I get emailed this question all the time. Many of you seem to be obsessed with the idea that you have to develop your own product line and build a business around it. You’re not sure what to use as a product so you’re not even getting started.

Consequently, you are missing out on month after month during which you could be building a business, gaining invaluable experience and, most importantly, making money.

Creating your own products and setting up your own marketing and sales materials is the absolute hardest way to begin online. I suggest you get started making money the easy way by using affiliate programs.

If you’re not familiar with affiliate programs, you’ll find the concept is quite simple. A company like ours sets up the product, creates and refines the marketing and sales system, makes the sale, collects the money, delivers the products, handles customer service and, most importantly, pays you a commission for sending us a customer.

The bottom line is that all you have to do is send people to the website. When some of them make purchases, you get paid.

I received a complaint this week from someone who didn’t want to use affiliate programs because he didn’t get a 100% commission. Instead, he was going to wait until he was ready to launch his own stuff. He didn’t know what it would be or when he would get started, but he was holding out anyway.

That’s ridiculous! You’re not doing all the work so you don’t get all the sales proceeds.

Even though we have our own products, we use affiliate programs to generate several thousand dollars in sales each month. We get paid thousands in commissions. We can’t create and manage these multiple product lines and we don’t want to. But, we have customers who will pay for these products so we supply them and receive a fair commission.

The affiliate programs that will work the best for you fall into two categories. The first is obvious. You should promote products and services related to your core audience. If people visit your website to find information about losing weight, then you should be offering products related to diet and nutrition.

The second category is not so obvious and a lot of people miss out on some (relatively) easy money. If you’ve got website traffic or a mailing list, you have people. Forget about why they came to visit. They’re just people.

As people, they will have an interest in certain generic products that interest all people. You’ll have to experiment with this to see what works best for your people. Some general products are credit cards, credit repair and almost anything that’s free.

You don’t have to always do things the hard way. Try the easy way sometimes. You might find that you like it.

Yours in success,

Shawn