So, what are the advantages to owning your own products?

Well, there are a lot of advantages. I have summarised a few of them below.

1. Selling your own products from a website can make that site unique. You are offering something no other site does (even if you get affiliate to sell for you). This means you don’t have a thin affiliate site on your hands - you are the merchant, not the affiliate. This means that sites built around your own products are likely to last for years to come, earning you a nice residual income.

2. You can get affiliate to sell for you. When you bring out a product, create an affiliate program for it, either at Clickbank, or Paydotcom. Offer your affiliates a good percentage (50% is usual for infoproducts), and then go looking for sites related to your eBook. Contact the webmasters, and tell them about your product, and your affiliate program. Many will sign up and sell your eBook from their site.

This is a fantastic way to create inc0me. You do not rely on your own traffic for sales, and you only pay your affiliates if they make a sale. What is even better than this is you can and should target really competitive niches, since the competitors who rank well, often become your affiliates, so you can benefit from their traffic, and not have to worry about all the SEO stuff to get traffic directly to your site from the search engines.

3. Owning your own products can make you an authority in your field. Besides selling the eBooks, you could open a forum on the site (which can have Adsense advertising), run mini-courses designed to pre-sell your eBook and other affiliate products, and create a newsletter, which keeps you in contact with highly targeted visitors. You can quickly build a business out of a single product, then repeat.

4. Owning your own eBook gives you the chance to sell affiliate products from within the eBook. If you have an eBook on "Car Maintenance", you can point your readers to online suppliers via your affiliate links. This type of back-end sales can often be very large, and in fact, I often give eBooks and material away, knowing that the links I have placed in the eBook will pay back many times what I would have received had I sold the eBook.

Hopefully you can see the potential of owning your own products. Since it can be done relatively inexpensively, you don’t really have an excuse. Any costs involved are business expenses, and the rewards can be huge. Also the costs involved in an online business are so much lower than a bricks and mortar business.

One type of infoproduct I have not really mentioned yet is video training courses. For this type of product, I use a tool called Camtasia Studio. This is not the cheapest, but it is the best. You will see a lot of online videos created with this tool, by many of the top marketers.

If you want to dabble with this type of infoproduct, you can do so for free, with a neat little tool called CamStudio. While this tool does not have the features of Camtasia Studio, you can get a feel for what this type of infoproduct can offer.

You can easily create membership sites based on video tutorials, and combine them with an eBook, forum etc. You are only limited by your imagination.

This year, my own business will see a massive increase in the number of products I own. Many will be written and created by myself and my wife, others will be farmed out to ghost writers. I intend to create infoproducts on a wide range of different niches, 90% of them wont be related to internet marketing. Internet marketing will become the tool I will use to sell them, and affiliate marketing will be something I do from within my infoproducts.

Hopefully this has got you excited. I know I am. Make this year a great year, and get started on your own infoproducts.