Selling Your Own Products
This is the ultimate, especially if you are developing an e-product (eg an e-book) as you will not have to deal with customer service, with the product shipment, ordering, accounts, marketing, following people up etc. Even if it a paper/hard product, it is part of the fun stuff that goes with running your own business when you get the hang of it. You have gotten good at selling other people's product for a commission. Now you get to keep all the money for your efforts.
As you grow bigger, you can begin to attract affiliates and dictate the terms. From your experience in selling for other people, you have an idea what if profitable and what is not that much profitable. You can devote your product development efforts to where the money is. Also, in the process of marketing, you would have built an e-mail list. You can send a mail to your list to intimate them of your upcoming product. They already know you, and hopefully are happy with your affiliate products. They trust you, and will easily snap up your product when it hits the market.
Hence the best route to take on the way to selling your own products is to sell other people's products. If you have put your act together and have decided upfront what your goal is, and where you are heading, this will be a major input into what you start selling. If you want to ultimately develop software for example, the logical route to take is to start selling software for developers. In the process of selling, you will get very familiar with the product, it's strengths and weaknesses, and areas of improvement.
This information will assist you in developing yours. And since you are now dealing with the sales and marketing aspect of it, you have a feel for what the market is looking for, and how to meet that need. You develop street/market sense, and this is invaluable in developing your software, as whatever you are developing will ultimately have to pass the market test. So in the process of being an affiliate marketer of the product you want to ultimately develop, you gain experience from development all the way to business development, marketing and sales. By the time your product is ready to hit the market, you would have done the requisite homework, instead of building castles in the air without any sense of market reality.
Finally, based on your market sense (from selling for others), you know what the weaknesses of available products are, and that puts you in position to develop something superior which will assist you in gaining market dominance if you play your cards well.
Selling your products is the ultimate dream of any online business, and it normally comes much later after you have mastered the terrain. You may want to have an idea of what product you want to develop down the line, so that you start moving towards it as you go along. With increasing competition, you will need to pull away from the crowd by increasing your streams of income through selling your own products.
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