You may find it very exciting to start an affiliate program. When you watch the number of your affiliates grow, you can see sales jump exponentially as affiliates start selling your products. If done properly, you as affiliate manager may be feeling like you want to add more products to your product line. After all, if you think it's exciting to sell one product through your affiliate program, it might be even more exciting to sell more than one, right?

Multiple products can, indeed, offer many benefits. For example, being able to offer a new product to customers can give you another avenue for money. If someone buys a particular product once, they may come back again to try something new, particularly if you've given them good products before and they know what you provide is quality. They know you and have a relationship with you, and offer you a particular loyalty that is only found with a repeat customer.

If you're going to offer more than one product, you also have the ability to focus on different people's interests. Even within a particularly targeted market, you can probably still find a wide range of interests that you can target particular products to. For example, if your particular niche is people who want to work at home, then not only can you develop several e-books that can fit various questions or need they have, but each of these e-books can address a different need, so that you have just created specific products geared to different segments of your audience. For example, if you're someone who wants to focus on establishing a social network at home, your needs are different than someone who wants to start a consulting business.

You can also do this in a different way, meaning that you offer a variety of products priced differently. In this way, you can offer less expensive (but still valuable) products to customers of more modest budgets, while you can offer more expensive programs, products or services to customers to can afford it. In this way, you don't lose any of your potential customer base because they can't afford what you have to sell. In short, you have something for everyone, regardless of the budget they have.

For example, you can sell a simple, basic e-book for $15. This e-book can establish the very basic steps needed to create the bare-bones basics of a home-based business, for example. For a slightly higher price, those who want more detailed information pay just a little more.

As with most things, it's both an advantage an disadvantage to offer multiple products. Some people who have a lot of choices in front of them will become indecisive and not buy anything at all. To keep this from happening to affiliates, you can offer a "featured product" each month. This brings customers into your web site for that particular project, meaning that even if they're paralyzed and can't choose anything in particular, they're likely to choose your featured product, since that's what they came for in the first place. It'll also give your affiliates an incentive to promote more; this is also one way you can reward affiliates, since, for example, you can establish a contest where the affiliate who sells the most featured product for a given month receives a particular bonus.

Make sure if you offer multiple products that you don't take the focus away from creating quality products. Sometimes, offering multiple products can cause you to take your attention away from offering quality, but always, always, always, this should be your first prerogative. Only offer multiple products if you can assure yourself that you will offer quality products no matter how many ultimate products you end up offering. Not only does it make you look bad if your products are of low quality, but your affiliates, too, will look bad and their performance and loyalty to your company will suffer.

In short, if you can keep all of these things in mind and offer quality products first, with perhaps a variety of products second, and you meet the needs you customers consistently, you're very likely to be assured success down the road, and customers will be glad they bought from you. This, in turn, will ensure repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising, which in turn will garner you even greater success.