1) You will earn 100% of your sale proceeds instead of the much smaller percentage that you get from an affiliate sale.

2) You control the service that you provide to your buyers. In most cases, providing better service results in happier customers. The happier your customers, the more business you will attain from repeat orders and referrals.

3) You control the quality of your product. With affiliate sales you never know what sort of quality your customers are getting unless you buy and try the product yourself. If you are serious about dealing with affiliates, you should always test out an affiliate product before recommending it to others.

Creating your own product can have significant advantages. Of course it is not the only way to make money on the Internet. You can make a substantial amount of money on the Internet by selling affiliate products. We covered some of the problems associated with affiliate sales in Part 1.

One of the problems with affiliate sales is the fact that it is important to diversify. If you are promoting six affiliate products and generate a total of 240 prospects, you will have sent 40 prospects to each affiliate site. If each of those affiliates has a conversion percentage of 1.5%, you probably did not generate any sales. In fact, statistically speaking, you would need to send 70 prospects to one of those affiliate sites before you generate any sales. If you were promoting them evenly, you would need about 420 prospects before you start making any sales. Of course, you could choose just one affiliate and send all of your prospects there, but if the one you choose gives poor service, it could cause you significant problems. It is not a wise decision to put all of your eggs in someone else’s basket.

You can however, increase your income stream by following some of the suggestions below:

1) Your first priority should be to develop your own product. That way, you can focus all of your marketing efforts on one product and you know that you are going to give great service. If you had your own product and generated 240 page views of your sales page, you almost certainly will generate some sales.

2) Post often and regularly to a number of forums. Develop a signature file that effectively advertises your product and leave it with every post that you make.

3) Use as many free blogs as you can easily maintain. Make sure you post new information at least three or four times each week. Ensure that all of your entries promote your product.

4) Track your results! It is extremely important to keep track of which advertising programs are generating page views. That way, you can eliminate the non-performers and commit additional time, effort, and money to successful programs. By focusing on the details, you can continually upgrade your advertising and produce more and more page views.

5) Reinvest the profits back into your business. When I suggest this to people, many of them say that they don’t need anything else. Are you kidding? Buy a domain name for your current (or next) product, upgrade your hosting service, use a professional to improve the look of your website, buy information products to enhance you skills, use a ghost writer to start on your next product, hire someone to write targeted articles for you. There are hundreds of ways you can reinvest profits. Always look for methods that will make your site, more profitable, more professional looking, or more automated.

If you are not happy with the amount of money that you are currently making, look into instituting the steps above to increase your bottom line.