This post is for anyone in the AM game who’s thinking of a game plan for the future. Sure, you might be making lots of cheddar pushing Sham-Wow or Acai pills, but it’s not going to last forever. Do you have a long term plan to keep your business going? What’s your competitive advantage over anyone else? Selling other companies products online is fickle and is dependant on quite a few factors and entities. Any number of people can throw a wrench into the gears of your money-making machine, whether it’s a traffic source, advertiser, or another competitor.

What are your options? Here are some to think about:

- Develop your own product. Pick a niche that you’ve had success with promoting and that you’re interested in. Find out who your customers are; their demographics, where to go online, what ads they respond to, what they are missing in the marketplace now etc. Affiliate marketing gives a huge head start to new product development, you’ve already mastered several phases of the lifecycle. And you probably already have a nice stash of capital to launch. If you think you’re earning alot selling a couple hundred bottles of pills a day on your network, think how much your merchant is pulling in.

- White label: buy direct from the manufacturer. Go to a site such as Trade Key and find an exporter of the product you want to sell. Then it is your job to handle the marketing and sales. Here you can get creative, eg. marketing ginko powder as “Power Drive, the performance enhancing supplement”. You will not have as much flexibility to create the exact product your market will want, but you have much more freedom than trying to promote a similar product on an affiliate network.

- Start an ads consultancy shop. Here you will continue to advertise for other companies, but scale this far beyond a single man/woman operation. Automate processes as much as possible through outsourcing, software, and hired guns, and partner with other internet marketers to take on as many projects as possible.

All these options solve the critical problem of building a reputation and base of customers that is missing from the work of affiliate marketing. Give me a shout at Affiliate Summit West if you have any good ideas.