These Things Are Interconnected…
There are basically two approaches to getting started selling ebooks online. You can begin by developing a product of your own and marketing it, or–you can begin by selling the products of others as an affiliate.

There Are Very Few Exceptions
For the most part, you will find that the most successful people online do both of the above things: They create their own products AND they market products as an affiliate. Some start by creating an info product (an ebook) first and then move into affiliate marketing and some do it the other way around, but there are very few exceptions–most successful people do both.

Flashback To 2007
I had a couple of ebooks of my own I was marketing online and one of them was doing pretty well. I had never done anything in the way of affiliate marketing but I decided to give it a shot. There was a guy up in Canada, Craig Beckta, who came out with a product called Secret Affiliate Code a year earlier–and I had bought it.

Secret Affiliate Code 2
I learned from Craig that he was launching Secret Affiliate Code 2 in about two weeks. I took some of what I learned from his first product and set up a pre-sell page for his new product. It was a Clickbank launch so I got an affiliate link from his JV page and set to work.

I Got It Put Together Quickly!
I set up a free Squidoo lens promoting his product as well as a free Blogger blog. I wrote two articles reviewing his product (I didn’t have a copy yet) and submitted them to EzineArticles. I created about 20 back-links to the pages. I did all of this in one single day. I finished all of this up by about 11PM one evening.

I Did One Thing Right
I had been using a free auto-responder account and had grown a pretty anemic little list over the past couple years. I decided to go to AWeber and sign up for a quality auto-responder service. I had it up and running in about an hour. I put an opt-in form on both of my pre-sell pages (it took me a while to figure out how to do it on my Squidoo page). This was the one thing I did right!

What A Difference 24 Hours Can Make
I was hoping one of my pre-sell pages would show somewhere in Google and I would get some free organic traffic. If people came to my page I showed them the bonuses I was giving away if they bought through my link. I told them if they opted-in to my list I would notify them the instant the product launched (about 10 days away).

The day after I got this all set up I checked Google to see if either of my pages where showing anywhere for the exact name search of the product. I knew it takes time for that to happen and wasn’t disappointed when neither page showed anywhere that next day. I went on with my normal business.

And then, BANG, the very next day I got up in the morning and Googled up the exact name of Craig’s new product. Are you freakin’ kidding me? Here is a screen shot of what I found.

My two sites were ranked #1 and #2 on the front page of Google for the EXACT name of Craig’s product. The screen shot was actually taken a couple days before the product launched.

I Got My First Sale Within 10 Minutes Of The Launch
For a period of a week or two before the product launched I was getting visitors to my pre-sell pages and people were opting in to my AWeber list. On launch day I had accumulated about 160 names into that list. When the product launched I hit my list with a promotional email and I sold about a dozen copies of the product right off the gate.

A couple weeks went by and my pages held their position. After 10 days or so the Blogger page fell down 5-6 spots the the Squidoo page held tight at #1. I kept getting more sales.

I Continued Promoting One New Product Launch After Another
I continued with this process. I would create pre-sell pages for about-to-be-launched products and opted in names of visitors into my AWeber account. Yes–I was selling products but my list was growing with each new launch I promoted.

With each new launch I had a bigger and bigger list to promote it to. The sales came almost automatically as I hit my list with promotional emails for each new product launch. It became easier and easier to make money because of one thing: I had grown a responsive list to market the products to.

The Biggest Thing I Learned Here…
Yes, you can make money creating products and selling them. And yes, you can make money promoting products as an affiliate. But the single biggest thing I learned was the enormous importance of growing a list and email marketing to it. In short, if you don’t grow a list–you don’t have anything. Your list will become your single biggest asset in your online business.

List Building And Product Development
I know people who spend many months creating a cool product in one niche or another. They put a lot of work into it. And then, an hour or two before they turn their product loose they decide to create a squeeze page to opt visitors in to their list. Selling their product is their first priority and growing their list becomes a secondary concern. Sorry, but that’s exactly the ass-backwards kind of thinking that short-circuits earnings.

It’s The Squeeze Page Thing That’s Important
You need to think backwards. You need to reverse engineer the thing. Sure, developing a quality product is very important. But the big thing is creating a squeeze page (a page where you give away a product to encourage people to opt in to your list) that converts a significant number of visitors into subscribers.

So if you’re working on developing a product of your own–great. But that is a two-fold process. Develop your product, but also work on creating a value-laden mini-product related to that product you can give away on your opt-in page.

Making A Good First Impression
DO NOT skimp on creating a great giveaway product for your opt-in page. If someone joins your list the first impression they get of you comes from the quality of the product you give away as your opt-in bonus. It doesn’t need to be huge–a simple 3-4 page report can work well. But it needs to give people the impression that you know what you are talking about so that they immediately have trust and confidence in what you say.

To Your Subscribers, You Are What You Give Them!
If you give them a piece of junk as an opt-in bonus they will believe that other products you promote down the line will be weak as well. As a matter of fact, if you provide them with a cruddy little opt-in bonus they may never open future emails from you and your efforts will largely be in vain!

The single biggest mistake people make in terms of making money online is NOT BUILDING A LIST and getting started with that immediately.

Create a squeeze page to capture leads. Begin driving traffic to it.

You Must Aggressively Test Your Page
Don’t just create a squeeze page. Test it and retest it making changes and checking the conversion rate in your auto-responder stats. Continually tweak your optin page until you are getting very high conversions and keep driving traffic to it.

There Are Tools To Help You…
You can use free tools such as Statcounter or Google Optimizer (both free) or a paid service such as Hypertracker to test different versions of your squeeze page to see which versions work best at converting visitors into subscribers.

As soon as you start developing a list, start marketing other people’s products to that list. Clickank is a great place to start finding affiliate products to promote.

Once you get a decent list you can then think about developing a product of your own. Go through the process again. Create a sales page. Test, test, and retest it until you get some copy that starts converting well. Test your sales (earnings) per click to your page. It may start out quite low. Tweak your copy. Get it up to twenty cents per click, then 50 cents per click, then a dollar per click if you can.

Create a sales funnel with up-sells and OTOs to get your earnings per click to your site even higher. Only when you have established a good earnings per click count go after affiliates.

If you try to line up affiliates with a product and sales funnel that doesn’t produce decent earnings per click for them they will abandon you and never come back. Once you get a mini-army of affiliates promoting for you, create more products and they will promote those as well.

Don’t neglect your buyers. The people on your buyers list can become your greatest affiliates if you have good products and a good sales funnel. Once you can get affiliates to drive you traffic and your products are converting for them you are golden. You’ll soon be a power player and the whole thing will almost run on auto-pilot for you.

If you want to be a player in any niche you must become a list builder. End of story.

I hope that helps a bit. I cannot overemphasize the importance of building a list and creating a good relationship with them. If you can do just this one thing you will be successful in your online business!