Product Creation before affiliate marketing?

Not necessarily. If you have knowledge of a subject to the point where you think you can make a quality product, you should make it.

No its not. I started building a list of potential affiliates before I even launch a product. I built a list of those who would want to promote my product to there audience.

It's important to Launch the product also. So my suggestion would be to look at the product you have, then contact different product owners and see if they would want your product.

Its simple and you are building future partners...hence a downfall would be a poor product. Have you done proper research into the niche, and have you got a well written sales page.

Take all that into consideration.

What are you selling? Is your product IM related? If so, yeah, results count for more than promises.

That being said, most brick/mortar business starts first with an idea then gets onto affiliate marketing and more. Heck, we opened an affiliate program and didn't have a clue what we were doing online at the time, but we had a product

I agree with most of the above responses. You do not need to be an affiliate marketer, but it helps to know that aspect of the business. Of course, if you're creating a course in how to be an affiliate marketer, then you'd better have some results under your belt, ha!

If you're creating a product just for your own community of followers, you don't even need to look for others to affiliate it, but usually you have nothing to lose by appealing to affiliates for help. That's the best business model for scaling your business.

PS: Being a product creator will almost certainly improve your affiliate marketing because you'll be interacting closely with other affiliates. I recently started a new blog in which I interview product creators exclusively, and almost always, they want to know how they can reciprocate. So it's really a "one hand washes the other" operation.

I suggest you to do some JV with other product sellers to buzz your new products.

It is not necessary but usually selling other's products give you lot more experience about what sells and what not. After that create your own product in the niche you were successful and you will make lots of money because chances of failure will be less.

But if you are committed to create your own product first, then go ahead. It will be little difficult but not impossible.

The questions you really need to answer are:

1. Have I tested the market with my product idea? If not, then affiliate marketing can be a way that you test the market with someone else's product before jumping in with your own

2. Do you have some momentum for a launch (I like to launch into new markets with at least 500 people on my list that will help in several ways: testimonials/initial case studies, reviews to get final improvement ideas for the product, initial jv/affiliate partners and some early activity to push sales as well as word-of-mouth into your market at launch)

3. Have you tested your ability to generate traffic and "warm" that traffic through a pre-sales funnel? You need to have this whether it is an affiliate product or your own product - I would suggest you try it first on an a related affiliate product (so your initial traffic and list are also relevant to your own eventual launch) so you can refine both your traffic generation and sales funnel conversion strategy

If you are either confident of all 3 of these areas OR decide to ignore them at your own peril - then you can jump right into your own product.

Jeff

There is no restriction. If you have any products, you can sell. On the other hand if you have no products, you can work as a affiliate for other peoples products. Most of the time, people who has no products, they work with other people products. So you can work with another people products. Thanks

It doesn't that matter.
Why not you do both?

Somehow, in my point of view, having your own product is better since your affiliates will promote it for you. You just need to make sure that your product is valuable for your customers then you will start making money.

Completely depends on your skills and talents.

Are you better at marketing a product? Then focus your energy on affiliate marketing.

Are you better at creating a useful and unique product? Then focus on that, and if your product is worth marketing, find skilled affiliate marketers to market it for you.

It depends on the product. IMO you shouldn't be creating products that is rehashed and not tested.

If you're creating an affiliate product and you haven't made any money by using that method yet then you will claim that you're making this XXXxx amount of money using what you teach. Then you're simply misleading the people who will buy your products.

There are a lot of crappy products out there already and the sad part, they are making tons of money from it yet a lot of newbies is getting more and more confused because of this.

Not really but you will need to at least do a research on how to market your product online. It is best to look for similar products online so you will have a clear idea on how other people market the same product.