What's the best course of action for a first time product creator?

This seems to be your first product... in that case, forget about JV blogs, leaderboards, affiliate prizes, etc. You're not yet at that level.

Right now, simply put your product up in Clickbank, toss in an upsell/downsell in the backend, and start networking in your niche looking to get your first relationships going.

You gotta learn to walk before you learn to run...

1. Focus on creating a unique, extremely high quality, and well branded product.

2. Next create a very simple and clean sales page. Or email capture page with email follow-ups.

3. Apply to ClickBank.

That's all your need to worry about.

Autoresponders all the way. Make a killer splash page with your autoresponder, follow up with your prospects with highly effective emails and watch the sales come in. Oh and I write tons and tons of blogs to get traffic to places like this.

You have a lot of great advice above me posted , So I am going to tell you to do your product about something you love. Then research the market to find the buyers & traffic. Then network with other clickbank product owners and offer on the side to special affiliate's 100% commission to build your list!

My advice is to get it out there and tweak as you go along. Look to recruit affiliates to promote your product and firstly concentrate on capturing leads more than the amount of money you can make from the product. If you are an authority in your niche as you mention then use it as leverage to promote your product.

Find a good niche, create a product for it, price it well, promote on Clickbank, drive traffic, make sales. Very simple.

Think about your sales funnel, and work backwards from there, a lot of times you'll find you may need 3 actual products to make sure you're not leaving any money on the table. People forget this. Sure you can make money on a sale, but it's what happens after that will make you rich! Even on a simple CPA offer I try and make a crazy 6 part auto responder series for! My first product launch I had some serious help and I'm glad I sought that out. It wasn't selling at all and now it's sold over 500 copies. It's funny because I actually took one big course and broke it up in to 3 courses. Free, Product, OTO1 and OTO2!

I have coached hundreds of students in product creation and it's impossible to answer the question in a short post.

With that said, let me suggest that you think strategically as you enter the product creation market...

Affiliates will drive a majority of the traffic so as you start and grow, think about how to incentivize affiliates to promote, even if they don't know you. Keep in mind that they have hundreds of new offers to promote each day. Be creative, build incentives, sacrifice up front to profit in the long term, and just be strategic about your entrance into the space

Too many people do this arse backwards...

That will get you thinking for now

G'day mate. The one piece of advise I want to give you is make a ******* good product. 50 Page eBooks are good if you want to make $7. But if you want to make $47 a pop, make 10 of these and amalgamate them. Don't do the flashy sales page. Keep it simple.

You got this.

When you create any type of product online make sure it works and the most important thing is not to make money from it but to help as many people as possible. If you do this the money will come later. Remember "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care".

So pick a niche that you are really able to create helpful content in, maybe even give it a way for free to a select number of people to get some really positive feed back.

Cheers Mark
ps I will post again to you later to see how you are doing and when you have thought about what I said I will be happy to give you a few more step to put into action to get your new product up and running.

Good Luck From Mark

Coming from a new product creator stand point I would say just the product out there for starters, that would be the first thing you do.

Now I have never launched on the CB platform before but instead as a WSO and to be honest I am seeing a lot of the same trends, JV's, contests, OTO/Downsells, prizes etc.

As a main focus I would pay most of my attention to the funnel itself and make sure that it is converting well for yourself without affiliates.

You want to make sure that your EPC's are as high as you can get them so proper testing will be needed in the beginning.

Once you managed to get your funnel where you would like it to be, THEN start contacting affiliates to promote. No one will promote an offer that is simply not converting well.

I've had a ton of affiliate apply, but none promoted sense my offer didn't convert well, which told me I had to do more testing to my copy to raise my EPC's.

I would still not worry about all the leader board stuff in the beginning of your product creation journey, since a lot of that is tied to launches themselves, so some credibility should be in place first.

Keep networking along the way meeting different people in your niche to build good relationships for your future launches.