After weeks of playing about with OptimizePress, Wishlist Member, EVS, Camtasia and Audacity I’ve finally come to the last stages of preparing my products for release. They’re not quite ready yet, but I’m not far from the finish line.

Earlier this week Clickbank approved my membership site, so now I have two products waiting in the wings. One is a mainly video based course and the membership site will act as a backend product.

So now there are essentially two main tasks ahead of me.

1. Prepare for customers

This means ensuring every element that should be in place is ready and working correctly. I’m going to double-check that every video is playing, every pdf looks right and every link works.

I realise this double checking is probably an unnecessary belt and braces approach, but this is my first set of products in the internet marketing niche and I want to give my customers a good experience from the start. I also need to set up at least the first few emails in an autoresponder sequence for each product.

2. Start getting traffic to my site

There is a whole range of methods to drive traffic. The important thing is to choose those that are most appropriate to your market and not to scatter your effort by trying to use too many of them at once.

My main method will be to recruit affiliates. This is one of the reasons I have put my products on Clickbank. They have an affiliate system built-in to their setup that will take care of affiliate commissions. This is important as I am unknown in the internet marketing niche and need my affiliates to believe they will get paid. Having Clickbank handle the commission payments covers that need for trust.

Traffic sent by affiliates is the most targeted and one of the highest converting sources. This is because they have their own lists that trust them to recommend good products. A personal endorsement from an affiliate carries more weight than an advertisement or a recommendation from someone who has not built a relationship with the prospect.

Another advantage is that I don’t have to become an expert in getting traffic. I don’t have to spend a lot of time, money or both getting prospects to my site. That’s the affiliate’s job.

My job is to find and recruit the best affiliates for my product. Now, although this is going to take some of my time I won’t have to invest a lot of money. I will have to pay a commission for each sale, but the point is I only have to pay when I get a sale.

In a couple of weeks I’ll go into more detail on how I’m recruiting and encouraging affiliates. For now it’s time to get down to work.