I recently responded to a question on a marketing forum that I though I would share here. The question was about how to promote a product that you created using affiliates for the sales and if you could get by with just creating the product and letting the affiliates to all of the heavy lifting promotion. Here is my main response, which followed a quick response earlier:

My main point was that if you want to be successful you will need to promote your offer, and if you are relying on affiliate sales then at the very least you need to be promoting to your affiliates. After 18 years selling online I have yet to find a good product that I can build and forget and expect any kind of results. After all, this is Internet Marketing, the marketing part of the name means promoting. The more promotion you do, the better your chances of success.

It really comes down to just a few factors. How much time you have for promotion and how much money you have for promotion. If you are promoting a product with a small profit margin you will need to spend more of your time promoting that product. If you have a product with a larger profit margin you will be able to allocate a percentage of the profits to pay for promotion (Google AdWords is just one example, banner advertising and newsletter advertising are others).

With affiliate marketing your affiliates will be basically providing you with leads, not with direct sales since the sales pitch will be on your sales page. The affiliate just drives traffic to that sales page. But that lead will have to have an interest in your product in the first place. That comes from brand awareness, your online marketing to gain exposure for your product. The affiliates will also need a lot of help, they will need pre-written emails, banner ads, swipe files, and any other marketing tools you can provide them. They will also need constant encouragement to be sending out your promotions. Keep in mind that most affiliates are pushing a ton of products, they sign up as an affiliate, take whatever email you give them and send that off to their list, maybe with a small re-write. Then they may do an announcement or two on social media and maybe a video on YouTube. They then wait for results. The products that start to show results will grab their attention and get further promotion by them.

So your job as a product producer is to excite your affiliates, give them great selling tools and ideas, and keep them motivated. This is an ongoing process, not something you can build and forget. The top companies using affiliate marketers for their sales staff spend as much time or more supporting their affiliate sales staff than a regular company would on their in house sales staff.

The best way to approach affiliate marketers is to stop thinking of them as affiliates and start thinking of them as your sales staff who are working on a 100% commission basis. What do you as a product producer need to do to keep your sales staff motivated so that they keep on pitching your product? Don't forget they are pitching products for lots of other companies as well, you need to fight for their attention. The way you do this is by giving them great marketing tools, keeping in contact with them, running occasional bonus contests, doing sales and marketing webinars, and anything else you can think of to support your affiliate sales staff.

Back to Affilorama, I am not suggesting that anyone buy their product, not that it isn't a good product, I just make a point of not promoting products on forums. What I am suggesting though is to sign on to Affilorama as an affiliate, there is no cost to do so. Then see how they support their affiliates. I recommend doing the same for several other top products on ClickBank. All of the top products on ClickBank became top products because of how they support their affiliates. So the best way to become successful on ClickBank is to analyze what the top producers are doing and then do the same. Luckily that is easy to do as it is free to sign up as an affiliate on any of the offers and then you can see exactly how they support their affiliates.

Going way back to the opening statement of this thread; "Hi, i don't want to waste time doing marketing to my courses. ...", Selling on the internet is all about selling. If you can create your own products great, that way you can have a higher profit margin and a better chance for success. But the main job is still marketing, not product creation. You gain success from your marketing not from your product. If you have a great product it makes your marketing easier, but your job is still marketing.