When Do You Become A Sponsor?
 

I've already seen gains from focusing purely on being an affiliate now that I've left my day job. At what point during the process of building a network do you make the move to become a sponsor and direct that traffic to your own program? Do you stay a successful affiliate and never make the move?

I'm nowhere near being able to send the traffic I need to a program of my own and do it without other affiliates. Nor am I sure that I'll ever reach that point. But, I've been doing a lot of building and planning and was just curious and would like some input on the subject.

Thanks!

if you can afford to buy the content and do the scripting, design necessary for the tour open your own site for your own traffic and feed it until it's profitable... find a couple buddies in the same niche and make it a private program and grow from there.

You can also partner with an existing sponsor program if you have decent traffic and have em build a tour for you if you are just looking for a custom tour for your traffic. :thumbsup

bumping...

If you can put together a site that's worth people paying for its many times more profitable than sending your traffic elsewhere.

I have my own site I've been promoting with my own small blog and tube network. I promote other sites as an affiliate as well, mostly to fill out the sites and cover additional niches but also to split test conversions.

Most of my sites are works in progress and are so bad I would be ashamed to even put them in my sig, and as can be expected I got maybe a dozen joins to external programs during 2011.

But to my own site that I own I got 50 joins and over 100 rebills.

I think the reasons are various,

1) obviously there is very little chance of shaving myself.
2) when I promote my own site with external blogs and tubes I am also link building, so I get SEO benefits to my money sites along with the obvious traffic I am sending to myself.
3) I can price my sites very low since I don't have to pay affiliates for my own joins
4) My sites are very much under-exposed so there is very little chance Joe surfer has seen them before.

Aside from all of the above I am in complete control of my program changes, unexpected closing, payouts etc.

I would say that in all things, move up the food chain whenever you get the chance.

Excellent posts and very informative. Man, I wish I saw this kind of information sharing and effort all over this board. Thank you guys!