Should you create your own product? The answer might actually surprise you. In this episode, Martin Ebongue breaks down the full truth about digital products, why beginners should wait before creating their own, and what the smarter path to online income really looks like.
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Get the avalanche →Why Digital Products Are the Holy Grail
Digital products are arguably the best business model in the world. You create the product once, and then it generates income indefinitely. There is no manufacturing cost, no inventory, and no limit on how many copies you can sell. A course, an ebook, or a software tool can scale to infinity.
The challenge is not that digital products are bad. The challenge is that creating one requires expertise, infrastructure, and strategy that most beginners simply do not have yet. You need a landing page, a sales funnel, an email sequence, split testing, upsells, and customer support before you see a single sale.
Why Beginners Should Not Start With Their Own Product
The biggest mistake most new entrepreneurs make is trying to create a product before they understand how selling online actually works. There are too many moving parts: the copy, the funnel, the conversions, the emails, the refund policies. Each of these is a skill on its own.
Starting with a product you built yourself means learning all of these skills on your own money, with your own audience, under your own pressure. There is a much smarter way to get started.
Start as an Affiliate: Learn on Someone Else's Money
The best entry point into online business is affiliate marketing. When you promote someone else's product, you get access to their professional copywriting, their tested funnels, and their proven sales sequences. You learn how successful online businesses operate while getting paid to learn.
A good affiliate program pays 50 to 75 percent commission. You bring the traffic. They handle everything else. You do not build the page, write the emails, or manage support. And if you are promoting a hundred different offers simultaneously, even one sale per offer per month adds up to serious income.
A digital product is the closest thing to infinite leverage: you create it once, and it pays you forever.
The Path From Affiliate to Product Creator
Affiliate marketing is not the destination. It is the education. Once you understand how funnels work, which types of copy convert, and what your audience actually buys, you are ready to create your own product. At that point, instead of earning 50 to 75 percent of someone else's sale, you keep 100 percent.
This is the progression: start as an affiliate, build your income, study the game, then create your own product using everything you learned. The financial freedom you build as an affiliate gives you the time and resources to do it right.
The smartest way to learn how to sell is to sell someone else's product first. You get paid to study the game.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should you create a product as a beginner?
Not immediately. Creating a product requires expertise, copywriting, funnels, email sequences, and ongoing customer support. For beginners, the smarter move is to start as an affiliate marketer, earn money while learning how the whole system works, and then create your own product once you understand what converts and why.
What makes digital products so lucrative?
Digital products have zero marginal cost. Once you create a course, ebook, or piece of software, you can sell it an unlimited number of times without additional production cost. The profit margin on digital products is close to 100 percent after the initial investment of time and platform fees.
What is affiliate marketing and how does it replace having your own product?
Affiliate marketing is promoting someone else's product in exchange for a commission, typically 50 to 75 percent of the sale price. You send traffic to their offer, they handle the selling, fulfilment, and support, and you collect your share. When done at scale with dozens or hundreds of offers, affiliate income can match or exceed what you would earn from a single product of your own.
What is the right time to create your own product?
Create your own product once you have a clear understanding of what your audience wants, how online sales funnels work, and how to write copy that converts. Use your experience as an affiliate to learn these skills for free. When you are ready, your own product earns you 100 percent of every sale rather than 50 percent.
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About the Author
Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.
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