I started as a designer and quickly expanded my business as a reseller, which now makes up most of my income. Reselling is similar to affiliate sales, except that you can have a recurring commissions source and you can support your customers as your own. It is really more of a partnership, they do the back-end work (so partner with a good company that you know you can trust, rely on, and depend on to continue a 'white label' presence in good faith) while I handle the marketing (my clientele and peers in my industry is where I started and continue to be my best customers).
And example of a bad company to hook-up with is GoDaddy. They used to have the best reseller system in world, then the company was bought out and they sold all the resellers out, no longer even maintaining or faking any kind of a 'white label' reseller experience.
Luckily, my design clients needs required multiple different options and services, which required that I venture out and explore alternate systems that met their needs while addressing their concerns over security, accessibility and the whole anti-spam system I market (mostly word-of-mouth & promo/PR listing/news links because email & webspam are such huge parts of the problem).
It's slow going this way, but I get to provide technical customer support myself, as many of my clientele/customers/peers trust me and there is usually a 24 hour a day web-ticket/toll-free support staff available (in all of my high-profile solutions).
From there, as a designer, I also started sharing the resources I use (graphics, fonts, etc.). And now, I am graduating from freeware (photography, graphics & fonts) design to actually starting to sell some of my stuff as stock for other designers to use.
And I know it doesn't count, because it's not online, but I also build PCs and media servers as a hobby, which also sometimes gives me a better insight into the technical aspects that happen on the backend, so that I can talk a bit better about the tech when I do give support.