I’ve been a little quite on the blogging front, but I thought it would be a good idea for me to update you all on what I’ve been up to and share some ideas that will hopefully help you make more money too.
As most of you will be well aware I’ve done a lot of affiliate marketing over the years, selling digital products, physical goods and also selling leads too. This has and continues to be very lucrative for me, however what I’ve been focusing on more over the past 6 months is selling physical products and in particular creating my own products. What I will share with you now is the benefits of creating your own products and the various ways you can go about doing this.
Isn’t Product Creation Really Hard Work?
Creating your own product is more work than affiliate marketing, there’s no doubt about it. You can set up an affiliate sites in a few days, however product creation does take more work, BUT the payoff is much larger so it’s worth it.
Some of the major benefits of creating your own product are:
You can make more money
You can get affiliates selling your product
You don’t have to rely on SEO only
You can build your customer base over time
There are more marketing avenues available
How to Start
There are a few different ways you can create your product, the two that I do are:
Digital products – ebooks, video courses, software, apps
Physical products – private labeling from a supplier
Let’s look at digital products first as this is the easier way to go. You can package up knowledge and experience in a niche and create your own product out of this. This can come in the form of an ebook which you can sell on Clickbank or through Kindle.
If you’re not an expert on any particular topic you can outsource this to someone who is, or you could interview people who are experts and turn your interviews into a product, in the form of an ebook, audio or video product. I recently saw someone do this in the natural dental care industry, where they interviewed a bunch of well respected natural medicine experts on the topic of natural tooth care, and they turned this series of interviews into a product. You can have a look at this here – Tooth Summit. I’m not an affiliate for that product nor do I necessarily endorse it as I don’t know much about it so can’t say whether its good or not, but either way its a good example.
Physical Product – Private Labels
Most people think that creating your own physical product is only for giant companies with lots of money. However this is not the case, as you can buy products from suppliers who’ll allow you to put your own label on the product and call it your own, this is known as ‘private labeling’, and something I started doing about 12 months ago.
A lot of huge supplement companies in the USA do this. They buy the supplement from a wholesaler and provide them with their label artwork and the supplier attaches the label and ships them the products as their own brand.
Private labeling is BIG business, and it means that small players can get their product inexpensively and focus on the marketing. To find companies that will allow you to do this, you can Google for things like “Product Name Private Label”
Getting your own brand developed is not hard, all you really need is a logo designed which you can get done over at Elance pretty cheaply.
Once you have your own brand like this, you are free to market it anyway you want, which is great, as often when selling another companies brand you are restricted in the way you can market it. For example some companies don’t want their brand sold on Ebay or Craiglist etc… Whereas where you own the brand you call the shots!
Helpful Tools
When creating a digital product you might want to use video. Two tools that I have used for years in doing this are Camtasia Studio for screen recording and GotoWebinar for webinars.
Gotowebinar is expensive but I have heard that there are more affordable options these days for webinar software, so it pays to shop around. Webinars are great as they allow you to interview an expert, and it provides them the option to do a live presentation as well which makes the content more interesting than just plane audio.
Camtasia on the other hand allows you to record your screen, which is helpful if your product revolves around teaching people things that rely on visual aids to show people what you’re doing.
Once you have a digital product ready, the easiest way to make it available is to use Optimize Press in conjunction with Wishlist Member WordPress plugin. These two tools will allow you to set up a member’s area using WordPress, and they are not hard to use either. At the end of the day it’s not that hard to create your own quality digital product.
Why Sell Your Own Product?
There are a number of advantages of having your own product, of which I listed a few at the beginning of this post. One of the best things is that unlike a lot of affiliate marketing websites, you don’t have to rely on Google SEO to make money.
If you own your own product you can get affiliates to send traffic, you can use Adwords (as long as the site does not look like a long sales page), and if you’re doing physical goods via private labeling you can even get other retailers, such as ecommerce stores or even offline stores to stock your product and sell it for you, I do this myself and it works well.
When you’re selling your own product you can also rely on a lot less traffic, whereas affiliate sites, because they’re sending traffic away from their sites in order to make money, require a lot more traffic to make the sale.
Also when you own your own product there is much less risk involved. For example a subscriber of mine recently contacted me and explained that he had started to make $6000 a month from affiliate marketing and was very happy, and in fact left his day job. The unfortunate thing that happened to him was that the merchant he was affiliated with decided to stop their affiliate program one day, and overnight he lost all his income! This is obviously devastating and I really felt for this guy, however that is one of the risks you run when selling another companies product. Whereas if you own the product you call the shots.
The final thought I want to leave you with is this; it is more work to create your own product, but that’s a good things as the more barriers to entry the less people will do it, so you’ll have a lot less competition.
I hope this post has inspired you to consider creating your own product. It doesn’t have to be the only way you make money online, as I still do affiliate marketing, but it is a nice way to add an additional revenue stream to your business.
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