The launch of my first actual product has finally happened. Many tears, one broken keyboard, 4 re-dos and a ton of lessons learned and it only took me 21 days. Rich dude says it should take a month to launch 6 products…so I’m just a liiiittttllle bit behind schedule.So Jon tell us about your “Real Blog Videos” product?So glad you asked!

The product was inspired by a couple things. The first was seeing people on the Rich Dad forums, where I hang out quite a bit,wanting to make money from blogging but not having the technical skills to create a proper WordPress site, so they would end up on Blogger not realizing the limitations they were putting on themselves.

In essence building a blog on Blogger or any other “free” blog hosting service is the same as spending money or renovations to the house you are renting. Yes you may enjoy it, but the value stays with the owner.

What if you blog got really successful, could you sell it? Nope.

What if you came to your senses and wanted to move to a new “Real Blog”…well you would have to do a ton of work setting up redirects or leave all your traffic behind and basically start over.

It just isn’t wise to start a business venture where the best thing that could happen results in something bad.

The other thing that inspired the product was ProBlogger’s What would I do different if I had to start my blog over? series.

Several of the bloggers, including big time names like Seth Godin, remarked that they would have started on their own domain names. Of course, bad bad bad not to own your primary marketing tool when you’re a big time marketer!

[Seth blogs at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ so all his traffic is essentially owned by typepad.com]

There were 3 reasons I could think of for starting out on a “free” or hosted blog:

1. Ignorance. Not knowing the consequences or ramifications of taking this kind of shortcut.
2. Cost. Wanting to save money and being non-committal towards blogging.
3. Intimidated by the technical aspect of setting up a real site.

Jon to the rescue. Now that I have defined the problem, as I see it the successful product goes about trying to solve the problem on each front.

Issue number 1 will be dealt with on this site, on my new blog [some may find it looks vaguely familiar...aren't I a good student!] that is focused on technical blogging issues and in my other marketing efforts: forums and article writing primarily.

Number 2 will need to be approached in largely the same way as number one…through communication.

There are 2 ways that the cost issue can be confronted: firstly it really isn’t that big of expense, buy almost any standards. In the videos I purchase a domain name for $2.99 for a year and I could of gotten it for less had I been willing to wait for a coupon, and secondly quality hosting can be had for $9.95 a month and it can be shared among many sites, which means that if you found 4 friends you would be in business for $2 each a month.

The second way to approach the cost issue is to break down the potential loss of time and revenue from creating a good site but not really owning it. Compare that possibly huge number, as in Seth’s case, with the small costs of getting started on a proper domainwith ahosted blog and the better choice is pretty obvious.

Also, I’ve kept the price low at $15 to accommodate this concern.

The third issue is solved by the actual product. Over 2 hours of instructional hand-holding films walk even a non technical person through every detail of getting a WordPress blog online and set up properly.

Overall, even though it was trying and I do have a lot of room for improvement on every aspect, it does feel great to have the first product done.

Almost immediately traffic started coming in from the ClickBank marketplace. Then traffic started to come in from affiliates who were recommending the product.

So far it is just a trickle, but I saw the power of being at the top of the productfood chain. All of a sudden there are people in cyberspace doing work to try and help me sell my products!

If you have a site or a list of folks you may like to help kick the Blogger habit, then you can earn a 75% commission by going to ClickBank and grabbing an affiliate link.

I call this new place in business the X^x factor because I see that when I work from this place there is exponential expansion possibilities.

So far 6 sales!

Any tips, feedback or ideas on the product concept, the sales page or my marketing approach would be very welcome.

This post was written by Jon Symons, see my short bio. Or use the contact page to get in touch.