Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Create Your Own Products
Last week I was doing a bit of business self-reflection and I listed all the current and recent ventures that I’ve done to make money online.
What’s scary is that there was 11 of them, but that’s another story.
I put them all in a spreadsheet and gave them all rankings for a bunch of criteria.
- Most personally satisfying to work on
- Home run potential (could it be sold for big bucks some day)
- Ease of fully automating
- Potential to quickly make $100 a day
- Time & money required to start and maintain
- Earnings
There were a couple other ones as well but these were the key factors I wanted to evaluate. Then I worked out a metric which was meant to indicate which method of making money online had brought me the most money for the least work.
The winner was the information product I created (Real Blog Videos). It took me about 10 hours to create, with a couple emails I had some great affiliates on board and in the year it has been online I’ve sold about 200 units, with very few support emails. The result is about $200 an hour in earnings and admittedly I’ve slacked a lot on the promotion; this number and the total return could be higher.
Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Create Your Own Products
- Having affiliates working for you. Clickbank makes signing up and paying affiliates a piece of cake. You can turn A-list bloggers and other high profile website owners into your sales force.
- You can capture email addresses and build a list of people already willing to spend money with you. These are the easiest people to sell your next product to.
- You can sell related affiliate products to support the products you are offering.
- It’s very rewarding when people send you unsolicited testimonials telling you how much your product helped them out (check out the testimonial for my videos on ClientK – top right side).
- Leverage and scale. If you are an affiliate you are one person marketing one product, if you are the product owner you can have many affiliates selling your one product. You can also leverage that product by creating related products.
Possible Downside of Info Products
Yes there is more responsibility when you make your own products. You have to make sure the information you are providing is true and reliable.
Support can be a nightmare if your product is not clear. If you understand how to anticipate questions and then document the ones that do get asked in an FAQ system, this potential problem can be reduced dramatically. I have heard other info product creators complain about it, but in my case, even with 200 units sold, I receive less than 1 inquiry a week for support.
Resources
I’m currently reading The Four Hour Work Week and it is not surprising that he recommends product creation as the easiest way to achieve time/money freedom.
Tubetorial has a very good set of tutorials called 7 Steps for Creating and Selling Niche Information Products.
Here’s my review of the home study course that I used to create my first information product.
Browse Timeline
- « 5 Tips for Setting up a Virtual Office for Under $300
- » 7 Questions to Answer Before you Sign up for Hosting
Comments ( 2 )
[...] Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Create Your Own Products [...]
Promote Your Blog Offline by Purchasing a Mailing List added these pithy words on Jun 11 07 at 3:13 pmK added these pithy words on Jun 06 07 at 2:52 pmIts a great product.
I’ve reco’d it to many friends.I also loved how you automated the entire process
yet still gave it a personal touch.And I think if you targetted the blogger.com crowd (simply by leaving comments on their sites), you could make a half decent return.
Think of it…your audience is easy to find.
All you need to do is reach them.