I previously talked about the various ways you can get products for selling for an online home business and said there were four main methods:
• build it yourself and sell it yourself
• get someone else to build it for you and sell it yourself
• sell someone else’s they’ve already built (Affiliate marketing)
• build it and get someone else to sell it.
I talked about affiliate marketing so will briefly cover the other three here.
Building it yourself and selling it yourself.
Building and selling it yourself is the easiest way apart from affiliate marketing.
The main type of product you want to create when building it yourself is an ebook, which is just a digital version of a book.
You need to find a market niche in a subject you know something about and start creating your ebook. I can give a brief overview here of what you need to do, but won’t go into any detail:
You should start with a basic outline of what you want to cover in your ebook. This should list 10-12 broad topics. Then divide and conquer. Break each topic up into 10-12 smaller topics. This will give you chunks of writing about the size of a normal article. If you can write an article, then you shouldn’t have any problem writing an ebook as it’s just bunch of articles jammed together in a logical fashion.
Even if you don’t know anything about your subject you can buy very cheaply, or get for free, Private Label Rights (PLR) articles about your niche subject. If you search for free PLR Rights you get a pile of websites with free PLR.
I will issue a warning here.
If you just grab these articles and publish them verbatim, you’ll be like hundreds of other article writers on the web.
Stand out from the crowd and rewrite PLR Articles in your own words and add your own slant to them.
It may be a bit more work, but it’ll definitely pay off in the long run as you now have a unique article that no one else has. If you can repeat this several dozen times you’ve got the basis of an ebook. This should make your ebook easier to market, as it’s a unique and original product.
Get Someone Else to Build It For You and You Sell It
If creating an ebook is too much hard work, or you think you can’t write, there are alternatives. You will have to pay for them, but the potential for earning from them should outweigh the cost. There are plenty of people on the internet who will write articles or ebooks for you, called ghostwriters. You just need to let them know what subject you want and they can churn out however many articles you want, even up to a whole ebook. A good place to start looking is www.elance.com.
Something you need to be aware of though is that while most ghostwriters are honest, there are the usual minority who try and do it the easy way and give everyone else a bad name. By copying someone else’s article and using it as their own.
There are sites around the internet that you can use to check if your article has been copied from somewhere else.
One free site is www.copyblogger.com. You just put the article on your website (somewhere hidden if you don’t want it published) and then type your url into copyblogger and they’ll scour the internet to see if there’s any similar articles. You only get 10 free checks per month though, so you might want to sign up for their paid service if you’re getting someone to write an ebook for you.
Build it And Get Someone Else to Sell It
There’s two ways of doing this. One is the exact opposite of affiliate marketing, where you become the vendor and put your ebook on a site like Clickbank, for affiliates to sell on a commission basis. All the traffic for your product eventually comes through your site, so you have the option of adding any new customers to your mailing list. You should also be trying to sell the product yourself, as you just went to all that effort to create it!
The other way is for you to approach someone with a big mailing list and get them to sell it to their customers on your behalf, known as a Joint Venture or JV. This is probably a more advanced technique and not something I’d recommend.
Why would you want someone else to get your product, get at least 50% commission on it, all without you getting any customers onto your mailing list.
It’s a good way to make a quick buck, but not sustainable in the long run, as your main objective needs to be building your customer base.
In my opinion if you’re serious about running your own internet home based business, you should at least be looking at outsourcing the creation of your product and then marketing it yourself. It’d also be great for your confidence to build the product yourself and market it yourself. After all, if you’ve done it once and it’s made you money, you just need to rinse and repeat and can start up several (or many) profitable streams of income.
