Successful affiliates often want to expand their business model beyond selling people’s products. Multiple streams of income are never a bad thing, and multiple revenue channels – affiliate sales, lead payments, ad revenue, and selling your own products – can act as powerful “insurance” should one of your income streams dry up.
Does the whole idea of creating your own product sound intimidating? It needn’t be. Here are three easy and relatively risk-free ways to experiment with offering your own product:
1 – Buy a resale rights to a top quality product in your best niche. A low-to-medium cost reprint rights license can be a way to acquire your first “real” product. The key is to acquire rights to a product that’s a good fit for your most profitable or highest traffic niche – you’ll have a ready audience.
Just don’t buy resale rights just because it’s hyped as the best opportunity ever. Buy the retail product first, examine it carefully to make sure it’s quality, and check to see how many competitors may already be offering the product.
2 – Create a video or audio tutorial product. With just a little practice and the right software, you can teach your customers how to use software, accomplish do-it-yourself projects, or perform other “how tos.”
For example, resale rights to software are available everywhere. But many marketers shy away from selling software because they don’t want to get stuck with tech support questions. A solution is to create video tutorials with a program like Camtasia, in which you walk users through everything from installation to explaining all the menus to doing a sample project. Doing this with photo editing or graphics software, for example, can turn a $29 product into a package with a price tag of $100 or more.
Or let’s say you’ve got resale rights to an ebook of dessert recipes. Tape a series of home videos in which you demonstrate basic cooking techniques the recipes require, such as beating egg whites and folding them into a batter. The videos don’t have to be studio quality – just good enough for the picture and sound to be clear. By selling a downloadable video of just five tricky cooking skills, you could turn a $10 ebook into a $35+ product.
3 – Create a physical version of a digital product. Burn resale rights software to CD, or turn an ebook into a printed book or an audio book on CD. Add unique packaging, and you’ve got a product with a high perceived value. This method is relatively easy and can be highly profitable, since physical products can be sold for 5 to 10 times their digital price.
Just make sure you check your resale license CAREFULLY before you go to the expense of creating physical products. Some licenses prevent you from changing the way the product is reproduced.
