Create Your Own Products

So far your e-commerce model has been based on selling through affiliation. And that's great - no stock, fulfilment, and a load of other benefits.

The downside is that you are only ever receiving a small proportion of the income compared to the sale value you are generating.

The most profitable kind of Practical DotCom Business is when you can create and sell a unique product - ideally with low or no production costs and easy fulfilment processes.

An impossible dream?

Well, remember when you were looking at ideas for sites and I quoted Ken Evoy as saying:

Each of us lives a life of unique circumstances and experiences that results in building a body of knowledge... knowledge that has value and that can be packaged and sold to others.

Ken wrote that in relation to Make Your Knowledge Sell! - it's the book that started me down this road. The basis of MYKS! is that everyone (yes - that includes you!) has unique and special knowledge and/or experience - or can get it - that can form the content of an "infoproduct".

Infoproducts include e-books like this one, but might also be other media - audio tapes, video, web sites, paper books, etc.

So - you can create a product that is unique, valuable to others, and (in the case of digital formats) easy and quick to deliver direct to customers.

If you are interested in this, you will gather that I strongly recommend MYKS!. Ken's guarantee of satisfaction is second to none - and his products are so good that I will guarantee his guarantee.

For another take on producing and selling infoproducts - especially if you are interested in formats other than e-books, I recommend Create Your Own Products in a Flash by Marlon Sanders.

Marlon has a number of widely respected texts to his name, and is a well-known public speaker on product development and marketing.

If you can afford it, it's worth having them both to combine the different approaches. For example, whereas Ken Evoy believes in produce, edit, polish and polish some more, Marlon Sanders shares techniques that have enabled him to take ideas from concept to product in a matter of hours.

I'm sure that being able to take things from all these approaches can be the most powerful of all.

Give It Away

If your subject, expertise, marketplace means that you don't think you can produce a saleable infoproduct, what about producing something of value that you can give away for free?

You could produce e-books relevant to your subject and give them away from your site - and allow/encourage them to be copied and shared. Give them to other webmasters to distribute on their sites.

Before you know where you are, you can have hundreds and thousands (millions?) of e-books distributed across the world - all of them containing links back to your site and selling or pre-selling your offer.

Sound like anything you've read recently?

The man who takes the credit for defining this idea is Chayden A Bates. His book E-Book Marketing Explained is the definitive book on the subject and it is one of the most effective internet marketing techniques I have used to build my Practical DotCom Business.
Please note: The title of this book refers to how you use free e-books as a marketing technique for your web site, products, services, or even other e-books. It is not about marketing or selling e-books themselves.

I have to thank Chayden for what has proved to be an extremely effective and cost effective promotional tool.

You can thank him too by taking a look at this free version of his book which I'm pleased to make available from my site.