Day 16 – Your Own Product
Think About Selling Your Own Product
Yes, you read that right – YOUR own product!
You can start off making money with Google AdSense or Amazon Associates or an affiliate program but with all of those things, you’re selling someone else’s product and you’re only getting a commission or a small cut of the action.
When you create and sell your own product, you’re getting a much bigger piece of the pie! You can make a LOT more money selling your own product.
With your own product, the only out-of-pocket costs you’ll have are:
- Product creation (time and expenses)
- Selling fees
- Advertising fees
That’s about it.
With product creation, you might have some costs with hiring writers, or someone to create your book cover or materials for your product.
With selling fees, that’s basically PayPal’s fees for the transaction (about 2.5%).
With advertising feed, it’s what you’re paying (if anything – this may be your time) to get people to your website.
A Book Example
I’ve written some books. A few are smaller ones that are there to set up as giveaways to get people on my email list but I’ve done a few that I just want to sell and they won’t be giveaways. One such example is my book for passing the Level 2 ski instructor exam.
With that book, I spent quite a bit of time writing it along with time spent having that experience in my life. I also had people proofread it for me. I gave some away to get some good testimonials. I also did the cover myself but that’s something that you probably would want a professional to do for you since it helps sell the book.
I have it available as a PDF (I include some bonuses I came up with) and on Amazon.com as a Kindle version.
With the PDF, it costs a little more because people get the PDF they can print and I include the bonuses and I just have the PayPal fee that comes out. With the Kindle version, it’s less and I get 70% of the cost from Amazon (they keep 30%).
It took a few months to write that book and get everything done, so it took time. I have a job so that was just in my spare time.
That wasn’t the best kind of book to go after if you want to make money but I knew that going in. The market is very small so I knew I wouldn’t sell many books but I wanted to write it to help people because I figured out that most people won’t have the kind of support and coaching I had. Also, I plan to move on as a ski instructor and having that book under my belt and in my professional resume will help me progress.
There are some good courses out there about writing books for Amazon. You can make some serious money doing it. The same for courses on Udemy.
What Else Could You Sell?
Besides creating books, there are other things you can sell.
You might have products of your own already – like with a company you own. You might have crafts or something you make that you can sell. Novelty items or products that can be gifts are great to create and sell.
You can create courses or videos. A video series on how to do something is a product.
Maybe you’re a graphic artist. You can put together images that people need.
There’s even PLR (private label rights) packages you can buy online and resell – you would have the rights to resell those items.
You can find free resources online that you would have the rights to which you could find for free, repackage and then sell them. You might be able to do that with images – just go and find 1000 good images that people might need for using on a website and put them together and sell them. I’ve thought about doing this and I might do it soon, actually.
Just get creative.
The nice thing about virtual products is that you don’t have to pay to produce them – you’re just selling a copy and there are no delivery costs – no shipping. They can sell at any time, too. I love seeing the PayPal app on my phone ring when I get a book sale. It’s fun to see that because I know I just made some money.
Conclusion
You can start with affiliate programs and ads to get your feet wet, that’s fine but consider and start planning to sell your own product. You definitely want multiple streams of income – not just one. Run ads and use affiliate programs AND sell your own product while building your list. That’s the ideal plan right there.
Even start thinking past your own products and think about a service you can charge a subscription for. That’s the ultimate for a lot of people. You have people signed up and you get a certain amount coming in every month. That’s the $2000 membership website idea I brought up earlier. If you have the time and energy, put something like that together or offer a service.
Think about Netflix. They have a lot of subscribers, right? To do what they do, they need a lot of servers, bandwidth, employees and advertising. That’s all overhead. Once they clear their overhead costs, they make profit. Maybe their profit-point is something like 50,000 subscribers a month (just pulling a number out of thin air). Every subscriber per month past that is profit. If they have 75,000 subscribers, then 25,000 of them are profit and they are charging them $10 a month, so that’s $250,000 in profit a month. Again, just making up numbers but you get the idea.
Go do something cool!
