At first glance, creating your own product seems like a big hassle when you could just sell other people’s products and take an – often hefty – commission. Or you could go across to a resale rights site, buy a product for $10 or so and – if you believe the sales pitch – resell it to people for triple that amount or more. Of course, that second scenario doesn’t actually pan out in real life, but you live in hope!

Selling other people’s products

There are several problems with selling other people’s products, especially if the other person is only someone that you’ve “met” on the internet.

Firstly, the other person may stop selling the product without notice. That’s happened to me on a number of occasions. In one instance, I was making a good number of sales per month so I know it wasn’t due to lack of profitability. They just disappeared off the face of the earth.

In other instances the product wasn’t selling enough to keep the domain name going so, again, that negated all the time I’d spent promoting it.

Or, more recently, a software program I was promoting was removed because it no longer worked and it wasn’t worth the developer spending the necessary money to bring it up to date.

So, as you can see, selling other people’s products isn’t the smooth path that people promoting affiliate marketing as an almost dream lifestyle quietly don’t tell you. You have all the risk that any commission only salesperson has. Without necessarily getting the compensation to go with it.

Buying in re-sale rights

Resale rights are just that – the right (subject to certain restrictions) to sell a product as your own. The supermarkets do a version of this all the time – it’s called white labelling because historically a product was supplied in plain white packaging, ready for the purchaser to put their own label on it. Nowadays all that is usually done by the manufacturer but the name has stuck.

With information products, you usually get a PDF book, maybe the Word document associated with it, possibly some audios and/or videos and maybe a sales letter and graphics.

Which sounds like a bargain until you find out that your granny could write a more compelling sales letter. Sure, the letter looks good but it doesn’t do the job of selling.

Then there’s the main product itself. 60 pages of (usually) ghost written content that’s been researched – if indeed it has been researched – on Wikipedia and a handful of blogs.

There’s a reason the original author didn’t want their name on it.

Creating your own product

So long as you know your subject, this isn’t actually as difficult as it sounds.

The main product just needs to be created – written or spoken or video – from an outline you create. So spend a while getting down the main sections and the sub-sections and the sub-sub-sections. Then create something valuable about each.

The sales letter doesn’t have to be top quality copy. Sometimes home-made sales copy works a lot better as it doesn’t come across that you’re a slick salesman. Some sites even deliberately make their sales letters look like they weren’t written by a professional – but we’re often talking big money for that as these often are, and that kind of copywriter really isn’t cheap.

Graphics can be done at sites like Fiverr and so long as you supply the original image that you’ve bought and got the licence to, the results are fine and you won’t get in trouble on copyright.

Then there’s the advantage that you can use an affiliate program to resell your product and let other people act as commission only salespeople for you. It’s win-win for you!

If you’d like help with creating your own product, contact me for a chat!