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THE WAY TO A GOOD START!

Please read on below, this may help you clear in your mind which one is for you:

This is a remarkably simple business model: you simply create a website or a sales page, select a product, sell that product from your sales page and then direct traffic there. This could be an eBook, a pair of jeans or even a range of assorted products.

The more traffic you can send to your site, the more you will sell. That means you can then start to invest more money, to increase and scale your business – or you can repeat the model with multiple assorted products.

How is Selling a Product Passive? You May Ask

Most of us are used to selling a product being a big upheaval. Normally, selling a product means first designing the product, then marketing it, making sure it is made to a high enough standard, promoting the brand through a website, and then sending out units to all your customers (fulfilment).

It means an endless process of ordering stock, promoting that stock, packaging, and delivering. Or at least that is the traditional way of selling products. The good news is that these days, it is much easier to sell a product than it ever has been before and you do not even need to make your own product to do so.

In the conventional model, selling a product meant one of two things:

• Creating and manufacturing your own item
• Buying items in bulk and then selling them off at a lower price point (reselling) Wholesale to Retail
• . . . .
• But the options we are looking at here are:

• Affiliate marketing
• Selling your own digital product.
• Drop shipping.
• POD
• Setting up automatically fulfilment and storage.

AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is an incredibly straightforward process and one that most people reading this may be familiar with. The idea here is that you are selling products that someone else has created and you are getting commission as a result. This is just like being a door-to-door salesman selling subscriptions to cable TV, except that you don’t have to go door-to-door because you can reach the entire world from the comfort of your chair thanks to the internet!

The other thing that sets affiliate marketing apart from regular commission, is the amount of money you will normally take home. When you are an affiliate marketer, you can expect to make anything from 50% to 90% commission. Often, this is going to mean selling a digital product like an eBook or a course. This means that the creator has no overhead and thus they can offer high rates to their marketers.

(I wish to point out here in that the percentage commission is determined and agreed with the creator of the product and it can vary)

They are happy to do this because the more marketers they can attract, the more they can scale their business – and they are not losing out on the sales they make themselves. Selling a digital product like an eBook is a good strategy and especially if you choose the right niche/industry – preferably one that has a great ‘value proposition’ and a universal appeal. Try to sell books that promise to make people’s lives better – whether that means making them fitter or helping them to make more money. Aim to offer them solutions.

Help them visualize themselves richer, happier, sexier and healthier than ever before!
The other great thing about selling products as an affiliate is that of course you can usually see how well those items are selling before you choose which one you want to sell yourself. That means you can select something with a pre-established record and thereby guarantee that you are likely to make a decent profit from it.

You can find these sorts of products from sites like JVZoo, ClickBank or Commission Junction. They will provide you with an affiliate link and any sales you refer to through that link will be credited to your account and earn you money. It is that simple! The problem with digital products though is that they do not have as broad an appeal as physical products. You will be able to sell clothes to anyone, whereas only a specific type of person reads eBooks.

Thus you might prefer to sell physical products, in which case you can use Amazon’s affiliate scheme or ShareASale. Suddenly, you will be able to sell everything from CDs, to clothes, to Transformer toys. The downside is that physical products tend to offer a much lower commission at around 4-6% of the RRP. You’ll likely sell much more and you’ll have the advantage of selling through stores that people are familiar with (especially in the case of Amazon) but you’ll also have to sell a lot more in order to make the same kind of profit you may be used to.

Whatever the case, selling an affiliate product will always be a way to make money passively as all you need to do is set up an account and then promote and share the link!

PLR

Another way to sell digital products where you get complete control, and all the profit is by using PLR packages.
PLR stands for ‘Private Label Rights.’ This is essentially a product that you buy with the sole intention of selling on but the good news is that all the work will already have been done for you here, which includes not only the creation of the product but also the creation of numerous marketing materials such as sales copy, freebies that you can use to attract attention and more.

Some of these will essentially be an entire ready-made sales funnel and this means that all you literally have to do is to copy and paste an existing business model in order to make money!

POD

POD means ‘Print on Demand’ and we are going to use that term a little loosely. However, the basic idea is that you can sell a product without having to order enormous amounts of stock and then hope that you manage to sell them! That is because POD products are automatically created each time you make a sale and often will get delivered too. Normally, POD is a term that is used in the publishing industry to describe an alternative to traditional publishing methods.

Rather than an author having to find a publisher willing to take a big risk on them by ordering thousands of books and then trying to sell them, POD allows the author to upload their files to a printer and then sell the books directly online. Each time you make a sale, it is sent to the printing company, the printer automatically prints out and binds the book and that then gets delivered to the buyer.

This means there is zero risk for anyone involved but you can still sell a physical hard-copy book! Amazon offers this service (which also means you can sell through Amazon itself!) as does Lulu.com and several others. You can also use this method and then order some stock that you send yourself, though this is obviously less passive. Of course, you need to create the book as well, but this is just the same as creating the digital product.

POD might normally refer to publishing but the same basic process can apply to many other scenarios. For example, you can use something akin to POD when you use 3D printing. Here, you will upload a 3D STL file or like a site Shapeways and that will then print out your cup holder, your ornament or whatever else you created whenever someone orders it.

You can also use printed t-shirts, or mugs, or caps and can do this through companies like Vistaprint or others that offer ‘custom printing’ or ‘corporate gifts’. And yes, you can make a surprisingly successful business by selling printed shirts!

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