What Are You Going To Sell?
One thing is for certain, if you are going to make a living online, you need to have SOMETHING to sell.
This article is about products but before we start it is important to point out that a person can sell services online as well.
Services would be any service that you can offer to other people to help them such as dentistry, attorney services, doctors, contractors, realtors, mechanics, coaches, therapists, builders, etc.
You can absolutely improve these types of “service” businesses with a strong online presence. So basically everything that we talk about on this blog can be used for and directed towards service businesses as well.
Service businesses also need a good landing page and sales funnel. They need traffic for their businesses. They need follow-up systems in place and more.
Let’s Talk About Products
But this article is about products.
So, let’s talk about that.
There are two types of products you can promote – physical products and digital products.
Then, to take it one step further you can promote either product that you created yourself or products created by other people.
Products created by other people is known as Affiliate Marketing and you can learn more about that here.
Network Marketing Versus Affiliate Marketing
Another type of product to promote is through a method known as “Network Marketing,” or “Multi-Level Marketing (MLM).”
So what is the difference between affiliate marketing and network marketing? Well, both are selling other people’s products.
But the difference is that with affiliate marketing, you are relying solely on your own efforts and with network marketing, you are bringing other people into the business and relying on their efforts as well.
The people you bring into the business are known as your “downline” and the people above you in the business are known as your “upline.”
For the most part, everyone who agrees to take part in the business is required to spend a certain amount of money every single month on products. Of course, this depends on the business model.
But that is what is most common with network marketing.
How Network Marketers Get Paid
There are generally two ways to get paid with a network marketing business – one is on the products that you sell yourself, and another is to get paid on the products of people you have brought into the business.
This can be a great thing and a not-so-great thing. The good thing about network marketing (when done correctly) is that you can leverage the work of other people.
The whole idea behind it is that if you bring in 1000 people and get paid off their efforts, then you can make 1000 times as much.
Now, this sounds good in theory but here’s the thing – the whole system needs to be duplicatable in order for this to work.
Otherwise, if you have to depend on all of the people beneath you in your downline, then they need to have the same skills and abilities that you do. Or at least, have a system that can be easily duplicated.
These days, this is much easier to accomplish than back in the infancy of Network Marketing.
In the early days, they were primarily designed to promote to the “warm market,” also known as friends and family.
How Network Marketing Has Improved Because of Digital Marketing
But today, many network marketers are having tremendous success through the use of sales funnels and the internet.
So, if you have a system that sells itself, then this is definitely a viable option.
But if the people signed up beneath you need to have sales skills in order to succeed, then it doesn’t matter how good your own sales skills are.
If the people beneath you cannot do what you do, then they will eventually drop out. Unless you have a duplicatable system.
I found this out the hard way back in 2001 and 2002 when I first became interested in internet marketing. No matter how hard I worked (because I was extremely motivated) and no matter how great the products were (and the company I was with had fantastic products), people could not duplicate what I was doing.
So what happened was I would get people into the business but I eventually realized that people were dropping out as fast as I could bring them in.
No matter how much I tried to inspire and motivate them, they could not afford to keep purchasing products every month and did not want to make the effort to “sell” those products or “sell” people into the business.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. I am not against this business model. In fact, I love it.
And besides, things have changed (thankfully) for the better since then.
It is a great way to motivate people to inspire one another and grow as individuals emotionally and in many other ways. And you can meet some of the best people in the world in these types of businesses.
I’m just saying that it did not work for me and I eventually changed my focus affiliate marketing instead.
Why I Prefer Affiliate Marketing
With affiliate marketing, I could automate everything online and not have to promote my business to people I know. Although when you have a great business, you will just want to do that naturally.
But … It is not required in order to succeed. You do not need to try and sell products to your friends and family, which is something that network marketing is widely known for.
With affiliate marketing, you are earning a commission to sell either physical or digital products created by other people. As mentioned above, you can learn a lot more about that with this article.
But another way you can promote products online is to create your own products.
Now, if you are an artist, a musician, or something similar, you can create relative products to sell online.
Creating Your Own Products
But if not, you can also create digital information products. This is most commonly referred to as “Digital Publishing,” and it has made many, many people extremely wealthy.
Now, the downside to digital publishing is that you have to spend a considerable amount of time creating these products. You either need to write a book, record audios or record videos to promote.
But the good news is that you only need to create these products once. Then you can sell them over and over again for years to come… As long as they have current information that is still useful.
Digital Publishing is an amazing way to earn a living online. But – just make sure you do your research. And don’t spend weeks or months creating a product to an audience that doesn’t spend money.
Extremely important.
So, read that previous paragraph again before deciding to walk that path.
An 8-Figure A Year Digital Marketer
I would recommend following Dan Henry if you want to create your own digital products.
Anik Singal also has a great course for this but it is not available all the time. You would have to check and see if it is available at this time.
What I like about Dan Henry’s course is that he calls it “Sold Out Courses.”
The idea is to sell out the course BEFORE you create it. This way you not only know it will sell, you already have it sold.
The method he uses is to work with students and get them results FIRST and then sell the product, which I think is a great idea. At the time of this writing, I have not purchased this course. I only watched the webinar.
But I would like to create digital courses in the future. And when I do, I will definitely be interested in listening to Dan Henry’s advice.
The Benefits of Private Label Rights
But another avenue for finding products to promote is through something called “Private Label Rights.”
Now, I love this method. What this means is that you find products already created by others, but you buy the rights to sell them yourself as your own product that you can either leave “as is,” or you can revise it any way you like.
Either way, you get to keep 100% of the profits. You can brand the products to fit your business.
This is a fantastic way to get quality information for cheap, brainstorm and repackage those products with your own logo and business name.
Personally, I would not want to sell it “as is” unless I give the original creator credit, but I do like to use private label rights products for information purposes that I can use to brainstorm and improve.
You can get some fantastic products this way for extremely cheap, so this is definitely not a thing to ignore, in my opinion.
Find out more about creating products for your business with this free “Beginner to Expert” internet marketing course!
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