Ewen Chias Internet Millionare System |“THINK-OUT-OF-THE-BOX” | Part 6| Advanced Strategies

Added by webmaster on March 8, 2010.
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Tags: CREATING YOUR OWN PRODUCTS, FIRE SALES, “THINK-OUT-OF-THE-BOX”

Ewen Chias Internet Millionare System | Part 6| Advanced Strategies

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n the previous modules, I showed you how to set up your reprint rights business and transform it into a long-term profit engine for yourself.

When you’ve started seeing regular income flow to your bank account, though, you don’t want to rest on your laurels, so to speak. That’s when you’ll want to start using some more advanced techniques to expand the power of your personal brand and grow your income.

This lesson will give you some specific ideas for how to do that. I’m going to give you three strategies that you can implement whenever you want.

First, I’m going to tell you how to put on a “fire sale” to make money from your reprint rights product library. This is a tried and true technique that can put a lot of money in your pocket fast.

Next, I’ll give you a few strategies that go beyond the traditional uses for reprint rights material. These creative strategies will open your mind to other possibilities that you might not have considered before.

Finally, I’ll give you some guidance about how to start creating your own products to grow your individual brand.

Everything you’ve learned so far is the core of what you need to do to have a successful reprint rights business. If you follow the advice I’ve given you, you’ll lay the foundation for a successful career.

This module will round out your Internet Millionaire System by showing you the road ahead.

Read on!

1.0 Fire Sales

fire sale in the offline world is a way a business (or an individual, actually) can recover at least some money for goods that were damaged in a fire. In some cases, the damage is minor and people buying the “damaged” goods can get a great deal.

You can use a similar approach in your reprint rights business.

When you start buying reprint rights material to build your library, odds are good you’ll end up with a lot of material on your hard drive. Sometimes it can sit there for quite a while doing nothing for you.

I’m going to give you a strategy that will help you make some money with that material fast.

1.1 What’s A Fire Sale?

I told you what it is in the offline world. It’s similar in the online world. Here’s a concise definition:

A fire sale is a one-time event that offers a large collection of products for a very attractive price in order to generate significant revenue quickly.

You might get different versions of that definition based on who you talk to, but that’s the basic idea. You’re selling a collection of products that otherwise might be sitting on your hard drive doing nothing.

1.2 What To Include

You do not want to make your fire sale like a garage sale, where you just empty your garage and try to get rid of a bunch of junk. It pays to be a bit more thoughtful than that.

First, you should include the freshest stuff you can. Some products are simply too old to add much perceived value to your offer. You should avoid selling those directly. But you can still sell them if you wrap them in an updated concept.

For example, let’s say you have some ebooks from a few years ago. They’re available in lots of other places, so you can’t make a case that each one is valuable. Here’s how you could update the set a bit and add some value:

Come up with a new name for the set of books that links them together as a set/system. The new name obviously doesn’t add value (although it might add perceived value), but giving people a way to think about using the products together can.
Add a custom component to the set that relates the products. This could be a “how-to” report you write yourself, or maybe an audio or video to explain how to use them. For example, let’s say you have three ebooks on various aspects of selling ClickBank products. You could create a very brief how-to manual that walks people through a step-by-step approach to using the three ebooks logically. It doesn’t have to be fancy—it just has to add some extra real value.

A slight twist on that approach is to add bonuses to your offer that make sense. Those could include “how-to” materials you create, or that you find elsewhere in your product library. In this case, you’re not specifically bundling products together, but you’re offering additional products that help people get more or better use out of others in your fire sale.

For example, if your fire sale package includes a set of website templates, you could offer a bonus of some website graphics.

But specifically why should be in your fire sale, and how much stuff?

There’s no one right answer, because every fire sale is different. But here are two easy guidelines:

Include lots of products, but not too much. This is subjective, of course, but you want to avoid appearing to offer a laundry list of hundreds of products. The bigger the set of products, the easier it will be for somebody to assume it’s a pile of garbage you’re just trying to get rid of.
Include a mix of products. Including some ebooks, some software, some audios and some videos makes your fire sale seem more valuable.

No matter what you include, though, there’s something that’s far more important than the list of products in your sale…

1.3 Your “Reason Why”

This is quite possibly the most important aspect of your fire sale.

If you don’t have a rational, believable reason why you’re having your sale in the first place, it will be very difficult to attract any attention or make any sales. There’s a good psychological reason for this.

People buy from people they trust. Sounds simple, but it’s true. If Person A doesn’t trust Person B, it’s highly unlikely Person A will hand any money to Person B, regardless of how good the product looks or sounds. Your fire sale reason helps break down the trust barrier.

Most online buyers these days are a bit jaded. They’re suspicious of anything that looks like a scam, and rightly so. So if you come along with your fire sale and you don’t offer a compelling reason why you’re having it, here’s what your prospects will assume:

“This person is trying to get rid of his digital junk, so he’s bundled it all up and will let me pay him for it…just so it’ll sit on my PC instead.”

Right or wrong, that’s what will be in their heads. You have to overcome that.

The easy way to do it is to come with a credible reason why you’re having your sale. Here are some possibilities:

A holiday. There are lots of holiday promotions out there these days, but there’s no reason you can’t have your own. You can say you’re in a giving mood and decided to have a sale. The key is to tie into the angle of the holiday in some way. For example, you could have a Valentine’s Day Fire Sale because you love your customers and want to give them a special deal (a bit contrived, but you get the point).
A family event. This could be the birth of a child, a child going away to college, a marriage, or anything else that merits some celebration. You can “share the joy” by having a fire sale.
A purchase you want to make. You could say you’ve been saving up for a car, or a house, or a new PC for your business, or something else. You’re putting on your sale to raise whatever amount of money you lack to make the purchase, and you’re giving people a great deal to make it an irresistible offer.
[The bald truth approach] Say you want to clean up a bit. The truth can sell very well. You can say you have a bunch of great stuff you’re not using, so rather than just letting it sit there, you’re bundling it up and offering to your list.

You can probably come up with other reasons of your own. The critical factor is making your reason credible. Here’s one that tends not to work:

Telling your list that you’re having a sale to help them (because you’re sick of “gurus not helping” or for some other reason) tends to flop.

If you have a good, credible reason that fits your style and the context of your fire sale, you’ll sell more.

1.4 How To Price Your Sale

Pricing of any product isn’t quite as scientific as marketing experts might imply. But you can use your head here and set a price that’s likely to work well. Here are some guidelines:

Don’t price it too high. If you have a fire sale with 100+ products in it (assuming they’re all good, and that that’s not viewed as “too many” by prospects), you might be able to slap a high price on your sale. But a good rule of thumb is to price it at a level where you would buy it because it’s such a good deal. The fire sale technique is about selling stuff, not necessarily making a ton of money on each sale.
Pick a price that makes the cost per product truly compelling. This makes it a little easier to test whether your price really will look like a deal. Let’s say you offer that 100-product fire sale, and you sell it for $37. That means each product in your bundle costs 37 cents! That’s a great deal. But keep the next guideline in mind…
Don’t price it too low. This is another thing that’s tough to define, but I would say your price is too low if it makes people assume the products in your sale are junk. So now reconsider that 37 cents per product deal. Are the products really worth much if you’re selling them for that little per product? Maybe not.

In a way, a fire sale needs to be an impulse buy, much like an upsell. The psychology is admittedly complex, but you want people not to even think about the purchase, because you’re giving them so much value for so little.

1.5 How To Build Anticipation

You’ll need to spread the word about your upcoming fire sale just like you do for any product you want to sell.

One easy way to do that is to let people in your niche forums know about it. They’ll like the opportunity to get a deal.

Another way to spread the word is to notify any JV networks you belong to, like http://www.JVNotifyPro.com. Tell them that your fire sale is coming up, let them know what’s in it, and tell them how much commission you’ll give them if they promote it for you. Then be sure to give them promotional tools to help spread the word (like email templates). You can even offer them the package for free if they’ll promote.

As you’re getting the word out, remember to do two things that will help build anticipation for your sale:

Push your compelling angle. This is partly your reason for the sale, and partly the packaging for your sale. For example, you could push the fact that your fire sale is going to help people become financially independent…and then offer it on July 4^th (Independence Day) in the U.S.
Use some mystery. If you spill the beans about everything that’s going to be in your offer, people won’t look forward to it as much. If you leave some of the details mysterious, you’ll probably whip up more interest. For example, you could say things like this in a promotional email you write for partners to use:

Here’s just a taste of what you’ll get in this shockingly valuable package:

A piece of software that can triple your income in a week from any affiliate product you choose to promote
A simple technique that will let you build a quality list of 10,000+ in less than a month
[etc.]
Build in scarcity. This is just like what you would do for an OTO, or even on your main product sales page. The more limited something is, the higher the perceived value, and the easier it is to build up excitement and buzz that will attract buyers very quickly on launch day. Your scarcity factor could be a limit on the number of packages you’ll sell, a limited time in which people can buy, or even the threat of a price bump after a certain number of days.

A fire sale is an event that requires as much as anticipation and excitement as a big product launch. Building that anticipation to a fever pitch isn’t hard. All it takes is spreading the word and pressing the right psychological buttons. I’ve given you the big ones.

1.6 Your Affiliate Program

One of the ways you’ll drive more traffic to your fire sale is to make your customers your affiliates. I talked about this approach earlier in the course for selling reprint rights products. You can do the same thing here.

All you have to do is tell new buyers about your affiliate program as soon as they buy. You’ll want to do that in three ways.

1.6.1 On Your Thank You Page

The first way is to publicize your affiliate program right on your Thank You page where you deliver your fire sale package. I showed you how to I do this for my Autopilot Profits product:

As soon as somebody hits the page where I let him download the product, I tell him about the affiliate program, tell him how to sign up and give him his promotional tools.

1.6.2 In Your Autoresponder

The second way to publicize your affiliate program to customers is to build it into your autoresponder instead of publicizing it right away.

You can force buyers to join your buyer list before they get your fire sale package, but I don’t recommend that approach. Instead, I recommend making it optional to sign up for your affiliate program. They get the product regardless, but don’t let them be affiliates without signing up first. That can be their incentive for joining your buyer list.

You might say something like this

Sign Up Here To Profit From What You Just Bought!

You already know the package you just bought is a fantastic deal. That’s why you’re here! So you know it sells like hotcakes. Now…what if you could profit on each sale?

You can. All you have to do is register to be an affiliate. Then you can promote the package for yourself and I’ll split the profits with you 50/50. Sign up here for free and I’ll give you all of the details:

[sign-up form]

Even if you’re selling your product through ClickBank, and literally anybody with a ClickBank ID can promote your product, you can keep that detail secret until somebody signs up.

Once somebody signs up, you can send him an email message with the details. Just put the details in your first autoresponder message, which goes out immediately when somebody joins your list. Give your new affiliate a link to a page where you tell him how to promote, and where you give him his promotional tools.

1.6.3 In Your Product

The third way to publicize your affiliate program is to build it into your product.

Your fire sale package will have multiple packages in it, but you can have a single READTHISFIRST.PDF file for the package, which most buyers will indeed read. Inside that file, you can have a welcome message, some instructions about how to access and use the material in your package, and a promo for your affiliate program.

That promo can look very similar to the one I showed you a second ago…except it will appear initially in the PDF file instead of on a web page.

1.7 Other Issues

Fire sales are a great way to use reprint rights material that otherwise might just sit on your computer. These sales are relatively easy to set up, and can produce big windfall profits fast. But here are some issues you’ll want to keep in mind:

Don’t violate terms of use for products in your sale. Check the usage rights for each product. If a product says you can’t include it in a bundle of other products, exclude that product from your sale. Odds are good the product creator will never be able to enforce the terms of use, but why potentially upset somebody who can pursue it?
Don’t leave anything out that you said was in. This is very important. If you say your bundle has a certain number of products in it, don’t forget one. Certainly don’t leave anything out that you featured on your sales page for the sale.
Make sure your package is easy to download. This is especially important for large bundles of products. If you have a huge bundle that takes up 100MB of disk space even when you compress it with a tool like WinZip, you’ll want to split it into smaller chunks that people can download separately. That will save you customer support headaches later on.

Remember, a fire sales isn’t a strategy you can use regularly, but it’s one that can put a lot of money in your pocket quickly, build a customer list, and cement your relationship with JV partners. If you create a solid package, backed by a compelling reason for offering it, and promoted by people you’ll share profits with, you can have a successful event that helps you grow your business.

2.0 “Think-Out-Of-The-Box” Strategies

eprint rights material (remember, that includes PLR, MRR and RR products) is an excellent opportunity to get creative with how you sell.

If you’ll think out of the box, you’ll find all sorts of ways to use other people’s products to boost your income.

Let me briefly give you some ideas for creative use of reprint rights material.

2.1 Create An Email Course

This is a great use for PLR material. You can extract chapters of an ebook, for example, and call each one a lesson in your email course.

In many cases, you’ll want to rework the material a little bit, since some ebook chapters are longer than what most people like to read in an email. One solution is to put the actual course lesson on a web page at your site, and use your email to send traffic to it, like this:

Hi [subscriber name],

Here’s the next lesson in your [course name] course:

[link to your site]

This lesson is all about [whatever it’s about].

And if you missed any previous lessons, you’ll find links to them at the bottom of this new lesson.

Here’s to your success,

[your name]

That will get you some website traffic, which will help your Google rank for your keywords, and will keep your emails short, which will probably increase the click-through rate.

2.2 Create A Video Tutorial

This is a great way to use a reprint rights ebook. You can use the book as a script, then use a tool like CamStudio to record the video.

For example, you might have an ebook about how to create profitable email promos using an autoresponder. Let’s say it walks through how to set up the emails, load them into the autoresponder, schedule them for delivery, etc. You can fire up your screen capture software and walk through the process with your autoresponder account to create your tutorial video.

2.3 Create A PDF Newsletter From PLR

Remember that you can use PLR material in any way you want to, as long as you abide by the terms of use. That typically means you can change the format of the material and offer it in different ways. A PDF newsletter is a nice option.

PDF newsletters typically have higher perceived value than email newsletters. There’s just something about seeing a nicely formatted document that’s very much like an ebook—it makes people think the information is better somehow.

Here’s all you need to do to set yours up:

Split your PLR material (articles, ebook chapters, etc.) into newsletter issues
Use your favorite PDF converter to save the material as PDF files (OpenOffice is a good choice here, or the most recent version of Microsoft Word if you have it already)
Offer your newsletter as a monthly publication either for free as an enticement for something else, or for a fee

That’s really all there is to it. It’s probably smart to spend a little time coming up with a nice design for your newsletter, but your existing PLR material can be the ready-made content.

2.4 Build A “Canned” Membership Site

I described building reprint rights membership sites in lesson 5, but there’s a specific type of membership site you can build that requires very little work in almost any niche.

What you do is use PLR material to create a monthly report on some aspect of your niche topic. It can be anything, and the reports can be relatively brief (5-15 pages).

Then find a MRR or RR product in your library that complements the report. It could be website templates or graphics for a report on setting up a site, some squeeze page copywriting software for a report about creating squeeze pages, etc.

Create 12 pairings of a PLR report and an MRR/RR product. It might sounds daunting at first, but it’s really not that hard if you have a decent-sized library. And you can always search for products you’re missing once you know what you’re looking for.

Once you have your pairings, offer your membership for a low monthly price, something like $7 or maybe as high as $17, and sell as a monthly “insider report” plus a “free gift”.

That’s a simple membership site you can set up in a day or three, and it won’t take any work once you’ve got it set up. Just sign up members and cash your checks.

2.5 Use PLR To Generate Traffic

PLR material is great for all kinds of uses. One convenient set of uses is as traffic generators. Here are a few:

Extract portions of PLR material (or even use entire articles) for forum posts
Post PLR videos to sites like YouTube with links back to your site
Create podcasts from PLR audios or audios you create from PLR ebooks with tools like NaturalReaders
Extract portions of PLR material for posts to your own blog, or even for comments on other people’s blogs, with links back to your site
Create quick and easy viral reports from PLR material that you can offer with free giveaway rights

Those are just a few ideas. Pretty much any use of PLR material to generate traffic is worth considering. The only limitation is your terms of use.

2.6 Create Offline Seminar Materials

As I’ve mentioned before in this course, I put on training seminars. In doing that, I’ve found a convenient use for reprint rights material.

I sometimes use reprint rights stuff, especially PLR but sometimes MRR and RR products, as offline seminar training material. It saves me a ton of work and cost. But you do have to be careful doing this:

Don’t recycle bad material. If the material will make you look bad as a seminar speaker, don’t use it! Find the high-quality stuff that helps you look great.
Favor exclusive material. If you use reprint rights material that everybody’s seen, they might wonder why they paid you for your seminar. But if you use reprint rights material that was more exclusive, odds are good nobody will have seen it before.
Edit it whenever you can. This obviously applies only to PLR. You always should put your own brand on the material, and you should consider editing it to sound more like your style. You still save effort because you’re not starting from scratch.

2.7 Use It For Affiliate Tools

Reprint rights material can make great affiliate tools.

For example, you might have purchased PLR to a set of promotional emails. You can edit those and offer them to your affiliates as templates to promote your product.

2.8 Use It For Affiliate Bonuses

Another great way to help affiliates is to let them offer things as free gifts to their subscribers as bonuses. You can package up some reprint rights material and have a few nice bonuses for affiliates to offer after literally 30-60 minutes of “work” (or even less).

You’ll want to make sure the products you let affiliates offer as bonuses are pretty new, though. Letting them hand out tired, old products probably won’t help them much.

And you might even put a twist on the “affiliate bonus” use and offer products as bonuses to prospective affiliates. It’s sort of like an ethical bribe. If you offer them some nice products for free if they promote, you might get more people promoting for you.

2.9 Use It For Affiliate Prizes

You’ve probably seen people crowing about how well they did in an affiliate contest, or you might have participated yourself.

In a nutshell, some product creators offer prizes to their top affiliates. This is especially common for big product launches. They might give cash or gifts of various kinds (sometimes expensive ones, like laptop computers) to the top five or ten affiliates.

You can do the same thing if you’ve got some attractive reprint rights material. The newer and more exclusive it is, the better. Package up the material and offer the same package to the top five (or however many) affiliates, or perhaps offer different subsets of it to the top affiliate, the number two finisher, etc.

3.0 Creating Your Own Products

eprint rights products are a fantastic way to start your products business fast, make money quickly, and even start your growth beyond the initial stages. But you can’t depend entirely upon reprint rights.

Why not? It’s a rational question to ask. I’ve spent this entire course telling you about how useful reprint rights products are, and now I’m telling you not to depend on them exclusively. Huh?

The biggest reasons are these:

You don’t want to be 100 percent dependent on others for your products. This is an example of not putting all of your eggs in one basket. If your product sources went away, what would you be left with? You need some product creation skills of your own.
Custom products build your brand. Sure, reprint rights products that you present in a unique way with your own custom USP help build your brand as well. But products you create yourself establish you as a unique source for helpful information. That’s the core of your brand strategy.

The idea behind the Internet Millionaire System is to put money in your pocket quickly by buying hot products and reselling them. Reprint rights products fit very well with that strategy.

But at the same time, you’re building a big customer list. You’ll want to offer your own products to them so you can cement your brand in their minds. And you’ll want to offer your own products to new customers so they see you as a unique information source right from the beginning.

In this chapter, I’ll give you three concrete strategies for creating your own products. Don’t worry, it’s not hard…and you won’t necessarily have to do all the work yourself.

3.1 Do It Yourself

This is always an option. It’s also the option that requires the most work on your part. But keep in mind that this is really the only way to get a product that’s truly the product of your own mind without anybody else having much input.

If you create a product yourself, it’s definitely yours. I strongly recommend that you create at least a couple products like this, if for no other reason than to prove to yourself that you can do it. That way, if you ever have to do it in the future, you’ll know you can.

So how do you get it done?

I suggest that you start with reprint rights products, but not in the way you’re thinking at the moment.

Don’t start with reprint rights products and use them as the core of your product. Instead, start with reprint rights products as idea generators. You can use a simple technique to develop product ideas:

Survey your reprint rights material to see what ideas come to mind. Don’t copy the products to create a “me too” version, but look at what other people are offering to get ideas. This is very much like looking at other people’s articles so you can summarize the main points in your own articles.
Investigate how various reprint rights packages present their components. This will help you imagine how you might create your own components.
Sketch out the components of your product. Do this before you’ve actually created them. This will give you a basic roadmap for what you’ll need to create.
Create your components. Start with the written material (such as ebooks), because that’s often the hardest for people who don’t consider themselves writers. It’s also a basis for creating an audio version of your ebook, which gives you another component without much effort. After you have any written material you need, create audios and/or videos using the tools I showed you in Lesson 3.
Create a free frontend offer. It’s smart to do this after you’ve created the product, because you’ll know exactly what the product looks like. It’s easier to create a frontend offer that way. For example, you could offer a chapter of your main ebook for free as your frontend.
Set up your site to sell your product. This means creating your squeeze page, sales page, etc. If you’re selling through ClickBank, in most cases you’ll need to set up another account to sell another product at a different site…and I recommend that you have different sites to sell different products. It gives you more “virtual real estate,” and keeps products and customers separate to make management and future marketing easier.

That’s really all there is to it. The technical side of getting your product set up to sell is pretty much always the same. The only “hard” part is coming up with what product to create and then creating it. But I’ve just shown you that it’s easier than most people think.

You do not need perfect product—those don’t exist.

You also don’t need a product with 100 components—a few nice ones (an ebook, an audio/video, and so on).

Come up with a solid core product—usually an ebook or one or more videos—and that will get you started. If you want to add more things later, you can sell version 2, version 3, etc.

3.2 Outsourcing

At some point in your Internet marketing career, you’ll have more money than time. When that happens, it’s smart to consider outsourcing.

You can outsource almost every aspect of product creation, from writing frontend reports to making professional quality videos. It costs money to do that, of course, but it might cost less than you think. The key is finding good service providers.

There’s no way to get around the idea that some people you hire won’t work out so well. They might not deliver. They might deliver poor quality. It’s just part of business. But if you shop around at some well known freelance sites that help you protect yourself, you’ll be better off.

Before I get to the freelance sites, though, don’t forget about the WarriorForum as a place to find outsourcing partners. Lots of great ghostwriter, copywriters, web designers and programmers hang out there.

Sometimes they offer special deals that they publicize in the Warrior Special Offers (WSO) sub-forum, and sometimes they publicize their services in their signatures, often with special deals for Warriors, as forum members are called.

Now on to the freelance sites…

One of the best sites around is http://www.Elance.com. This site is mostly for ghostwriters, copywriters and website designers, although you can find all sorts of freelancers there.

Another good place to look is http://www.Scriptlance.com. This site is a great place to find people to do relatively small “script” coding projects for you. That could be everything from installing forum software on your web server for use in your new product offering, to writing custom scripts you can sell as part of your products.

A third excellent resource is http://www.Rentacoder.com. This is where you can find programmers to create more complex web-based or PC-based custom software for you, if you want to include some custom software in your product.

All of these freelance sites work in a similar way, and Elance illustrates the process quite well.

On their home page you’ll see a place where you can search for qualified professionals in eight major categories:

It’s free to post your “job” to get freelancers to bid on it. You just have to click the Start Now button under Post Your Job to get started.

If you don’t have a free account set up yet, you’ll be prompted to do that (it takes seconds to do). Once you’re signed up, you’ll see the Elance job posting wizard:

You can give you job a title, select the category of freelancer you’re looking for, type in a description, set your budget, and so on. Remember, you’re just posting the job at this point, not agreeing to pay for it. You’ll get evaluate bidders before you accept one.

Watch the video that walks you through making your post.

What’s more important is what job you offer, how you go about describing it, and how you evaluate bidders. Here are some guidelines.

3.2.1 What Jobs To Post

Start small. That’s the best rule of thumb. If you’re working with a new person, give him a small job to start with. When he proves he can do a good job, give him a bigger one. That means you need to split your first job (at least) into two parts:

A small initial piece, perhaps something like a short report in Word format
A larger follow-up piece, perhaps the full ebook for your product

If you’ll split the work that way, you not only protect yourself from wasting time on somebody who hasn’t proven himself, but you also give freelancers an incentive to prove themselves. If they do good work, they’ll get more, and that’s a powerful motivator.

3.2.2 Your Job Post

There’s no one right way to post your job, but here’s a sample posting you can edit for yourself:

I need a 15-page report about [your topic]. It needs to be in editable Word format, written in excellent English. For formatting, I want it in Georgia 13pt font, with 1.25” margins on all sides.

The report needs screen shots related to the material, preferably formatted with explanatory text and graphical arrows to point to contextual items of interest. And there needs to be a set of embedded affiliate links, which I’ll send you.

Here is the high-level outline for the report:

[your outline]

I have some initial source material for you to use, but you’ll need to supplement that with your own research.

As you can see, my budget for this is $[your amount], and I need the report within 7 days from the time I accept your bid.

If you do a good job on this, I’ll gladly give you positive feedback on Elance.com, and I’ll invite you to bid on some more (larger) work immediately.

Thanks.

[your name]

When you get bidders, you can evaluate them (see the next section) and pick one. If that person does a good job, you can post your second, larger job like this, and invite that specific person to bid on it:

I need a 50-page ebook about [your topic]. It needs to be in editable Word format, written in excellent English. For formatting, I want it in Georgia 13pt font, with 1.25” margins on all sides.

The ebook needs screen shots related to the material, preferably formatted with explanatory text and graphical arrows to point to contextual items of interest. And there needs to be a set of embedded affiliate links, which I’ll send you.

Here is the high-level outline for the book:

[your outline]

I have some initial source material for you to use, but you’ll need to supplement that with your own research.

As you can see, my budget for this is $[your amount], and I need the report within 14 days from the time I accept your bid.

If you do a good job on this, I’ll gladly give you positive feedback on Elance.com.

Thanks.

[your name]

Very similar, obviously, but the point is the same. You need excellent work in a reasonable amount of time, and for a reasonable price.

3.2.3 How To Evaluate Bidders

The first time you post a job at a freelance site, you won’t know who the bidders are. That means you need so do some research into who they are. Dig into their profiles and the feedback they’ve gotten to see if they’re any good.

You can get some basic information about freelancers by looking at their profile summaries in Elance (and at other freelance sites). Here’s what they look like:

On the right side, you’ll see the freelancer’s feedback rating (in terms of percent positive), the number of reviews and his total Elance earnings.

That gives you a snapshot of this person’s experience. But you don’t have to stop there.

It’s smart to drill down on a person’s profile to see the details. You can do that by clicking on the person’s profile name, which might be a business name. You’ll then see the person’s Elance resume, like this:

I blurred this freelancer’s identifying information so you wouldn’t take this as a recommendation—it’s just an example.

A freelancer’s page shows you the person’s profile, their portfolio of work, the feedback comments they’ve gotten, and so on. You absolutely must dig into this to evaluate who you’re hiring. If you do, you’ll probably find a winner you can work with again and again.

3.3 Creating Products With JV Partners

There’s no reason you have to do all of your product creation work yourself, even if you don’t “outsource” per se.

A great way to develop products is to work with partners to do it.

When you first start, you might not have a lot to offer a partner in terms of established products. But you can certainly offer your time and effort.

You can propose that you work with this partner to create a product you both can profit from. Here are few examples of what you could create:

An interview product. You could interview this person, record it and sell it together. If you volunteer to do most of the work and just split the profits with your partner, that might be an attractive deal for him. Later in your career, you’ll probably be a in a stronger negotiating position, and you won’t need to volunteer to do as much.
An expansion of an existing product. Perhaps your partner already has a product, but you have an idea for how to add to it to make it better. That’s a perfect case for working together.

For example, Maybe somebody has a product about how to set up a website, but you know how to use a relatively inexpensive new tool to get the job done faster. You could propose creating a screen capture video for how to use the tool, add it to the existing product and split the profits from version 2.

A combination of products in a bundle or a system. Maybe you can add a component or two yourself, and then package your contribution with your partner’s to create a new combined product and split the profits.

I told you how to propose a JV in Lesson 4, and this is a wonderful place to use that approach. You can propose a product creation JV! That’s a true joint venture, where you both contribute and both share in the rewards.

3.4 Don’t Stop Here!

Custom product creation could be an entire course in itself.

I’ve given you three simple approaches to getting the job done, because the primary focus of this course is to get you started fast and growing.

But by all means, continue your education on the topic of creating your own products. It can be a lucrative way to expand your business.

4.0 Conclusion And Course Wrap-Up

n this module I finished things up by giving you three advanced techniques for growing your business beyond the “quick start” the rest of the course showed you how to create.

I told you how to create your own “fire sale” to make money from your reprint rights product library.

I gave you a few “out of the box” strategies for using reprint rights material in non-traditional ways.

And told you how to start creating your own products to grow your personal brand.

And now…

You’re done!

Thanks for sticking with me for the entire course. It was a lot of material, but I tried to condense it to just what you need to know to see success as soon as possible.

But actually, you’re just beginning.

I’ve shown you how to set up your reprint rights business. Now it’s time for you to do it and start seeing the profits. You’ll encounter some speed bumps along the road. Don’t get discouraged. It isn’t hard to create a steady, reliable online income for yourself if you stick with it.

All you need to do is focus on doing the right things, and the money will come eventually.

Starting your own reprint rights based business really is one of the simplest approaches around for building a business (and a brand) with long-term growth potential.

To your success!

Recommended Resources

This book is full of great resources, so I wanted to collect them all in one place for easy reference.

http://www.CamStudio.org – An open source (free) tool to create your own screen capture videos for products.

http://www.OpenOffice.org – A set of programs much like Microsoft Office…but it’s free!

http://www.NaturalReaders.com – A text-to-speech tool that lets you create audios of ebooks quickly and easily.

http://www.WarriorForum.com – The most popular marketing forum online. A great place for forum marketing, finding JV partners and developing other relationships.

http://www.Elance.com – One of the most popular freelance sites on the web. You’ll find a huge community of freelancers here, in a multiple categories. I recommend this site for ghostwriters, copywriters and web designers.

http://www.Scriptlance.com – A great freelance site where you can find “script” coders for help in setting up your own business or in creating scripts for your products.

http://www.Rentacoder.com – Another great freelance site where you can find programmers for custom software.