Creating my own product to sell. Need some help (13)
Hi. i am a experienced email marketeer and server administrator. i have worked for many years with affiliate networks (and still do) selling other people's products. Mainly im working with europe (portugal, spain, italy, france, uk etc)
most of the products the networks here advertise are insurance, car test drives, newspappers, e-learning and so on.
I have been a few years ago on clickbank, i developed a product took me a long time to do it and i published the product there. i got like 1 person that advertised my product and very low sales. the book was good but... im not sure that i want to do ebooks again.
But i really wanted to have my own thing.
What i'm asking is, anyone can help me or guide me on a good direction on what product i can make to sell online and get direct sales?
im not asking that you do anything for me or give me the "gold" but just what to do if you do not want to sell e-books. if you have ideas to share please let me know.
i also noticed that campaigns like "pin submits" for mobile offers are being banned in europe, and most networks do not want to run them. i researched how to make my own mobile content offers and couldn't find companies or carriers doing this in my location.
thanks in advance
Hey there. Unfortunately your question is not a well formulated one, and this makes it hard for anyone to give you any meaningful advice.
There are companies that make millions of dollars selling everything from backpacks, to medicine, to toilet paper to software to consulting services. Diapers.com was purchased by Amazon for almost a billion dollars ...
All of these are products that can be sold and which are not ebooks.
thanks cmdeal i think that you are right.
i wanted to have a digital product to sell like a mobile app to be able to allow worldwide affiliate networks to publish it and sell it
My advice for you would be to duplicate the types of products that you are used to promoting.
You mentioned you have promoted insurance, car test drives, e-learning. These can all be created yourself by creating lead gen style offers. It's one of the simplest forms of offers you can create.
The goal would be to work directly with insurance, car test drive, and/or e-learning buyers.
How do you find those? Go back to the offers you promoting, fill in your details and wait for the buyers to contact you 
.
Why even go there and take on all that extra hassle of being an advertiser (shipping, returns, supply chain management, working with providers, storage, personnel, etc).
Most advertisers don't make any money on the first conversion, but monetize way later in the pipeline. Think of CPI and CPL campaigns, an install or lead is worth nothing for an advertiser as long as they dont convert into a sale. But as an affiliate you already got paid and just have to worry about one thing: traffic!
Why not just focusing on what you know (affiliate marketing - email) and trying to grow that step by step. You can make big money with it, if you focus on it and have a clear strategy to scale it up.
Originally Posted by monicaca
If I were in your shoes, the following would be the bare minimum steps I would take ... either before trying to solve this problem yourself or asking others for help.
1. The first step would be to create a list of criteria against which you will make your decision.
2. The second step is to then order this list of criteria by importance.
3. The third step would to rate a few potential products you may think of selling against this criteria ranking.
This should at least get you pointing toward the right direction. Right now, I get the sense that you are directionless. That is obviously not a great place to be, but it also makes it almost impossible to help you.
Originally Posted by cbrughmans
As an advertiser he can still buy the traffic AT THE SAME cost as the affiliate and he doesn't have to pay your commission as the affiliate network and he also get's to keep the rest of the profits...
I understand there are many pros to running affiliate offers, but the pros of owning an offer are also more than clear
I think you're excluding the idea of the ebook for no good objective reasons and this puts you in the wrong mindset of how to approach things. My impressions is that you don't want to do that again because of your previous failure. An ebook is just a product that solves a problem for the user. If you create an app or a webservice you still have to think of a problem to solve, so maybe you should start with that instead of the way you present the solution to the user.
Your previous failure was due to noone promoting your book. Since you say you have experience with marketing for other you should decide if you're going to promote the product yourself or rely on affiliates. If you want to promote it then you should think of a niche you're familiar with promoting. If you want others to promote it you should research what's hot and come up with something new in that area to attract affiliates.
To answer your question of what kind of digital things you can create beside ebooks that you can sell:
- mobile apps - costs a lot to develop and good luck selling an app for $10-$50 or having a positive ROI with a $.99 price
- software - costs a lot to develop as well
- subscription to some website/forum (like STM) - if you're not an expert in any field good luck creating a paying community
- mobile subscriptions (PINs) - complicated with all the regulations and payment plans from carriers
I think an ebook or online course it's the easiest way to have your first product that you can directly sell.
You asked me this in PM:
"I wanted to have my own thing to sell on the networks that i work with. i don't see how i can give a network a product that they already have."
I'll reply here.
Nearly every network has many offers within the same niche. There are many factors you can differ your offer with; landing page, the angle, how optimized it is, the payout, the list goes on.
Originally Posted by beckslash
i'm going to do a proper research and see if i can come up with a new idea for a book.
by the way, since i know a lot about security my previous ebook idea was probably bad. my ebook was called "how hackers make cash" so... now i see why it failed.
Ebooks on Linux system administration definitely sell, as do ebooks on windows development.
Both are things that a lot of people want to know about, often quite urgently, and usually the people in question are reasonably well-off and quite used to buying digital books.
See http://nathanbarry.com/books/ for one example of someone doing fairly well selling books on technical topics. There are other people doing significantly better than him.
Hell, you could write a book on Linux sysadmin (and how to set up a server well, and how to make it fast and cheap, etc) for digital marketers and make a decent ROI on that alone!
Originally Posted by caurmen
I have run campaigns to sell a couple million ebooks in the past, and based on this experience, I honestly am not sure the risk-time-reward payoff for a ebook on Linux sysadmin will be very attractive for you.
It feels to me like you will be boiling the ocean on this one ....
@cmdeal - yes, sorry, I didn't phrase that particularly well. It does very much depend on the scale you're looking for.
You can certainly make what most "normal" people would consider a good living writing and selling books on Linux system administration - hence my reaction to "I don't think this will sell". It definitely sells - I know multiple people doing more or less that (selling ebooks or other infoproducts primarily targeted at developers or people with serious tech needs) as their only source of income and being pretty comfortable, but not "baller" level.
However, if you're looking for an affiliate-level lifestyle or above, cmdeal's absolutely right. The risk-time-reward payout for that sort of activity doesn't fit your goal in that case, because writing about sysadmin hits a ceiling well before that. As a rough ballpark I'd say the ceiling's around the $200k per year mark unless you get smart about parlaying your authority into high-level consultancy or similar.
Thanks for the clarification prompt!
As a side note, I think cmdeal's really highlighted something important here. There is an enormous universe of topics that people will pay money to read about. Almost any skill you possess has the potential to be turned into an ebook that sells. I could take 5 minutes and list a dozen things I know enough about to write an ebook that would make more money than the average publisher's author advance. (Coffee, various technical things, filmmaking, game creation, VR...)
However, it's worth noting that the average publisher's advance these days is not large. And nearly all of these things would hit a hard ceiling well before they reached an affiliate lifestyle level. You may note that I've been an affiliate for years rather than an ebook author
The issue is the size of the market - either in terms of raw size, price sensitivity, or both. So much like affiliate campaigns, the first question you have to ask is whether the maximum scale of the venture fits the goal you're aiming to achieve.
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