Use Your Knowledge to Sell Other People’s Stuff

Many bloggers are earning a pittance by just selling other people’s products via AdSense, private ad sales and affiliate marketing and I suggested that we package our knowledge into our own products that we sell directly.

By opening up our product sales to affiliates we can then harness the power of other bloggers thus massively extending our reach way beyond our individual blogs. In this post, I’m going to go full circle and suggest that as a product owner you can now start making a lot more money with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Is Very Broad

Last week I wrote a review of a $27 ebook about ClickBank. That is what I consider a ‘money post’. It’s not going to change the lives of my readers and it’s only real purpose is to make me money as an affiliate for that product. Will I get rich doing this? Well it would help if I inserted my affiliate links properly but even on the days when I do check my posts before publishing, selling the odd copy of a $27 product from a one-off review on my blog will not allow me to retire any time soon.

However, $27 is the low end of the market, especially in this particular niche. You may have heard some buzz last week over something called the Product Launch Formula 2.0 by Jeff Walker. This product was priced at $1997 and gave affiliates a 50% commission. That is a whole new ball game…

Selling High Priced Items

Readers who have been with me a while may remember my high paying niche experiment. I was trying to find a product such as PLF that would give me a $1000 commission to see if it would be harder to sell than a product with a $10 product, or somewhere in between. The experiment failed but the experience I have learned since then tells me that I don’t even need to conduct an experiment such as that because you don’t sell $27 ebooks in the same way that you sell $2000 courses.

Just about every big name in the Internet Marketing industry promoted PLF and none of them wrote a review of it on their blog! They wouldn’t have been able to because the product was available for all of 24 hours before being pulled off the market. They had to promote it without seeing it and they had to try to get an edge over every other affiliate out there who was promoting it at exactly the same time.

Your Own Product Is Your Edge

If you’ve ever bought a product in the Internet Marketing industry you will probably be familiar with the concept of a ‘bonus’. “Buy this product from me and I’ll throw in X, Y & Z as a bonus.” This is how the promotion of PLF worked. As a consumer, when you are about to spend two thousand dollars you want to get the most bang for your buck and pick the affiliate with the most appealing bonus package.

I was one of those consumers (or at least I tried, they have still not managed to process my credit card, looks like I have missed out) and one thing I found particularly useful was a blog that was put together by Dr Mani. He showcased all of the bonuses that PLF affiliates were offering.

What struck me as I looked through these is that almost every single bonus took the form of the knowledge of the affiliate. They threw in ebooks, courses, seminars, skype time, personal mentoring and coaching. Every one of those affiliates offered up their own knowledge in the form of their products as bonuses for people who bought PLF through their affiliate link.

Of course, those with the best products could put together better bonus packages than those with weaker products.

How Do You Compete With the Big Guys?

The second thing that struck me was that even if I was an affiliate for PLF or some similar product in the future, that I would never be able to compete with those guys. What product do I have? Well none yet but soon I’ll have my course on StumbleUpon.

However, what I remembered here was that I was looking at an extremely high priced product in just about the most competitive industry that there is. These guys, names like Ed Dale, Rich Shefren, Mike Filsaime, John Reese etc are the “big name guru’s” of the industry and have all had years and years of experience and have used that time to create unique and outstanding products.

I don’t have to compete with those guys and neither do you. For starters, the Internet Marketing industry is a tough one and there are plenty of other niches out there that don’t have gurus like that to compete with. I’m still hoping to set up a niche site this year that will be nothing to do with IM or making money online but in that niche I want to create my own product and make some decent money.

We All Start At The Beginning

Whatever niche we are in, we don’t have to compete at the top level and even if that is our ultimate aim we all have to start somewhere. Blogging in particular is a tough venture to excel at simply because it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to get a new blog off the ground.

But its also easy to forget that everybody starts out at the bottom and so we can forget those guys at the top and start out by chasing the commission on that $27 ebook. Maybe next time it will be a $97 ebook or a $297 course and so on. My StumbleUpon course seems trivial to me when I compare it to the kinds of bonuses that were being offered for PLF but it doesn’t matter because it’s a start.

Every success story, online or offline has to start somewhere. Most of the great successes have a string of failures and minor successes behind them. Sure there are those people that seem to burst onto a scene out of nowhere, like the winners of reality TV shows for example, but most of us can get where we want to be by taking that first step and just getting started.

Recapping The Strategy

There’s lots of ways to make money blogging, and many of them revolve around selling other people’s products. However, when we create our own products we create something that is exclusive to us. We have at our disposal a product that nobody else can offer. When we wish to step beyond simple affiliate links embedded in review posts we can use our own products as leverage to give us an edge over competitors in our niche.

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