Reselling4Profit Newsletter
March-April 2007

"Dr. Frankenstein, I Presume?"

Or what the heck to do with the stuff on your hard drive - Part Two

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True story. I recently received an email selling PLR rights to Scratch Card Generator. It was inexpensive...$17, as I recall. But I thought to myself "didn't I already purchase this? Or did I just think about buying it. " I did a quick search on R4P and couldn't find it, but that didn't mean it wasn't on one of my hard drives somewhere.

I was going to search my hard drives. After all, I *do* rename products so that I can find them, even if it takes a search.

But, since I was pretty sure this wasn't a new product, I decided to Google it first. After all, why pay $17 if I can get it for less? (Assuming I didn't already own it.)

Even more important, and my main reason for searching, was why buy a product that is already oversold? After all, if it rang a bell with me, with the thousands of resell rights products available on Reselling4Profit, I was sure it had already been offered for sale.

Much to my surprise, the first result was a FREE download. So I didn't even bother searching my hard drive. I downloaded the freebie, checked the rights to make sure I could post it on the Reselling4Profit.com membership site as a PLR product...and saved myself both $17 and the time of even searching my hard drive! (And, yup, it got uploaded promptly for R4P members to download and use.)

Granted, most people won't do what I did.

Rule of Thumb: Do what I did :-)

Again, most people won't even think of doing what I did, much less do it. They won't think of searching by a product name. so they won't discover a less expensive version of the same product.

What does this mean for you? It means you could potentially buy a product for less than the sales pitch you received (or, worse, that your potential customers could). Knowing this already gives you a leg up on your competition.

But what about the people who do think about doing this? After all, I just told thousands of people what I did, and suggested they do the same :-)

Well, if you create your own product, you get to NAME your own product. Even if all you have are is a private label right product, you get to rename the darn thing. As a result, people won't find what you're selling somewhere else at a lower price by doing a product name search.

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OK. While I just may have saved some of you money, there's still the whole issue of creating a 'new' product and bringing it to market.

If creating a new individual product completely from scratch isn't high on your list of possibilities, yet, compilations - such as "X In A Box" type products - can be very popular and make you decent money, assuming you do them the right way. Packaging a bunch of old, out-of-date resell rights stuff, however, isn't the right way. The people you need to help you sell won't help you sell.

This doesn't mean that some older products aren't still great products, but most have outlived their usefulness. Therefore, you have to choose the best of the best...and choose them carefully.

Plus you can't count on them alone. While there are new people coming to Internet Marketing every day who haven't seen these older products, you still need sales help, and those people likely have seen these older products before and won't be interested in promoting a compilation.

[By the way, last month I mentioned tracking at least the year of publication' of products you collect on your hard drive.. Do you see the value of this now?]

Secrets of the Super Bloggers was a big hit back a few years ago. The 'creator' took a then-hot topic and gathered together 14 products all related to it. Some had Resell or Master Resell Rights. Others were free reports. Some could be sold separately and included sales pages. Some were included as the 'main product' while the others were included as 'bonuses'. And the package itself came with Resell Rights and its own sales page.

This 'new' product saved people time and effort by gathering all this information together, it saved people money because they didn't have to pay individually for each product, and it offered them the opportunity to make money both by using the information effectively as well as by selling the products themselves. And a lot of people felt that was worth $97!

One of the cool things about Internet marketing from a compiler's perspective is that, once someone comes up with a new "latest thing", a lot of other people jump on that bandwagon, creating a number of related products in a very brief period of time.

This gives a heads-up product compiler a great opportunity. Yes, you'd have to invest in the products quickly, but then you get to turn around and make money yourself from them not as a reseller competing with everyone else marketing the same products, but as a new product creator.

Rule of Thumb: Use other people's efforts to create something unique yourself, rather than doing what everyone else is doing.

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OK. So if all you have to do is gather a bunch of stuff together in a package and create a sales page and some graphics, how come everyone isn't doing it? And, if they did, how could anyone make any money at it.

Well, actually, tons of people *are* trying it in some manner or other. And, almost none of them are making money at it.

The problem is that simply clumping together a bunch of products, even though they're related, isn't enough.

Part of the problem is timing. Being first is usually much better than being better. If you dawdle around, as most people do, someone else will beat you to the punch.

Rule of Thumb: The early bird gets the worm. Wouldn't you rather make money and leave everyone else eating worm leftovers?

Another part is presentation. You can't just compile products together. You have to get people to see your compilation as a new product with value-added. Yes, gathering things together in one place at a lower total price is value-added. But if your sales page stinks and your graphics are unprofessional, potential buyers aren't going to think much of your offering. They will not see the value.

Yet a third is actually getting your offering in front of potential buyers. You can't sell anything if no one knows you have anything to sell. And, if your timing and presentation are poor, you reduce your chances of being seen even more because no one will want to promote it.

So, what does a motivated person do?

Well, there are several things.

One is to recognize that you'll probably have to spend a bit of money on presentation. Whatever you do...DON'T create one of those cheesy-looking ebook/box covers using some program that adds your ugly text to an ugly template. They scream "Unprofessional! Not worth the money!" at everyone. Hmmm.

Rule of Thumb: Ugly is ugly. Cheap is cheap. Even if your product is a freebie. Why set yourself up to fail?

Suck it up and hire someone on, say, Rentacoder for $15-$25 to create a nice-looking product graphic. Ditto your page's header graphic, although I AM having fun with the 123 Headline Creator I'm reviewing this issue. It does a much better job than any other template-driven header graphic program I've come across so far and requires far less of a learning curve.

Another is to recognize that you need to have a compelling sales page. Most of you aren't going to be all that good at creating that either. So look into hiring someone via RentaCoder as well. Now, the downside here is that not all the writers there are going to be that much better than you are. (If nothing else, make sure you see several samples of their work before hiring them,)

If your writing skills are like most online marketers, some improvement is probably better than nothing, but that doesn't mean it's good enough. Plus cheaper is pretty much guaranteed to not be better when it comes to sales text.

I'm going to cover this topic in-depth next issue because it deserves a separate article on its own.

Rule of Thumb: Even if you're giving something away, you have to 'sell' it.

A third is to simply acknowledge that other people are going to be 'compiling' existing products as well, and that you need to do something to make your product stand out (in addition to being professional looking and produced in a timely manner.)

They may be 'compiling' them on a website, rather than as a single product. They may be 'compiling' them as bonuses for something else they want to sell. They may be 'compiling' them as giveaways in order to capture email addresses. It doesn't matter. They are your competition.

However!  The thing that most "Internet marketers" do is to only look at resell rights products from other Internet marketers. That's where they fall down on the job, and where you can set yourself apart.

Sure, if you are first to get your compilation product out there with great looking graphics, a converting sales page, and the assistance of people with larger lists than you do...people who will actually look at your product and decide it will sell and, therefore, make them money...this may not matter.

But, if you aren't, you need to find 'value-added' elsewhere.

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I have a friend who specializes in a non-Internet marketing niche. Her's is a subniche of a very popular niche. She started about 5 years ago. She discovered this particular niche when she was trying to accomplish something in her life and discovered that what she wanted was difficult, if not impossible, to find. She decided that she couldn't possibly be the only person in her situation wanting what she was looking for, so she started a tangible-product Internet business, working with legitimate wholesalers she found through extensive research. (We both have decades of research library experience. Trust me. You couldn't hope for a better background when trying to find things that other people haven't found.)

She created a beautiful website and compelling sales pages. She got tons of traffic, and did really, really, really well.

Now, I'm being secretive about this niche and her site for a reason that has nothing to do with you. What happened was that, two years ago, a couple of other women saw what she was doing and decided to copy her, including stealing her copyrighted web sales material and so forth.

(In case you didn't know, someone else's website is copyrighted material, even if it doesn't say so. You do NOT have permission to take text from it and use it on your own site.)

Worse, from my friend's perspective, once they tracked down her wholesalers, they decided to undersell her, even though they had to be selling so cheaply that they were working for only a buck or two an hour.

As a result, my friend's business plummeted. She thought she'd have to go get a job after experiencing several years of success. She was devastated. Then we talked.

We talked about value-added. We talked about how their working for $2 an hour (in the USA) was not maintainable. We also talked about adding digital products to her inventory...which concerned her because she was afraid they'd steal that, too. I told her not to worry.

There were numerous resell rights products in the overall niche, so I suggested we create a compilation product and offer it as a 'bonus' to people who bought from her. But I also had a few tricks up my sleeve...just in case.

As a result, she looked at all the things I showed her and choose a dozen items as being the cream of the crop.

Her sales pages were rewritten to promote this 'amazing bonus' that "answered all your questions" and so forth and so on. Note: there was no mention whatsoever of 'resale rights' because hers was not an Internet marketing niche.

Her sales started improving significantly almost immediately.

Those women? They started offering similar digital 'bonuses' such as their own checklists, guides and so forth. Their freebies were shoddily done - they were apparently doing them themselves - but they still cut back into her sales.

But we were already looking elsewhere. The deal is...if you offer written products, anyone else can write their own alternatives. Their written products could be crap, but they're free and the sale has been made, so who cares. Certainly not those two women.

Not only does software have a much higher perceived value than written products, it's also more difficult for people to 'copy' it successfully. Certainly most people can't create their own. So we needed to find software that "did things" that potential buyers would love to be able to do. In this particular niche, there are all kinds of those desirable things...which, based on experience, I believed meant that a lot of programmers had already created software that would do them.

One of the important things here - and please take note of this - is that we didn't bother looking at Internet marketing products beyond the ebooks and other written material we'd already used.

We needed software. We needed things those women couldn't duplicate by themselves or wouldn't know how to find by themselves. (And, yeah, you'd be surprised at how limited most people's knowledge is.)

We initially did a very simple Google search: free + software + [her niche]. That's it. Nothing more elaborate than that. We came up with dozens and dozens and dozens of possibilities. Some were open source. Some were freeware. Some had only free trials. But it was a treasure trove. Not only did we identify numerous software possibilities, but we also could narrow down future searches based on those initial results, which led to even more goodies.

My friend, who was the niche expert, choose about eight software programs that she knew would appeal to potential buyers. Each did something a buyer in her niche would love to have automated.

We packaged them with great graphics, titles and text - she had to negotiate with a couple of the programmers for certain rights as not all were open source, do whatever you want with them programs. She paid to have professional graphics created, but she did not pay an arm and a leg. She found someone on RentACoder to do the work for about $120 total.

Then we set up a new series of software bonuses, all of which included software that did really neat, niche-related things. We also gave different levels of bonuses for different levels of tangible-goods purchases. Plus we decided the software could be purchased by itself.

My friend's sales skyrocketed and have consistently stayed a high level. She's even added several more software products using those techniques.

Those two women? Well, they're still out there undercutting her on price. But my friend's business is no longer threatened by them.

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Sorry for the long-windedness, but I wanted you to understand that you can find 'value-added' all over the place. You don't have to stick with products promoted by Internet marketers. Nor do you have to pay to have software created (assuming you even come up with ideas for software, which is hard for most of us.)

There are millions of software programs out there. Hundreds of thousands of programmers creating products that have nothing to do with Internet marketing, nothing to do with resell rights, nothing to do with what most of you have been looking at.

Yet a huge number of these programs are available for you to incorporate in products of your own. Finding them really isn't all that hard...and now you know where to start!

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Part Three of this series - well, shoot, I wasn't planning on a Part 3. But if I want to do right by all of you, I've got to give you more.

So more comes next issue where I go into coming up with compelling sales text without resorting to the old "benefits, not features" routine that, while it's true, doesn't help most of you actually accomplish anything.