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Locating Products For Your Internet Business
It's the question often asked by newcomers to mail order, direct mail, marketing on the Internet. How and where do I get products to sell?
In fact, the worry about not having a product to sell is the most common reason people don't follow one of those highly lucrative business ventures. Sadly, that question is also the easiest to answer. If only people knew where to look. The following concepts and tips will help you find hundreds of business ideas today, tomorrow, for the lifetime of your entrepreneurial existence.
Licensing
Licensing means obtaining rights to market other people's products. The concept ranges from wholesaling, dropshipping, joint venture deals, and some other product sourcing methods, where normally a licence gives full rights to use marketing and sales materials used by the owner to sell the product, and also confers rights to re-produce the product itself.
Let us take information products to explain the procedure. In giving a licence to produce this book, I would have to provide the licensee with sales materials (plus in the case of the book you are reading a web site, too, to sell the product) together with a master copy of the product from which to create copies. That master copy might be in paper, disk, electronic book, CD or downloadable pdf format. Perhaps all of those formats. It really doesn't matter as long as you have a means of re-producing the product.
Licensing Tips (again using information products as our example)
* Obtain licensing rights simply by asking someone whose book you've read and would like to market. That's the hard part over, next comes negotiating over rights and fees!
* Look for products in offline and online media, such as in business opportunity magazines, niche market publications, on publishers' web sites, by contacting authors in writers' journals or by direct contact to self-publishers.
* Obtain a copy of the product, read it, check it, ensure you feel comfortable selling the item concerned.
* Make sure the individual has rights to offer the licence or you could be in a great deal of trouble for breach of copyright and other legal infringements.
* Make sure the book represents value for money.
* You do not have to stick to the previous price for the book but always check the copyright owner has no objection to you changing the price.
* You do not have to use the original marketing materials, but as before check before assuming you can design your own.
* Look for ways to package licensed products with whatever other products you already have or can obtain rights to market.
* Several licensed products packaged together can be worth far more than the cumulative price of the individual items.
* Most owners will be more willing to licence products to people and firms operating in different markets and countries to themselves, especially if they intend to continue marketing the product.
* For your best chance of finding quality products on licence study overseas suppliers from the Internet or advertisements in foreign journals and web sites.
* Search the Internet for licensing opportunities by keying in 'Licensing' or 'Publications', Licence' and whatever other combinations are appropriate.
* n the publishing world 'licence' differs from 'reproduction and resell rights' in that licences normally cost far more and are often restricted in number to protect potential profits for licensees.
* For products carrying reproduction and resell rights look in business opportunities magazines and on business web sites for a huge selection to choose from.
* You can make your product appear unique, the one people buy in preference to anyone else's, by making your offer different.
Do this by:
Repackaging the product, for example by combining several titles with a common theme such as property investment, buying and selling at auction, caring for domestic pets.
Make your advertisements different to your competitors' by testing adverts in new media, inventing new headlines, creating new sales letters, designing more unusual web site promotions.
If you're selling by direct mail or on the Internet, you can repackage the product, create your own sales letter and, most importantly, ensure your list broker gives you a list which has not yet been used for the product you are selling.
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