I recently went to Graceland with my family. I always thought Elvis Presley was cool, but I had no idea. He was a product creation superstar!
*** Elvis Recorded 82 Albums
*** Elvis had 147 Gold, Platinum or Multi Platinum Singles
*** Elvis performed over 500 Live Concerts
*** Elvis made 33 Movies
(Oh… and in the middle of his career, he was drafted into the Army and served a full term as a United States Soldier in Germany.)
Here is the most amazing fact of all… Elvis died in 1977 at the age of 42 years old.
So he did all of this over the course of only 24 years!
That means that an average year for Elvis Presley included 20 Live Concerts, Recording 4 New Albums (not records – Albums with multiple songs on each one), Making 1 or 2 Movies and all the other stuff involved with being an international superstar… TV appearances, parties, marriages, kids, etc…
At the time of his death, Elvis Presley had sold over 600 Million records. As of January 2010 it is estimated that he has sold 1.3 Billion records. Now, that’s impressive!
Elvis Presley’s estate makes approximately $42 Million Dollars a year as of January 2010. He makes more money 33 years after his death than virtually any of us will make in our entire lifetimes.
When I went to Graceland… I have to admit that it was quite an experience seeing all the fresh flowers sitting at Elvis’s gravesite – from fans all over the world – that had obviously been sent that week. People loved and still love this man. It was also quite amazing seeing where he lived and worked, etc…
The reason that people know his name to this day is that he was a product creator. The day that we went through there happened to be on a Thursday afternoon and it was packed out.
The reason for this is that he created music and movies that touched people. And they are still looking to get a little piece of him to this day…
That’s the Power of Creating your own products.
Reason #1: Control
Control over the Product
- Make sure you only sell the best products
Control over the Customer Service
- Make sure the customer is treated right…
Control over the offer (Big one here…)
- Affiliate offers get changed all the time
o Price drops
o Commission splits changed
o Sales pages get screwed up
o Or the product could be dropped, ignored or discontinued
o With your own products, you have the ability to offer discounts, run sales, bundle offers, etc…
Control the Customer (Biggest reason…)
- They are YOUR customer when its your product
- Lifetime value of a customer is huge if you know what you are doing
- Most expensive thing in this business is acquiring a new customer
- Dan Kennedy says that the only REAL ASSET you have is your customer list/customer base
o Products can be pirated
o Products can be outmoded (Antennas on Roof’s)
o Loyal customer is an asset that can always bring you money
• Special moving sale, birthday sale, etc…
Reason #2: Profits
Another reason to create your own products is that they margins are great! How about 100% margins? Well, not really… But as close as you can get to 100% margins. If you are selling affiliate products, you are probably making 50% and then paying merchant fees on top of that so it nets out to about 40% usually…
With your own products, you make 100% of the sale if you actually initiate the sale. This is powerful for many reasons.
First off, it opens up other marketing channels for you. Marketing channels that make it possible to scale your offer and income. These marketing channels include PPC, Affiliates, Media Buys & Offline marketing. If you are only making 40% of the profits, then in most cases, it closes down these distribution channels for you and relegates you to the free traffic sources.
Free traffic is nice, but in most cases, it is only a trickle of the potential traffic that you could send to your offer if you could do it profitably. That’s what creating your own products is all about. I have a buddy who does $12 Million Dollars a year in sales of a single ebook that he wrote. You’re not gonna do that submitting articles to ezinearticles and BUM marketing…
Here is an example… You are promoting affiliate product X via PPC on Google. The product is an ebook that costs $47.
You are able to get clicks at .25 cents a click through optimizing your PPC campaign. The offer converts at 1% (pretty good for cold traffic) and so it takes 100 visits to make a sale. So, 100 visits X $.25= $25.00 PPC cost per sale.
The affiliate commission is 50% and you have to subtract out the Clickbank fees, so your commission is $22 per sale.
For a net loss of $3.
Now, if it were your product, you would be looking at about $20 profit per sale after fees… If you sell 10 a day via PPC then you are making approximately $6,000 a month NET PROFIT.
(Now, you do have to factor in refunds, which would be usually around 5%, but you are still doing really well)
Reason #3: Personal Brand & Legacy
People still pay to see Elvis… Not his producers. Not the affiliates that sold his records nationwide. They want the King!
You wanna be the King. You need to be the guy(or girl) with the nuts to put yourself out there and on the line. You need to be a leader. People want to be led.
When you create your own products, it opens up lots of other opportunities for you. It can open up opportunities for you to JV with other product creators.
You also get opportunities for speaking engagements and have other monetization options like back end courses, membership sites and coaching.
If you make a name for yourself as a guy who knows what you are doing, then it becomes easy to find other ways to make money too…
Like right now, all the rage is the “Local Marketing” stuff… Well, because of my reputation, I turn down people every month who want to me to consult on their marketing…
And because I sell between 3,000 and 4,000 units of my own products each month, I don’t have to take on small consulting clients…
Its nice to be 100% in control of your own schedule and time. So, I guess the last reason to create your own products is FREEDOM.
Nobody wants to be a slave. It sucked to be a slave. It sucks today to be a wage slave. Some people are high paid slaves – but still slaves. If a brain surgeon takes a year off, he doesn’t make money. If a high paid trial lawyer takes a year off – he doesn’t make anything.
Elvis hasn’t worked in 35 years and made almost 50 million bucks last year.
.
Source:
http://kevinhutto.com/why-product-creation-rocks/