Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Hot Air Businesses: Why you should offer a physical version of your info product
Run a Google search for the keywords 'info product' and take a second to glance over the results on Page 1 and Page 2. There is a bounty of information out there on creating information products. Half of it is worth reading to reaffirm what you already know, lots of common sense marketing stuff, and the other half more or less is a trite attempt at offering an info product about creating and selling info products !
This is the trend. Anyone who has taken a shot at sifting and assimilating the mountains of resources and information about starting a web business and selling digital products can testify to the ridiculous amount of nobody's out there trying to be somebody. The sad truth is that nearly all of them fall far short of the mark.
Here are a couple of screenshots of some marketing attempts from two different info product sites:
The first of these two 'businesses' makes an attempt at offering you a 'plugin' (likely a WordPress plugin but I wasn't about to give up an email to find out). This sort of tactic is ubiquitous and commonplace amongst the plethora of badly-coded and seedy marketing sites out there, all promising way more than what they can offer. I cannot speak to the validity and effectiveness of 'squeezing' your clients down into an email list. I've never bothered to waste my time trying. A good product, particularly an informational product, lasts a lifetime and doesn't require upselling or lifelong updates to support it. A product that requires that sort of support and effort is a product that requires additional and continued work over time. When I think of a good informational product, I imagine a product that is all encompassing of a subject or niche, a product that contains timeless information that doesn't deprecate, a product that contains legitimate, real, and tried-and-trued information and secrets that months or years to gather, and a product that can be sold over and over and over again. This sort of quality you will never find in a downloadable ClickBank product or from some seedy website employing pop-up's begging you to stay on the page, using redirects to offer 'special' or 'limited time-only' offers, and every other trick they can image to squeeze $40 from you for a subpar, low quality product.
A real entrepreneur's first initiative is providing a great product. His second is making money. If you're determined to set out and create information products, do yourself (and more so, your customers) a favor; don't succumb to the enticing low margins of downloadable products. They're not scalable and you cannot grow a business that provides a genuinely high quality product from providing only downloadable products. Go the extra mile and first, research and develop a product that is outrageously superior to all your competitors offers. Take that information and perfect it. Copyright it, patent it; whatever you have to do. Then, produce that information in the form of a disc or DVD and retain sellers rights. Your goal is to dominate your competition. Employ every tactic in your book to do so.
Offering your info products on printed CD or printed DVD units gives you a physical product to ship. Some of you are cringing, considering the mere thought of establishing a USPS account and adding the additional tables to your MYSQL database to capture more than 'First Name', 'Last Name', and 'Email Address' already has you red in the face. Cut the tension, Johnny. It isn't necessary. Shipping a physical product is no more difficult than configuring a locked-content downloadable product system. In my opinion, it's way simpler. You capture addresses, pay <$4 to ship an info product, and batch ship 2-3 days a week. If the product sales incredibly well, you simply hire a fulfillment center and collect checks. A physical product always scales far better than a non-physical, easily pirated, and cheap info product.
If you don't believe me when I say 'easily pirated' then do this. I'm sure some of you reading this are a member of the guilty few running purely digital info product businesses. Go to google. Enter this search string, replacing 'nameofinfoproduct' with the name of any popular info product or even your own info product. Chances are good that someone has already stolen it and put it up for free public sharing. Try it out:
Search in google: site:mediafire.com 'nameofinfoproduct' or try this one site:4shared.com 'nameofinfoproduct'. Catching my drift?
Physical info products shipped on encrypted and printed cd's aren't as easy to pirate or at the very least provide a better layer of protection than immediately downloadable (and immediately uploadable, afterword) digital products. CD printing is cheap. You can get upwards of 500 cd's printed for around $200 dollars and sell each one at a much higher margin. Offer your info product with a spiral-bound guide, workbook, or accompanying printed product and you've got a product that is automatically superior to digital products. DVD printing is no different; it's cheap and easily produced. A video product is even more timeless.
My idea of a perfect info product looks like this:
Printed CD Product + 35-100 page accompanying book or other printed paper product + pocket-sized reference cards with highly valuable information printed on index cards and laminated for storage in a front or back pocket.
Printed DVD Product - 1-5 DVD's professionally produced and edited, not cheesy or gimmicky, with seriously applicable or actionable information along with a printed paper product.
I use We Print Discs for all my disc printing. They're cheap and offer the fastest turn around time. The interface is simple and they have templates that are easy to add your custom printed disc artwork to. Check them out at http://ping.fm/Mp70S
(I do not get a commission or affiliate payment for recommending them, I legitimately use their services, and they do have a 48-lead time.)
Choosing to sell a physical info product can make all the difference in your business. I recommend you test the idea and monitor the response. Testing is always a good option. Otherwise, I wish you luck! If you want to see some my personal results with physical versus digital, leave a comment and I'll correspond with you by email.
This is the trend. Anyone who has taken a shot at sifting and assimilating the mountains of resources and information about starting a web business and selling digital products can testify to the ridiculous amount of nobody's out there trying to be somebody. The sad truth is that nearly all of them fall far short of the mark.
Here are a couple of screenshots of some marketing attempts from two different info product sites:
The first of these two 'businesses' makes an attempt at offering you a 'plugin' (likely a WordPress plugin but I wasn't about to give up an email to find out). This sort of tactic is ubiquitous and commonplace amongst the plethora of badly-coded and seedy marketing sites out there, all promising way more than what they can offer. I cannot speak to the validity and effectiveness of 'squeezing' your clients down into an email list. I've never bothered to waste my time trying. A good product, particularly an informational product, lasts a lifetime and doesn't require upselling or lifelong updates to support it. A product that requires that sort of support and effort is a product that requires additional and continued work over time. When I think of a good informational product, I imagine a product that is all encompassing of a subject or niche, a product that contains timeless information that doesn't deprecate, a product that contains legitimate, real, and tried-and-trued information and secrets that months or years to gather, and a product that can be sold over and over and over again. This sort of quality you will never find in a downloadable ClickBank product or from some seedy website employing pop-up's begging you to stay on the page, using redirects to offer 'special' or 'limited time-only' offers, and every other trick they can image to squeeze $40 from you for a subpar, low quality product.
A real entrepreneur's first initiative is providing a great product. His second is making money. If you're determined to set out and create information products, do yourself (and more so, your customers) a favor; don't succumb to the enticing low margins of downloadable products. They're not scalable and you cannot grow a business that provides a genuinely high quality product from providing only downloadable products. Go the extra mile and first, research and develop a product that is outrageously superior to all your competitors offers. Take that information and perfect it. Copyright it, patent it; whatever you have to do. Then, produce that information in the form of a disc or DVD and retain sellers rights. Your goal is to dominate your competition. Employ every tactic in your book to do so.
Offering your info products on printed CD or printed DVD units gives you a physical product to ship. Some of you are cringing, considering the mere thought of establishing a USPS account and adding the additional tables to your MYSQL database to capture more than 'First Name', 'Last Name', and 'Email Address' already has you red in the face. Cut the tension, Johnny. It isn't necessary. Shipping a physical product is no more difficult than configuring a locked-content downloadable product system. In my opinion, it's way simpler. You capture addresses, pay <$4 to ship an info product, and batch ship 2-3 days a week. If the product sales incredibly well, you simply hire a fulfillment center and collect checks. A physical product always scales far better than a non-physical, easily pirated, and cheap info product.
If you don't believe me when I say 'easily pirated' then do this. I'm sure some of you reading this are a member of the guilty few running purely digital info product businesses. Go to google. Enter this search string, replacing 'nameofinfoproduct' with the name of any popular info product or even your own info product. Chances are good that someone has already stolen it and put it up for free public sharing. Try it out:
Search in google: site:mediafire.com 'nameofinfoproduct' or try this one site:4shared.com 'nameofinfoproduct'. Catching my drift?
Physical info products shipped on encrypted and printed cd's aren't as easy to pirate or at the very least provide a better layer of protection than immediately downloadable (and immediately uploadable, afterword) digital products. CD printing is cheap. You can get upwards of 500 cd's printed for around $200 dollars and sell each one at a much higher margin. Offer your info product with a spiral-bound guide, workbook, or accompanying printed product and you've got a product that is automatically superior to digital products. DVD printing is no different; it's cheap and easily produced. A video product is even more timeless.
My idea of a perfect info product looks like this:
Printed CD Product + 35-100 page accompanying book or other printed paper product + pocket-sized reference cards with highly valuable information printed on index cards and laminated for storage in a front or back pocket.
Printed DVD Product - 1-5 DVD's professionally produced and edited, not cheesy or gimmicky, with seriously applicable or actionable information along with a printed paper product.
I use We Print Discs for all my disc printing. They're cheap and offer the fastest turn around time. The interface is simple and they have templates that are easy to add your custom printed disc artwork to. Check them out at http://ping.fm/Mp70S
(I do not get a commission or affiliate payment for recommending them, I legitimately use their services, and they do have a 48-lead time.)
Choosing to sell a physical info product can make all the difference in your business. I recommend you test the idea and monitor the response. Testing is always a good option. Otherwise, I wish you luck! If you want to see some my personal results with physical versus digital, leave a comment and I'll correspond with you by email.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
Get 100 Full Color Cd's for your band for $45.00.
Hey guys,
If you're in a band and you need demos or your full-length printed and packaged quickly, I'll walk you through how to place an order with us and have it packaged and shrink wrapped in a slim cardboard double-sided sleeve.
Having a great demo is the key to touring success. If you put on a good show, then your product needs to speak the volume. We can print full-color, high quality discs with your artwork, and we can do it dirt cheap.
Here's how to get 100 full-color CD's for $45.00.
Start by going here: We Print Discs
Watch or skip the video. If you have your own artwork, click this center square:
This next screen is where you will add your artwork. There are a multitude of programs out there created specifically for creating CD and Disc artwork, so I'm not going to cover that and I'm going to assume you already have your artwork ready to go:
You must be logged into your WePrintDiscs account to proceed. If you're logged in and the buttons are active, click on "Choose File" and select your disc artwork file from the "Browse" window that opens up. Once you've selected it, hit "Open" and then click "Upload!" We Print Discs will return your artwork for three months so that you can return and create a new order with ease.
Once your artwork has uploaded, click on the smaller image located under "Artwork Gallery." The image will materialize to the right under "File Details" where you will see a preview of the artwork relative to the disc template. (Disc templates are available here at the bottom of our homepage: http://www.weprintdiscs.com/index.php)
Here's a project located in the cart:
Click "Checkout" and then you'll be taken to the payment page to finalize the order.
There you have it! 100 Full Color CD's for your band, photography portfolio, ministry video, or instructional video and at a cost of less than a CD drive!
Go forth and have awesome discs.
If you're in a band and you need demos or your full-length printed and packaged quickly, I'll walk you through how to place an order with us and have it packaged and shrink wrapped in a slim cardboard double-sided sleeve.
Having a great demo is the key to touring success. If you put on a good show, then your product needs to speak the volume. We can print full-color, high quality discs with your artwork, and we can do it dirt cheap.
Here's how to get 100 full-color CD's for $45.00.
Start by going here: We Print Discs
Watch or skip the video. If you have your own artwork, click this center square:
This is the next screen you'll see:
Here, you'll want to select your media type (CD) and choose a quantity. For bands or musicians, I recommend 250 to start but 100 will get you the $45 price tag for full color discs.
Choose "Full Color" and click "Continue"
This next screen is where you will add your artwork. There are a multitude of programs out there created specifically for creating CD and Disc artwork, so I'm not going to cover that and I'm going to assume you already have your artwork ready to go:
You must be logged into your WePrintDiscs account to proceed. If you're logged in and the buttons are active, click on "Choose File" and select your disc artwork file from the "Browse" window that opens up. Once you've selected it, hit "Open" and then click "Upload!" We Print Discs will return your artwork for three months so that you can return and create a new order with ease.
Once your artwork has uploaded, click on the smaller image located under "Artwork Gallery." The image will materialize to the right under "File Details" where you will see a preview of the artwork relative to the disc template. (Disc templates are available here at the bottom of our homepage: http://www.weprintdiscs.com/index.php)
Click continue and give your project a title. Then, click "Add to Cart" to place your project in the cart.
Here's a project located in the cart:
Click "Checkout" and then you'll be taken to the payment page to finalize the order.
There you have it! 100 Full Color CD's for your band, photography portfolio, ministry video, or instructional video and at a cost of less than a CD drive!
Go forth and have awesome discs.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Upcoming promotions through We Print Discs
Bonjour tout le monde!
In the coming weeks, American Recordable Media and our imprint company, We Print Discs, will be making improvements to our site by adding the promotional video from our previous post, creating new discount codes made available to new clients only, and more.
If you've not taken a look at WePrintDiscs, here's a snapshot of our current front-end:
If you're a photographer, musician or band, in the medical or manufacturing industry, a motivational speaker, or in any other profession that utilizes consumable media such as CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Ray, We Print Discs can get your content, photographers, business reports, instructional courses, and more onto a disc and looking great.
In the coming weeks, American Recordable Media and our imprint company, We Print Discs, will be making improvements to our site by adding the promotional video from our previous post, creating new discount codes made available to new clients only, and more.
If you've not taken a look at WePrintDiscs, here's a snapshot of our current front-end:
Everything is easy to navigate, orders are streamlined and we do our best to get our clients the information they need right up front.
If you're a musician or in a band and you're printing your own demos and discs from a desktop printer, let me do some math for you.
Suppose a spindle of 50 CD-Rs costs roughly $25 or .50 cents per disc. Naturally, you must purchase the printable variety, so at retail, you're paying closer to $30 per spindle.
So far, that's .60 cents per disc. Now the ink. Ink for most inkjet printers costs around $50 for a black and tri-color cartridge. Add in another $25 for cases for each disc, $8 for a ream of paper for inserts, $15 if you want photo quality inserts (and you do), and you're finally ready to print 50 discs at a cost of approximately $120 dollars.
So, $120 dollars divided by 50 discs for a cost of $2.4 per disc. Outrageous.
At We Print Discs, we can create 100 full-color discs for you at a cost of .37 cents PER disc. We know that's competitive.
If you're a photographer, musician or band, in the medical or manufacturing industry, a motivational speaker, or in any other profession that utilizes consumable media such as CDs, DVDs, or Blu-Ray, We Print Discs can get your content, photographers, business reports, instructional courses, and more onto a disc and looking great.
Check us out here on these other channels:
Website: http://www.weprintdiscs.com
Twitter: @recordablemedia
Facebook: We Print Discs
LinkedIn: American Recordable Media
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
We Print Discs Promo Video
WePrintDiscs.com offers full color high resolution disc printing to accommodate the needs of many industries, professionals, artists, and groups alike.
We can provide quantities as low as 100 discs or large-scale high quantity runs for corporations, events, colleges, and more. Our primary aim is to create your media products for you cheaper than you will pay elsewhere and definitely cheaper than you could do on your own.
We offer end-to-end solutions including product, packaging, printing, and inserts. You supply your artwork and we handle the rest. We have a huge variety of media, cases, packaging options, and printing. We can print on DVD for instructional videos, company reports, training videos, events, showcases, documentaries, and anything else you can image. We also offer Blu-Ray discs and the same printing quality on Blu-Ray discs as any of our other quality products.
We're a US-based company with locations in Lexington, KY and Los Angeles, CA. We offer our services all over the world for countless industries, including the medical field, musicians, independent record labels, recording studios, bands, photographers, businesses, events, colleges, mail promotions, churches and ministry groups, motivational speakers, online courses, educators, and more.
Whatever you need on a disc, we can do it for you. Check out our super nifty promo video here:
If you want to make your next project really soar, let us put your content on a disc. Monthly specials and more information can be found here: http://www.weprintdiscs.com
Connect with us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/American-Recordable-Media/112411562194704?sk=wall
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/RecordableMedia
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmericanRecordable
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/2330686?trk=tyah
We can provide quantities as low as 100 discs or large-scale high quantity runs for corporations, events, colleges, and more. Our primary aim is to create your media products for you cheaper than you will pay elsewhere and definitely cheaper than you could do on your own.
We offer end-to-end solutions including product, packaging, printing, and inserts. You supply your artwork and we handle the rest. We have a huge variety of media, cases, packaging options, and printing. We can print on DVD for instructional videos, company reports, training videos, events, showcases, documentaries, and anything else you can image. We also offer Blu-Ray discs and the same printing quality on Blu-Ray discs as any of our other quality products.
We're a US-based company with locations in Lexington, KY and Los Angeles, CA. We offer our services all over the world for countless industries, including the medical field, musicians, independent record labels, recording studios, bands, photographers, businesses, events, colleges, mail promotions, churches and ministry groups, motivational speakers, online courses, educators, and more.
Whatever you need on a disc, we can do it for you. Check out our super nifty promo video here:
If you want to make your next project really soar, let us put your content on a disc. Monthly specials and more information can be found here: http://www.weprintdiscs.com
Connect with us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/American-Recordable-Media/112411562194704?sk=wall
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/RecordableMedia
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/AmericanRecordable
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/2330686?trk=tyah
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