Can You Make Money Marketing A Product You Didn’t Create?

There’s a lot of people who are in agreement that creating your own products should be something most of us look to do if we want to make money online. There’s also a lot of reality that says there might be products that don’t sell as well online as others might.

propag170
Luiz Fernando Reis
via Compfight

For about 2 months I was marketing my latest book on leadership here and on my business site, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google Plus and on LinkedIn. I still market it in a small way with each article I put on LinkedIn.

I’ve made some sales, but nothing like I had hoped. Truthfully, I didn’t expect I’d have great sales, but I thought I might sell more than I did. However, I recognize that leadership is a tough sell to people who don’t see themselves as leaders. Even if it’s more of a book that leads with stories that have recommendations towards leadership, it’s not the type of book the masses will go for.

If you want to sell products off your blog and your own products aren’t getting it done, the next best thing to do is to try to market products made by someone else. However, that comes with its own set of issues.

Who remembers Clickbank? When I was first into blogging that was the big platform all the bloggers were talking about as a place to make money selling either your own product or products of someone else, since there were a lot of things there. I remember going through a large part of the database and having all sorts of problems finding things I thought I could talk about.

One in particular I bought first, liked it, learned something from me, and decided to turn around and market it off this blog for a few years. I wrote a couple of specific blog posts promoting it, and the guy who put it together was a major name in internet marketing at the time. I thought it would be pure gold.

I didn’t sell a single book. That was a shocker to me, but it was also a reality check of sorts. Since I was getting more traffic back then than I do now, it told me that either I was a lousy copywriter or that just because you like something and write about it doesn’t mean you’ll get people to buy it.

I’ve learned a lot about sales though, even if I’m not great at it. Most sales coaches and trainers will say that you have to find a pain point and, if it’s big enough and you can sell a solution, it makes things much easier for you. Notice I didn’t say easy; I said easier.

The one product I sold the most of out of all these years via this blog is called Mailwasher, a product I still use and love. I sold 3 of those because of the post I just linked to because of the pain point of being able to see and eliminate mail you know is spam while it’s still on the server, which protects you from opening up potentially dangerous email on your computer. If you visit that blog and click on the underlined word, you can still check out the product and buy it… as I’m still an affiliate. 😉

Best of Events 2011
eveosblog.de via Compfight

The thing is, I wrote that post in 2009; this is 2015! I haven’t tried marketing much of anything that I didn’t create in years from this blog or any other blog of mine. Truthfully, putting up a banner ad isn’t really marketing if you don’t talk about it or promote it anywhere; it’s just an ad sitting there taking up space. Am I right?

I’ve written some posts about products or books and added a link to it… only to have just that one post out there and never talk about it again. Heck, it wasn’t even until this year that I thought about marketing my blog posts more often in social media, which is a major shame.

So, I figure it’s time to give it another shot, just to see what might happen. I’ve already got a product in mind that I’m going to take a shot at marketing. It’s something I use that’s helped me in more ways than I can imagine, and it took care of my pain point.

First, I’m going to set up a page where people can look at the product, along with having a lot of different choices for it. Second, I’m going to write a blog post about it, extolling its virtues as much as possible. Third, once that post is written I’m going to put it out there quite a few times to make sure as many people as possible see it. Fourth, I’m also going to push the specific link to the product page, since it’ll be on a different website than this blog, to try to drive traffic there as well.

Can you make money from a product you didn’t create? Maybe yes, maybe no. In this case I’m not looking to get rich, but I am looking to make a statement. By the way, since the product also has a relation to health (no, I’m not mentioning it just yet), I’ll probably write about it on my medical blog; might as well expand the market even further right? 🙂

Let’s see what happens. I’ll either have that article up next Monday or Thursday; depends on what else comes up. For some reason I find myself pretty busy over the last few days; let’s see if prosperity is ready to come my way via those laws of attraction I wrote about on Monday.
 

8 thoughts on “Can You Make Money Marketing A Product You Didn’t Create?”

  1. Yes, we can earn money. I think every internet marketer knows about clickbank. Clickbank is one the best platform to Make Money Marketing a others Product.

    1. Suraj, I’d totally have to disagree with you on Clickbank. It might work for marketers who create their own products but it doesn’t work well for the rest of us, as I noted in the article.

  2. I’ve often thought of that idea myself Mitch but to date I’m buggered if I can come up with something that people will pay to join. Heck, I couldn’t even get them to join my free forum for bloggers 😉

    1. Overall I think forums are dying or dead. With most I’ve seen it’s the same people talking to each other all the time, no matter the numbers. That’s just how it seems to go.

  3. I think with the right strategy you can make money from everything, no matter you created it or not. However, it takes the right knowledge about the niche you are aiming at.

    1. Like with everything in life it takes the right knowledge to do something beneficial. Yet, I tend to believe that sometimes it takes more than just knowledge or strategy, especially with certain types of products or programs.

  4. Hey Mitch,

    One of the reasons I moved away from just affiliate marketing was because I was always having to find more products to promote due to the fact that a lot of them became outdated or no longer worked. I wasn’t in like the health niche where you could continue to promote something that would always work.

    I do also believe that the quality of the products that are on Clickbank took a nose dive. I can’t believe that they don’t check the products out more because knowing that they’re associated with their sites and the majority of the ones I’ve run across are pure crap, well that doesn’t way a lot about Clickbank anymore. I’ve steered clear of them for years now although I did rather well back in the day.

    I think you do need to built up a reputation in the niche you’re going to be promoting and as some of the stats prove that I’ve shared over the past few months is that people now have to see your content at least 10 times before they’ll buy. So you have to continuously get in front of that particular person who is searching for what you have to offer that many times. It’s not as easy as some people make it out to be but it is worth it when you start seeing some results. I have faith in you though so I’m going to wish you the best of luck Mitch.

    ~Adrienne

    1. Hey Adrienne! I’m not necessarily sure you need to have built up a reputation in a particular niche specifically. I think you at least need to have built up a reputation of trust, which is what I’m hoping for after so many years online. That and maybe touching a nerve for some people, finding a realization like I did and deciding to be ready to do something about it. 🙂

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