How To Make More Money From Your Digital Downloads
If you have a lot of digital products and they are selling for peanuts on the Internet you can make more money by burning the products to a CD and selling them on and offline. It is not difficult; information products were selling on floppy discs and CDs long before digital downloads became popular and will continue to sell because many buyers prefer physical to virtual products.
Along with that preference is the fact that you can command a much higher price for your physical products and buyers are happy to pay it. Another aspect is that because it is a bit more difficult and takes more time to deal with a physical product sale you will have less competition than you have on the Internet with easy, instant digital download sellers.
How To Produce Your CD
First of all you should plan the theme of your CD and choose a title. For instance you might own a large collection of ebooks about petcare. Burn your chosen products to the CD and create an index or catalogue with active links to enable the buyers to easily find what they want. You will need CD cataloguing software, but there are various free and paid for versions on the Internet. It is not totally necessary to add a catalogue, but it will make your product a bit more professional and give added perceived value.
The sweet part would be your instruction file. Apart from implicit instructions you can suggest hosting, domain name, autoresponder companies or any other products that you are affiliated to. If your product is good and your customer is happy with it and your service there is a good chance that they may follow your recommendations and earn you some backend sales.
You could stop at that and market your new product but the smart way to sell information CDs is to make a more professional package. You can get free software on the Internet to design smart looking CD labels and covers that will impress your customers far more than a cheap looking blank CD jewel cases.
Extra Income Earning Options
As you have a physical product you can include printed details of more products that you have on offer within your package. You can also follow up with mailshots whenever you create a new product. If you create several products an idea is to produce an attractive little booklet, but always add at least one special offer. Or you could put your offers on a separate CD with links to your website and perhaps a few free products to ensure that they retain the CD and check it out at least once. You could choose to email your customers instead, but a mailshot is more likely to be opened and read than an email in this age of spam.
To increase the sales value of your product you could offer resell rights and add a sales page for your customers to use on the Internet. You could also build an Adsense/Amazon website for the digital products and advertise it as free with the collection of ebooks. A good idea for those websites would be to add RSS feeds to blogs or article directories to give the sites regularly updated content and potentially more traffic. Another addition to the resell package could be a personalised master copy of a sales leaflet for offline advertising. With all of those extras you could charge more for the resell rights either in the initial sale or offer the resell rights at extra cost within the product package. The extras should be on a separate CD however you offer the resell rights.
Another alternative if you want to retain control of the product is to offer commission on sales that your customer makes with the promotion tools that you freely provide. Ideally sales should come to you not commission agents to enable a speedier delivery time and better customer service. Agents can be paid either immediately or monthly, whichever you feel is more convenient.
Sales Outlets For Your Products
You can sell your products on the Internet either on your own sites or on auction sites. As eBay has banned digital product auctions your physical product will have less competition and you can charge far more than the previously low priced huge digital packages that could be found there.
You can advertise in offline publications suited to your niche. If you use classified ads you should offer details and not ask for money in your advertisement. When you get a request for details reply quickly, use first class mail and a decent white envelope. Your details should reflect the asking price of your product i.e. a one sided A4 page for products up to the value of ?20 and for up to ?50 2 pages minimum. If you are asking more than that then a longer sales letter usually works better. It does no harm to pop a leaflet in with a few special offers.
The smallest ad that I would ask for money off the page is A5, but if you are unsure check out the regular ads in your chosen publications to see if they are asking for money off the page and how much they are asking in comparison to the ad size. For instance a 2 inch ad may sell a ?10 product off the page but it is unlikely to sell an ?100 product.
You can buy mailing lists for your niche and send out targeted mailshots, but once you have an established customer base they will prove to be the most responsive. Second class postage is fine for mailshots and always use good white envelopes.
In the UK the distance selling law states that a product must be deemed to be worth the asking price. Wherever you live your product should have a high enough quality to make your customers feel as if their money has been well spent. As information product CDs cost little to produce and mailing costs are not that high you should be able to make a very good profit on each sale.
Post And Packaging
For CDs and DVDs always use padded envelopes to protect them from damage. If you are supplying personalised copies of sales leaflets for your customers use a large hardbacked envelope. You can cut your costs for stationary and CDs by buying in bulk. I use a company that offers a same day service if I order before noon, delivery costs are free if I spend over ?30 excluding Vat. I can order on the Internet or by telephone.
First class postage should always be used to send the products out to your customers. Prompt and efficient service is remembered and increases the likelihood of your customers buying from you again. You could ask for your customers to cover postage costs on your website or in online auctions, but if your profit margin is large enough it will give you an edge over your competition to offer free postage. I personally would only add postage costs for overseas sales and that would depend upon how much it would cost as opposed to profit.
Branding Your Product
Your product could be a single, double or collection of several CDs. The larger the collection the higher the asking price. Or you could start with one product and if you choose the title well you could release a series of information CDs over time. As I used the example of pet care previously I’ll use it again to show you what I mean.
Your first information CD could be called ‘The Ultimate Collection Of Pet Care Information’, Your next CD ‘The Ultimate Collection Of Pet Care Information II’ and so on. Or you could narrow the topic and release ‘The Ultimate Collection Of Dog Care Information’ as a follow up. You could change niches altogether and publish ‘The Ultimate Collection Of Organic Recipes’. ‘The Ultimate Collection’ would be your recognisable brand and identify your products with your company.
Outsourcing
If you have a high volume of sales you could outsource the work. There are fulfilment companies with sites on the Internet who will produce your CDs and mail them out for you. Or if you want more control you can get your CDs burned in bulk, have them delivered to you and either mail them out yourself or hire a friend, neighbour or member of your family to help you.
There are lots of different options for the information CD business and if you do things right there is plenty of money to be made.
Patricia has been running her own business on and offline for over 10 years and is an expert in the information publishing field. She writes for the Resell rights blog and owns Eprofits Centre where you can get free digital downloads.
