Create A Product To Sell Online On Your Own Website

Today is the day of the digital age. We are living in a time with untold possibilities at our finger tips and all we do is complain and moan. How crazy is that! The truth is, the general public do not know how to make money or realise what possibilities there are all around us.  That’s why I wrote this post looking at ways to create a product and sell it online!

Everyone wants more money, let’s be brutally honest about it. OK, that’s not true, maybe the Queen doesn’t sit there thinking she needs some extra cash for the gas meter! But in general, the rest of us would like more.  The big problem is that we don’t do anything about it. It isn’t that there are no ways to make money out there for us, there are plenty. Even in this slowed down economy and its double dip recession, there are ways to make money.

Making money online has opened the flood gates for everyone. It is all about scalability in many ways. In the days of my Father’s shop, he could only sell products to people in the area. Maybe he would get a few passing customers or people who were visiting friends in the area, but they were not regular customers. His best customers were those that lived nearby. Sadly, eventually all these customers ended up going to the supermarkets when they moved into town.

They could only sell products that he bought from the wholesalers. He would charge a small percentage on top of the price that he bought it for, and that was how he earned his money. They couldn’t make the chocolate bars or the tins of beans. He could only charge a few extra pennies on each item, otherwise he would price himself out of the market with customers choosing the other shops over him. Those days were HARD!

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be that hard anymore!  Check out these ideas that you can use to create a product of your own to sell online or on your website/blog.

Sell Your Own Music

We have musicians selling music worldwide thanks to MP3 downloads without a record label, something we would never have been able to do 20 years ago. CDs can be printed at home or printed online by 3rd party companies like Amazon. MP3s can be sold via your own website or sites like Tunecore and iTunes.

If you like making music, it is easy to create, upload and sell an MP3 online these days. There are no manufacturing or pressing costs, no postage or sleeve printing costs either. It is simply a downloadable item.

Now I like my music. There is a whole world wide web to explore where we can connect to millions of other music fans, musicians, up and coming bands, etc. Even a non-popular ‘Acid-Techno’ track can be liked by thousands worldwide! 1 MP3 track sold at a £1 to 10,000 people is? That’s right, £10,000! Imagine having an email list where you have several hundred thousand fans, eagerly waiting for new tracks.

If you make your own music, why not rip your own MP3 music files and create a product that you can sell to music lovers!

Write An eBook

The same principle applies to eBooks. There is so much potential for eBooks, as they cover every topic imaginable. Even an eBook on ‘How to Sell an Acid-Techno track to 10,000 People for £1’ could sell from a music website. The great thing about eBooks is that they can easily be made from home. 20 years ago we had to write on a type writer, send it off to a publishing house and hope for the best.

Now we can type away on a laptop while sat on a sunny beach or drinking coffee at the local coffee house (Take a bow J.K.Rowling) and it is instantly saved onto a hard drive. We can edit it and save many versions at the click of a button. We can save it as a PDF file and email it to anyone, anywhere in the world.

In a traditional printed book the images would have had to be bought from a photographer who was contracted in to do the job. The marketing of the book was done in newspapers and on TV at a high cost.

Now we can do it all online! Photos can be bought from places like iStockphoto, taken by photographers based anywhere in the world. You can even find copyright free images on sites like Flickr. Graphic design can be done and arranged online, no posting of artwork or images they can all be emailed.

You are reading this on a computer, so open up your word processor and create a product eBook that you can sell.  This can either be on sites like Amazon, on your own site or even both!

Check out our ‘How To Make Money Writing An eBook‘ post for more info.

Conduct Interviews

One of the most popular products, that has helped get many internet marketers on their way to financial freedom, is the interview. Simply using free recording software like Audacity, interviews can be arranged and recorded over the phone or Skype, then turned into MP3s and sold as a collection of podcasts or audio CDS.

Daniel Wagner went to an internet marketers seminar/summit armed with a digital camera on a tripod and a digital microphone, he interviewed the speakers for 30 minutes to an hour and created a master mind website.  He used these videos to create a product selling the set of interviews. They can be on DVDs, again which can easily be burnt at home or stored online, and accessed via a link once paid for.

Design Your Own Products

There are public domain materials like books and music than can be made into products that can be sold on sites like eBay and Amazon. Images can be made into clothing and sold on eBay or CafePress.

Some cartoonists and graphic designers make hundreds of thousands of pounds selling their own designed T-Shirts from 3rd party printing sites like CafePress. They do not screen print their own products, all they do is create the design, market their site and let CafePress do the rest. They receive a cheque each month for the remainder of the takings once CafePress have taken out their cut.

Before you go thinking that this sounds hard, I did an experiment where I used several photos of graffiti characters and using the free paint art package that comes with PCs. I added some text and created several designs that I simply uploaded to Cafepress. After that, they were available to buy online on T-Shirts.

For people who like to draw you can draw your design on paper and then scan the image into your computer or buy a graphics tablet that acts like a pencil and paper, but transfers the image to an arts package on your computer. I use the free software Paint.NET

You just need a bit of creativity to do well here.  If you can think up a design and create a product that people like, then you could make money online!

It’s Easier Than You Think To Create A Product!

Whether it’s; DVDs, books, CDs, eBooks, MP3s, T-Shirts, etc. we can create a product that can be sold to people worldwide, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 day a year! My father could only make money during the time his shop was open, he could only make profit on any physical item he had, once it had gone, it needed replacing and he could only sell to people in the local area.

MP3s and PDF files do not run out when several are bought, they are like amoebas, they split and replicate, giving a constant supply from the one source.

When you look at the success of TV show & Film series ‘Jackass’, where a gang of halfwits film themselves doing outrageous things with hand held cameras, you can get an idea of what is possible. You only have to look up ‘Bum Fights’ to see what success can come from making controversial videos with a cheap hand held camera.

Obviously, you may think that to make good videos you require a good camera. To make music you need good music software/equipment and music skill (I say skill, I cannot play a keyboard but I have produced music and sold some tracks online). To write a good book you need good writing skills. But we have ALL of these things at hand to a lesser degree.

The video on my smart phone is exceptional, it can create good enough videos to start something now. There are many books that are written to imitate modern life, most of us can do that. Spelling is no longer an issue with MS Word having a spell checker and many online dictionaries available. (Google Chrome also has an inbuilt spell checker)

I’ve loosely covered only some of the things that can be done from home online to make money. If you find it too hard to create a product online, then you might be suited for more admin style roles.

There Is Always Admin Work

There are many admin jobs out there that people will pay you to do, like replying and deleting emails for people. An online personal assistant is known as VA (virtual assistant). I know it can be low paid work sometimes as you are competing against people in countries with low economies like the Philippines.

Could you be a virtual assistant, doing some online admin while watching your favourite soap opera? Once the day job is over you could spend an hour or two a week writing newsletters for a website or do some blog commenting for a site (I do mean proper helpful thought out commenting and not spam linking).

Go to places like ODesk, VWorker, Fiverr, PeoplePerHour or Elance and sign up as a worker, or even pop over to Gumtree and set up a free advert offering your services.

We have plenty of time in reality to earn extra pounds here and there online. So if you are finding things a bit tough, maybe you should be looking towards the internet for that second income. Wouldn’t you rather work from the comfort of your own home than having to go out to another job just as one finishes?

But what do you think?  Have you managed to create a product and sell it online?  Have you got any other product ideas that you think would work?  If so, let us know by leaving a comment below!