Continued from page 1
Along
same lines... if you can offer a range of different levels of service you increase your revenue stream and back-end sales. An example of this is Lead Factory (a service offered by my friend Marty Foley). You pay for subscribers to your list. His system generates subscribers by presenting your ezine or list subscribe boxes displayed on high traffic websites. Lead Factory offers a product line in that you can specify
quality and demographics of
leads. You can specify that you only want leads from certain countries, or certain other demographics. You can get single opt-in leads, or for a little more, you can get double opt-in leads. Just by giving customers a few choices, this service comprises a range of products and thus a product line. Satisfied customers, such as myself, use
service over and over generating a nice residual income for
provider. Check out this excellent example: http://williecrawford.com/cgi-bin k.cgi?subs
A service that can be offered in unlimited supply can generally be priced and scaled so that you can also market it through an affiliate program. A service where you manually do most of
work can't generally be marketed successfully through an affiliate program. If you are just selling your time and effort then you generally don't want to share
revenue. Offering a finders' fee or commission is possible with a personalized service but it needs to be "high-end" enough to allow you to charge a premium price. The limiting factor will be
number of hours that you can spend delivering
service.
My personal experience with marketing services is that I offered website and ezine promotion services. I also offered website optimization services. I found all of
above too labor intensive for my personal preference. I also noticed that many relative newbies entered
market and offered cut-rate fees. I priced my services based upon
value I placed upon my time and expertise. I noticed many people enter and leave
website promotion and optimization business - I suspect for
same reasons. Don't get trapped offering a service that under-values your time, effort and expertise.
A service which really can't be duplicated because you are offering "you" is consulting or coaching. If you have, or if you can develop expertise in an area, then this may be
perfect service for you to market. It can be marketed in many different ways depending upon how you define
service. For example, you can market your expert knowledge through telephone consultations, audio and video tapes, and even tele-seminars. As you go from personal consultation to recorded presentations, you go from service back to product but they all tie together. Marketed properly, one will set you up to offer
other as a backend product. For example, short telephone consultations will often show
customer that they need your longer videotaped or audiotaped presentations. Sometimes listening to an audiotape or tele-seminar will show a customer that he need to set up a personal consultation to discuss to his specific situation more in-depth. Your expertise in effect becomes an entire product line.
Creating your own product or service is how you earn
big incomes online... especially if you use
leverage of an affiliate program. Hopefully, this short series gave you
basics of creating your own product or service. You now have a good start for launching your own informational product or service. If you find that you do need one-on-one consultations, I do offer telephone consultations. Details are available at: http://williecrawford.com/consultations.html You can see that I'm not offering you a lot of theory. I'm showing you exactly how I generate and market both products and services :-) Use these examples to examine
feasibility of your own ideas
To your success. Willie Crawford
