Repurpose Content to Maximize Profits

If you listen to any Internet marketing guru, you’ll hear them say that you must create a sales funnel to gain maximum profits. What is a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is the process by which you acquire pre-qualified subscribers, lead them through a series of sales options with increasing value at each step in order to gain a lifetime customer with repeat sales.

I digress, sales funnel is the topic of an upcoming eBook that I’m working on right now. Stay tuned for more details.

In this post, I want to introduce the concept of repurposing your content to create high value information products. I use the acronym T.E.R.M. to keep me focused on repackaging my existing content.

Here’s what T.E.R.M. stands for:

T – Tangible or physical products

E – eBooks

R – Reports or small reports

M – Membership sites

Tangible Products: These are physical products that you ship to your customers as versus downloadable information products. Typically, these are CDs, DVDs or even a printed copy of your eBook. The perception is that a tangible product costs more to produce and therefore people are willing to pay more for them.

Let’s say you have written a series of articles on creating content, finding buyers and marketing eBooks for profits. You can repurpose those articles into a step-by-step home study course with accompanying audio or videos to demonstrate the steps. Such a course would lend itself to being put on a CD or DVD and selling it at $97 to $147 as compared to a $17 ~ $27 eBook.

One source that I have found that takes all the hassles out of manufacturing, printing, fulfilling orders and shipping CDs/DVDs is Kunaki. They’ll take your content and produce full-color, glossy, fully assembled, cellophane-wrapped, retail-ready products with free UPC bar codes. You can order from 1 to 300 CDs or DVDs, there are no minimum quantities and they’ll drop-ship to any address. Just-in-time production means it is completely risk-free and zero warehousing cost for you.

While tangible products do command a higher price, they do have an inherent drawback. Your customers have to wait for them to be shipped. They lack the immediate gratification of downloadable products.

eBooks: You are probably very familiar with eBooks if you’ve been an infopreneur for any length of time. They can be anywhere from 30 to over 100 pages but usually are around 45 to 60 pages. The topics are widespread and cater to different niches. eBooks can provide more detailed information than a short report and your customers can print them on their desktop printers to get the same tactile feel as a printed book.

eBooks can be sold at a higher price point than shorter reports and offer instant gratification because they are downloadable.

You can bulk up the value of eBooks by offering related videos or audios that can be used as upsells to your primary product (see Upsell Profits Blueprint).

Look at my information products catalog for more examples of eBooks I’m selling at various price points.

Reports: Small reports are great as starter products. There are several reasons for them being so popular and effective.

• They are sold at lower prices, typically $7 to $15 making them easier on the pocketbooks for your customers
• Usually 10 to 20 pages long making them quicker to produce than a full-blown eBook. NOTE: sometimes a small report can be as large as an eBook
• You can concentrate on a single topic because of their brevity
• A larger topic can be broken up into a series of small reports that lends itself to repeat sales and/or bundled at a higher price point than a single small report

Here are three examples of small report from my Small Reports Vault:

1. The Solopreneur’s Guide to Marketing with Press Releases
2. Fast Web Profits Explained
3. 10 Proven Ways To Get More Traffic With Article Marketing

Membership sites: This is the Holy Grail for all online marketers for the simple reason that they provide recurring income. Instead of one-time sales, subscribers pay you monthly fees. You create the content once and keep earning from it continuously.

Sounds easy, right? Yes, the membership is a great business model but there are two major hurdles that tend to trip up many new Internet marketers. They are:

• Creating new content every month or week
• Constantly finding new members to replace the ones that drop out (typically after 3 months)

Membership sites can be built for different niches and can have different formats. For example, you could automatically (use an autoresponder) deliver small reports or courses to your subscribers every week, host a forum where members participate and you moderate, offer hands-on training via live webinars or videos that are accessible only to paid subscribers. The possibilities are truly endless.

Learn how to set up your own profitable membership site in 48 hour or less with Jimmy D. Brown’s membernaire.com.

Make sure you study your niche before deciding a format or formats that will work best for your audience.

What content format has been the most successful for you? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.