How To Make Money on the Internet Without Creating Your Own

Milana Nastetskaya Writing a book is an effort that not everyone takes pleasure
in. Creating software takes special skills and patience. If
you can't write and can't program, does it mean you can't
start an online business? Absolutely not.

Luckily, there is a wonderful thing called Reprint Rights.
You don't have to write a word - just purchase the resell
rights to someone else's work and start an instant business.

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What are Reprint Rights?
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I first learned about reprint rights from Ken Evoy's "Make

Your Knowledge Sell" and thought, "what an amazing concept!"
You don't have to know how to write, or spend months creating
a quality product. You can just buy the rights to it and keep
100% of the profits, without paying any royalties or
reporting your sales figures to anyone.

Compared to any other business, launching an information
selling company has a very low start up cost. The key is to
choose a product that fits your interests, is of high quality
and in demand. The rest will be up to your desire to succeed
and persistence.

If you already have a product to sell, find a product with
reprint rights that would make a good bonus, addition,
or a back-end for your business. For example, if you are
selling a $10 report about successful golf playing, a good
back-end product could be titled "Advanced Techniques of the
World's Best Golf Players" priced at $50 or higher (forgive
me if I am way off - I know nothing about golf ;-).

You could also work backwards - first find a good product you
want to purchase the rights to, then write a report that would
serve as an introduction/sales letter to it. Then give it
away or sell it at a low price. That's what I did with my
"First Business Web Site in 10 days!". After I finished
writing it, I created a short version of this book (and turned
a 120 pages manual into a small 15-page book) and started
giving it away on my web site under a different title ("The
Absolute Beginner's Guide To Starting a Web Site").

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How to make money with a product you purchased the rights to
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Many people buy rights to a product but never do anything to
make it a success. You MUST treat it as your own product to
make it profitable.

- First, choose a quality product (purchase a copy for yourself
first to review) that fits into your interests, or your
existing web site theme

- Make sure you are absolutely impressed with it so you could
write a great ad copy (though many products already come with a
sample sales copy)

- Create a simple web site using an easy-to-use web editor

- Find a way to take payments online (many people use
inexpensive services of ClickBank, iBill, and OrderButton)

- Promote it (subscribe to free marketing e-zines and
experiment to find the most effective ways to advertise it)

While you don't have to create a product (what a great
shortcut!) you still have to promote it to sell. There is
plenty of free publications and forums on the Internet that
can teach you how to do it, if you can devote 1-2 hours each
day until the desired level of income is reached.

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Buying cheap rights vrs. Expensive
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The first time I purchased resell rights, I could only afford
a $49.95 package. The deal looked great! I was getting over
25 books to own and resell as my own. Only a few weeks later
did I realize that everyone and their dog are selling the same
books. The products were still great and if you purchase them
for the sake of learning business and online marketing, it's
a bargain. After purchasing this package I sold it to at least
10 happy customers, thus making $450.00 on a $49.95 investment.

To build a successful business reselling these books, though,
would be very difficult since hundreds of other people are
selling it on their web sites.

Yes, $49.95 is very affordable to anyone who wants to start
an online business. But the cheaper the reprint rights are,
the more people are able to afford them, thus you will have
more competitors selling the same product. So if you find the
price is a bit steep, think of the advantages: not every
average "joe" who might not even be serious about business
will purchase these rights. And if you do, you will have only a
few competitors and your marketing efforts will pay off much
better.

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Where to find products with reprint rights
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Many authors, especially new ones, have never thought of
offering resell rights to their products. If you find a product
that you like and want to resell, contact the author and make
him or her an offer. Make sure it is a high quality product
that you would want to purchase for yourself. For example, I
was contacted several times by my past customers who so much
liked my products that they wanted to own the rights to it.
This is a great indicator that you will succeed selling this
product: you read it, you liked it, you know it, you can write
a great sales copy to sell it from your heart.

One other good way to find reprint rights to quality products
is by going to a Search Engine and typing a word or a phrase
on a subject you want to focus on. When browsing through
results, pick out web sites that sell a product you are
interested in AND have low traffic. Use Alexa (free from
alexa.com) to find out each site's traffic rating, which is a
good indicator of how the site is doing. Webmasters of low
traffic sites might sell reprint rights to their products
cheaper than any popular site.

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Important questions to ask before purchasing reprint rights
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I am not going to call myself an expert on reprint rights. But
after selling almost a dozen rights to three of my products, I
learned a lot about the subject. Here are the questions you
should ask before you decide on a product to purchase:

1. How many other people will be allowed to sell this product?
In other words, will there be a limit to how many resell
rights are available? A standard number for information
products is 20 resellers. More than that might create market
saturation and too much competition between the resellers.
Also, every marketing strategy that you implement might be
"borrowed" by your competitors and hurt your sales.

2. How many copies of this product have been sold?
The answer will simply tell you if this product has been
popular and selling well. While it is difficult to say what
number of sold copies will qualify a product as "popular",
remember that even if it is a brand new product (e.g. my
oldest book is only 7 months old) it can still be a winner.
The author may be just entering the arena and is not known on
the Internet yet, or hasn't been putting enough effort to
create steady sales. For example, as soon as I was done with
my 1st product, I immediately started creating my 2nd one
which turned in fact to be two more new products - I know,
tell me I need to focus :-) - so I didn't have time to get
out and actively promote my 1st book.

3. Are you allowed to modify the product and/or reproduce it
in a different format? Most e-books are made into an
executable (EXE) or an Acrobat Reader (PDF) file format. But
if you want to put this product on a CD, or publish it as a
hard copy, you might need a special permission from the author
first. Ask if you are limited to a certain format or are you
free to make it into anything you wish.

4. Can you sell the reprint rights to this book?
Many products out there include the right to resell the rights.
In other words, you pay $49.95 for a book, then turn around
and sell this book to someone else. That someone else can do
the same thing, and so on. As you understand, this technique
will reach market saturation very fast (the rights are
affordable and you can resell them, too).

But many products of high quality do not include the right to
resell the rights. You need to purchase such rights, called
Master Reprint Rights, separately at a higher price. While it
is not affordable to everyone, it certainly limits the number
of resellers to only the serious ones.

5. Will the author/seller offer you technical and marketing
support? Make sure the person you purchase the rights from
will keep in touch with you and help you get started with
the product. It doesn't mean creating a web site for you and
writing your ad copy. Simply being there in case a question or
a problem arises is all you need. Especially so if you
purchased the rights from the author: after all, he or she
knows this product the best and is the only one who can answer
all the questions that you (or your customers) might have.

Once you purchase the rights to a product, get right to it.
Don't waste any time setting up your web site and starting to
sell it. And if you are fast enough, you might make your first
sale within hours after purchasing the rights.

About the Author

Milana Nastetskaya is a full-time web developer and the
author of 3 books: "Create Your First Business Web Site
in 10 days!", "65 Instant Web Answers!" and "How To Install
and Troubleshoot CGI scripts".
http://www.helpingfoot.com/REPRINT_RIGHTS