Today we want to talk about how you find products to sell. There are a number of ways. Some will cost you a bundle, some will cost you a little and some will cost you nothing (except your time).

Finding products

We discussed products in Article Two, but here the emphasis is different. Then I wanted you to think about your product as the second most important element in your business model. Here I want to talk in just a little more detail about how and where you find products.

As we said, there are a number of ways to find products. You can:

• Create them yourself
• Pay somebody to create them for you
• Buy a licence to sell somebody else’s product
• Obtain them from free sources
• Run your business with no products at all – we shall defer this discussion until Article Twenty-Four – Affiliate Programmes

You can create products yourself if you have the skills and experience. If you are a writer, for example, you can write books, either printed or ebooks. If you are a programmer, you can create software. If you are experienced as a consultant, personal coach, trainer or public speaker, you can turn these talents to creating products.

Again, your big advantage with products you have created is that you own them, full stop. You can do anything you want with them. Potential joint venture partners are usually only interested in products you wholly own.

You can pay somebody to create products for you. As we said, this is one best left until you have a little time and experience as a direct marketer. Here you will have to spend more than just a bit of money before you have sold anything. You will also need enough knowledge about this business to be reasonably confident your market will want to buy.

If you have more money than time, or if you feel you simply don’t have the skills to create your own products, you can buy licences to other people’s products.

The downside of this is that it will cost you some money up front for licences to decent products. The advantage is that if you are dealing with products created by respected, well-known people, you can offer them to your list with confidence.

There are people in this business who make very, very good livings having never created any products of their own by selling products created by others.

There are also people out there making very, very good livings creating products to license others to sell. They work with very small lists of successful direct marketers. They are respected experts within narrow niches such as software development or running seminars, as examples.

If you discover you are very good at product creation, you may want to think about this as a business model – another income stream (we shall talk about multiple income streams in Article Thirty-Eight).

You can also create information products using sources freely available. Written material that is out of copyright or has never been in copyright can be used at will. This information is known as ‘public domain’.

There are several things you need to think about when using public domain information:

Laws regulating use of material in and out of copyright vary from one country to another. Copyright protection will be determined by the country in which the material was published. If in doubt, you need to check with Copyright Office for that country.

You may pick up a pirated copy of a work that carries no copyright notice, but is, in fact, still in copyright. Again, you need to check with the Copyright Office.

Some materials such as government publications are not copyright and are free to use as you wish. Also, check out www.gutenberg.org There are over 19,000 downloadable publications on this site. They are all public domain and you may reproduce them at will.

If you plan to use public domain information, always give appropriate credit to the original authors, whether for out of copyright material or that which has never has been in copyright. Presenting others’ work as your own is thoroughly dishonest. None of the big players in this business ever do. If you want to be as successful as they are, and I assume you do :-), indicate your sources.

Finally, include your own copyright on everything you write, both hard copy and your web pages. You do this by placing ‘Copyright © Your Name 2006, All rights reserved,’ either at the top or bottom of the document.

When one person has viewed your text, you are ‘published’ and by including your copyright information, you then hold what is known as a ‘common-law copyright.’ This gives you legal protection and the right to be recognised as the author of the material.