We do a LOT of business online, that includes e-commerce where we sell wholesale items like Yoga and fitness gear, affiliate products like musical instruments and equipment as well as other people’s ebooks and software but we wouldn’t even consider building a business that did not sell our own products.
Through our mentorship and coaching site over at InfoMarketer’sZone we help all kinds of online business owners, offline business owners and entrepreneurs build and grow their sales online.
Some of these people have built very large businesses selling other people’s products.
They have spent years building content, lead funnels, sales funnels, ad campaigns and web pages that front affiliate businesses or wholesale e-commerce sites that range from pet stores to organic food, from furniture to health products and everything in-between.
The Flaw That Leads 6-Figure Online Marketer’s To Go Broke!
At a given point in time, the revenue and profit returned to these business owners may look very impressive, yet there is a fundamental flaw in their business model.
Can you spot it?
They don’t fully control ANY part of their business!
I can’t tell you the number of times in the last decade-and-a-half I have observed or worked directly with online entrepreneurs who have lost EVERYTHING after rising to the top of the mountain.
Here’s a entertaining, and very TRUE story that will hit home!
The middle-age man who built an organic traffic JUGGERNAUT in the early 200o’s pulling in 5-figures each month in Google Adsense Advertising revenue – on autopilot.
We met at an Internet Marketing Conference back in 2004, his vision was to continue building 1000’s of pages of content and eventually make it to a $Million business then hand it down to his kids – his retirement plan and his inheritance toward his kids was going to be this “automatic money-machine website” that sold ads and affiliate products
All through dinner he was gloating about how Google was sending him checks that were so large they had to be sent via special courier and that he was actually profiled on the front of the Google Adsense (ad payment) site for several months as one of the top earners – on and on it went!
Sure, I was happy for him, but something told me right away that all of this seemed too good to be true.
My advice to him then was to augment this business model by turning some of his content into paid content via his own products – videos, ebooks, reports, etc… “just in case” something happened in to his business model that depended so heavily on Google at the time.
Today, people are doing exactly the same thing except this time it’s YouTube (still Google) or Facebook, tomorrow it will be Snapchat, Pintrest, etc…
His response?
No way, the world is my oyster and it all comes from producing free, organic content which leads to truckloads of traffic and a ton of ad clicks and sales of affiliate products.
To him, the idea of packaging any of this content and SELL it was ludicrous, after all, he was getting BIG monthly checks for putting up tons of free content.
Now THE Bad News!
Oh yes, want to know what happened to this gentleman that had the world at his feet?
He found his business cut in half OVERNIGHT when Google made significant changes to their search algorithms in the mid and late 2000’s – no longer was he the darling of Google, he went from loving them to hating them in a 24-48-hour period.
He has never recovered – but guess what his next strategy was…?
Yes, publishing his own information products.
I remember talking to him years after when he vowed to never create another piece of free content and that everything he was doing now would be turned into his own information products – reports, videos, ebooks, etc… yet it took him years to get back to anywhere close to what he was raking in via the untrusted method of leaving the control of your business in the hands of other products and third-party platforms.
GOOD NEWS – There Is Another Way – Here It Is
Folks, as we near the end of 2015 and you get a few, fleeting moments to consider your goals and plans for 2016…make sure you SERIOUSLY consider and plan to have your own products in 2016.
Not only will you make more money, brand yourself at the top of your market and have full control over your financial future, you will avoid the most serious mistake I have witnessed online entrepreneurs make and that is leaving the financial future of their families in the hands of others – whether that be affiliate partners products (which could disappear tomorrow) or 3rd party content engines (that WILL change their rules tomorrow).
Many online business models have come and gone over the last decade-and-a-half, the ONE that has consistently grown and produced multi-Millionaires with REAL businesses is creating and selling your own products (digital information products, training programs, software, licensed products where you have clear ownership)
Focus on this as the TOP PRIORITY for 2016 and I guarantee you it will be the best decision you ever made.
If you want to augment your own products with third-party products, ad sales, affiliate sales and other modes of generating revenue and profit – no problem, we do that too.
Just don’t fool around with your core products…
Design your business around being an expert and providing information, advice, training, help and systems to your market – those will be needed forever, valued higher than anything else in the marketplace and will brand you as the expert, the go-to person and business in your space giving you tremendous leverage to serve and dominate your market into the New Year.
If you need help, you will get it at this blog…you can tap into the Private, Fast-Track Training Programs and Mentorship Programs inside InfoMarketer’sZone (which are about to go WAY up in price for 2016 by the way given our desire to continue to limit the membership to those that want to reach the top the most) – but do make sure you plan to lead with your own products and you’ll never look back again.
