Take your message, your quotes, or the characters in your book and put them in a product that your visitors will love to buy!
Multiply your intellectual property into a line of products that reinforce your brand.
3 Ideas for creating products:
Online Retailers:
Zazzle is an online service that provides a plethora of products and opportunities for you to implement into your own business online and offline.
The service is free. The biggest condition that you must have is the legal permission or copyright to reproduce the artwork onto their products. You simply go to their site, create an account and upload your artwork to create products. They make the product and ship to the customer when it is purchased (whether it is for you to resell or use for advertising or someone who wants to buy for themselves.) The money earned is split between you and them.
Here’s what it might look like for you. You’ve written a book and are writing blog posts that support your book. The topic is fascinating and a following is created. In your writing you bring out interesting concepts or facts. These concepts, facts, characters, etc. become the image that you put on merchandise. With a service like this, you can do that, without worrying about the manufacturing or distribution of the merchandise. It can be sold directly from your website. Besides selling products, you are building your brand by word of mouth.
Digital Products:
Amazon has a service called CreateSpace that allows you to upload your manuscript for sale as a Kindle product or for print-on-demand. However, understand that your manuscript should be written, edited and ready for publishing before you upload it!
Anything that can be printed in a document can become a digital product as a PDF or as an ebook. Your manuscript, which we’ve mentioned above, could be sold by you from your website. Know that if you sell as a PDF, then it can easily be passed along – but don’t despair! If passed along, your product becomes a viral marketing tool. Make sure that the footer of each page contains your name, your website URL or a URL that goes directly back to your products. You want an identifier on each page with an action step.
Coloring pages, and workbooks, are a couple of other ideas that you can print as PDFs in order to make a digital product.
Collaborations:
Do you write? Do you know someone else who writes or has a story? How about someone who illustrates? Perhaps you are an expert and don’t write, but have information that you know would be something that people would pay to know? Consider a joint venture with a complimentary talent to create a product that could be sold on both of your sites and through both social media influences and split the profits 50/50.
What ideas do you have? What are some quick and easy product or merchandise ideas or sites that you’d like to share? Please share as a comment below.
