I’d guess that all of the readers of this blog are feeling the effects of the poor economy. I’d also guess that many of you understand that selling an e-product would be an awesome way to supplement your income during this time.
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If the problem is that you can’t think of anything to offer for sale online then this post about how to make money podcasting other people’s content (OPC) is for you.
Creating podcasts of other people’s already successful content is a wide-open opportunity.
Don’t let yourself believe for a second the notion that the entire online world is being monopolized by only those few people that understand it like ShoeMoney and John Chow. Don’t for a second believe that this tiny group of people are exploiting what they know to such a high degree that there isn’t room for anyone else to play.
YOU CAN PLAY IN THIS GAME!
Why Podcasts are Excellent E-products…
First, what do I mean by online product, or “e-product”?
An e-product is something you can sell online that has no tangible construction. It’s made up, not of one’s and zeros… it’s made up of magnetic charges that correspond to “on” and “off”, plus and minus, or which some call 1’s and 0’s or, binary code.
An e-product has no weight. It doesn’t need shipping. It doesn’t need manufacturing any more than using the copy/paste feature in Windows or Mac. An e-product is easily reproducible and endless in supply. Once made you can sell it by the hundreds, or thousands. Contrast that with any other traditional product you might choose to sell online – socks, electronics, dead butterflies stuck to display cases… these are exhaustible supplies and you need to continually buy more materials to create your products.
When you create an e-product you own it entirely. Everything can be produced by you if you’re savvy enough. What you don’t know you can probably learn quickly. You own all the rights to your products unless you bargain them away in order to create your content. Creating books, videos, music, music videos, art, or anything that you own and can resell is a beautiful thing. You can sell them for eternity if they’re timeless.
What? You don’t sing? You don’t make video? You don’t draw or paint or sculpt or tig-weld metal into StarWars Stormtrooper art?
Me neither.
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Create your own e-book or any other product I mentioned above and it’s yours. You can own 100% of the rights to it and resell it over and over. Create many products based around a central theme and you’ll have a more valuable collection of assets – the collection adds value to itself.
Giving Away Your Rights?
I mentioned above about bargaining away your rights. It sounds like a ridiculous thing to do on first thought – but, sometimes it makes a lot of sense. Say you’re not a singer, songwriter, bookwriter, video producer, artist, graphics expert, web site template or Facebook widget developer. How can you create e-products that will absolutely sell – without question? You could make them and give away some of your rights to the income made with them. Let me explain as this relates to producing podcasts…
If world famous personal development blogger, Steve Pavlina from StevePavlina.com agreed to let you turn his 600+ articles into .MP3 podcasts you’d need to give him some rights to the material you create from his content, after all – he created the articles that have made him millions of dollars over the years. Steve would also need to give you the rights to use his content as the basis for your .MP3 e-products.
Would it make sense to do something like this for Steve?
It would depend on what agreement you could work out with him – but, it could work out to be quite lucrative for both of you over the long-term – even if you only received 10% of sales of these podcasts that you created from his content.
Podcasts are one of the easiest products to create and they give a lot of value. If you can’t create the value yourself with original content that you created there is still a profound opportunity for you to create podcasts based on someone else’s written content that is already successful online (or not).
Podcasts are not difficult to do – but the vast majority of big-time bloggers like Steve, Darren Rowse of Problogger.net, Leo Baubata of ZenHabits, Jeremy of Shoemoney.com, and others are NOT doing them for each piece of content (article) they produce for their websites.
Why not?
It’s an extra, time-consuming step. It’s tough enough to write up an article of 500 to 6,000 words, adding photos, charts and even the occasional video. Creating podcasts is often overlooked. Sales of e-books and the downloads at Apple are proof that people LOVE taking podcasts with them on their Apple or other mp3 players.
I know for me – if I had a choice I would listen to podcasts about 50% of the time from my favorite bloggers. I would pay for a subscription service to that blog to be able to listen to podcasts because it makes more sense than reading when I can’t be sitting in front of the computer – and it’s still next to impossible to read articles on my mobile phone. I do it – but, it’s a serious eye-strainer if it’s more than a couple hundred word article.
Maybe you have a great voice or know someone that does…
One of the most wide-open opportunities I see online for entry-level entrepreneurs is in creating podcasts of content that has already proven VERY successful in written format.
First, identify someone producing awesome written content that isn’t podcasting them. Send the author an email asking if they have any MP3 podcasts available… If they don’t have them – maybe you can finagle your way into creating them for the author.
I’d suggest offering to do mp3 podcasts for all of their content for just 10% of sales in the case of someone like the aforementioned group of bloggers or a higher percentage for those that are not in the same ballpark. If your voice is really excellent – or the person you’ll get to read the articles is top notch and easy to listen to you’ll be able to ask for more.
Why would someone allow you to create podcasts of their material?
In a word, cash. It’s another way to monetize the material they already created. You’ll make it a no-brainer in most cases by offering to create the podcasts for free – and to only take a small commission from the finished podcast that sells. Of course you’d both want to have a very solid contract drawn up that covered how the money would be split between you and the author and if the contract was breakable by either side, or enforceable over your lifetimes.
Second, post podcasts at Apple, Amazon, as well as placing them online at the creator’s blog and other websites, your website and maybe a new website you create just for the purpose of selling this group of podcasts.
Recording a podcast can be as simple as using your mobile phone recorder function to record a sound file that can be converted into mp3 by a free software program like “Super”. I either use my Nokia e71 mobile phone or I use a Sony Cyber-Shot digital camera that records video – with a sound track. I record a video, but separate the sound track from the video and convert it to MP3, again using “Super”.
Whether you listen to podcasts or not you should know that many people do. I found a great pre-installed podcast software program on my Nokia e71 mobile phone the other day that directs me to Gcast.com and a very easy interface to search for podcasts by keyword.
I searched the word, “thai” and came up with podcasts for learning Thai, and a friend’s podcasts about Thailand that I had no idea he was creating. His written content was being turned into an MP3 file by OdioGo.com and Gcast had the feed which is how I heard it. You can set this same system up for your blog – by going to OdioGo.com and linking your blog to it. They’ll give you an RSS feed you can subscribe to in your feed reader ((– what’s a RSS feed reader? –)) that will be a whole feed of all of your posts in this computer voice.
Here’s a sample of this computer voice reading a difficult blog page: Krabi Bike Tours sample MP3 (right click, “save file as” or “Save target as”.
This is the best text to speech reading voice I’ve ever heard. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it has reached a level where I could listen to it to for a 2,000 word article yet – but, I’d be interested in knowing if any of you reading this could listen to that voice without much difficulty. Just think – soon there will be amazing computer voices that you won’t be able to tell from human voices. (Does anyone know of a better computer voice than this one? Please leave a comment, I’d love to know about it.)
Using podcasts are a great way to use your time more effectively. You can download a bunch of podcast content behind the scenes as you tackle your email and other reading you need to get done online. Before you shut off the computer transfer the files over to your mobile phone or iPod type device and hit the road. You can listen to them in your car or while you’re sitting at work or in a restaurant.
If you want to set up the easiest e-product on the planet, with a high probability of success then start your search today to find someone that will let you produce high quality podcasts from their already successful content. I don’t think you could go wrong – even paying someone to read the content for you and recording it, paying them for their time.
Good luck and best of life,
Vern
Hawaii might just be the singular best spot on the face of the earth to live and enjoy life…
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Good brief and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you on your information.
Wow thanks a lot for this very informative information. I was looking for a way to add podcasting to my blog and I found your site.
I’m going to give odiogo a try. I went over and check it out and it’s looks good and it’s free.
Again thanks a bunch for this – I’d love to share this article with my LinkedIn group and my tweeters. I’m going to share it on Facebook.
Thanks a lot