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Are
Reprint Rights A Good Idea For Your Business?
By Terry Dean
Are reprint rights a good idea for your business?
The answer is, "Yes" and "No."
I wish there was a simple answer to this question,
but there really isn't. Buying the reprint rights to a hot selling product
could be the deal of a lifetime.
You could end up with a product that already has a
hot market ready to buy without having to do any of the research,
creation, or ad writing. It could be the perfect opportunity. Or it might
not be.
This same 'perfect opportunity' might be sold by
thousands of businesses already...It could be outdated...and it may never
have sold well in the first place!
So, reprint rights may be right or wrong for your
business depending on a number of factors.
I have experienced both the successful aspects of
reprint rights, and have been able to avoid most of the pitfalls...but not
all.
I have created many of my own products such as the
"Instant Internet Cashflow System" series of ebooks and our newest video
course "Internet Publishing."
Even though I have created my own products, we have
still used reprint rights licenses in many ways to either expand or
generate new profits.
I purchased reprint rights to several products when I
first wanted to market online. The early success I experienced through
selling these products led to the business I am in today.
Doing a quick run-down of the office shows that we
currently have reprint licenses on 23 different products. One of these
products has 19 videos and 2 manuals in it. Another one has 24 audio
tapes, 2 videos, and a manual.
Other products consist of electronic books only.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each format. The primary
advantage of an electronic manual is that it is easy to setup and sell and
requires no fulfillment or shipping costs which can be major hassles.
The primary disadvantage of electronic books which no
expert seems to like to discuss is that most people don't like to read on
their computer. They prefer to read a hard copy book, listen to an audio
tape, or watch a video. Plus, it is much harder to show the uniqueness of
an electronic book.
Both types of products (electronic and hard copy)
have the unique advantages and disadvantages. I have been successful
buying reprint rights on both!
So, I am speaking from a position of authority.
Reprint Rights have been a part of my business from day one.
SECTION ONE: What Are Reprint Rights?
First, let's cover the different types of rights that
are available out there on different products.
1. Affiliate Programs - Affiliate programs could be
considered a form of rights, although a very basic one. Most of my readers
understand exactly what an affiliate program is so I won't go into here.
The advantage of affiliate programs is that they have little or no cost to
get involved in.
The two major disadvantages are that you receive the
smallest piece of the action from an affiliate program (10% to 50%) and
that you will have thousands upon thousands of competitors. Always
remember this, the cheaper and easier it is to start a business, the more
competition you will have. Affiliate programs usually have no cost and no
time involvement to sign up, so you can expect to have the most
competition through them.
The advantage here is that the affiliate owner
actually takes care of all the fulfillment, order processing, and
everything else. So it is a great way to get started promoting products or
to expand your product line. As I said above though, this could end up
being a double edged sword. It is easy for you to sign up. It is also easy
for ten thousand others to sign up.
2. Resale Rights - A resale rights are a little more
involved. Usually when resale rights are involved, you pay an up-front fee
and then you are given the right to buy the product at a discount. In some
cases you buy the product wholesale and sell it retail.
In most cases though, you take retail orders for a
product and then send the product owner a certain percentage to fulfill
the order for you. This is often called dropshipping.
For example, you may want to sell a video set we have
and offer to pay a resale fee of $500.00. Then, you take orders for it for
the full $297.00 retail price. Every time an order comes in, you process
the card and send us $125.00. We then duplicate, process, and ship out the
order. You would never have to touch the product. That is dropshipping.
You make much more money this way than an affiliate
program usually, but you do a little more work. You take the orders and
process them yourself. Then, product fulfillment is handled by the owning
company.
3. Reprint Rights - This takes the product selling to
another level. With reprint rights, you actually take over the whole
process yourself and don't have to pay anyone else. All of the money is
yours to keep. When an order comes in for $297.00, you process, duplicate,
and ship the order yourself. Then, you keep all of the money that is left
over.
If it was an electronic manual you owned the rights
to, then you would take the order and have digital delivery. All of the
moneyleftover after processing fees would be yours to keep.
So the advantage to reprint rights is that you get to
keep all the money. The disadvantage is that reprint rights usually have a
premium price on them. For most products, you will pay 10 to 25 times the
actual retail price of the product for reprint rights. Digital products
usually are on the high end of the scale at 20 to 25 times the price,
while audios and videos usually are closer to the 10 times value level.
So, a $29.95 ebook will usually cost $600 to $700 for
rights while a $29.95 video will usually cost $300 to $400. The reason for
the higher prices on the ebooks in most cases comes from the inherent
dangers of reprint rights to the creator of the information.
As a product developer, it is much more dangerous to
sell reprint rights to an ebook than to a video. Since a video is a hard
product, there are costs associated to selling it (low costs of around
$3.50 per video plus shipping). Since an ebook has no cost in delivery, a
customer could buy reprint rights to it and give it away for free or
almost nothing.
For example: Just recently I looked at the online
detective ebook (which is actually more of resale rights not reprint
rights) and saw a price of $4.95, $9.95, $19.95, and $29.95 after looking
at several different sites. All of them were offering the same product,
but at vastly different prices.
Someone could buy reprint rights to your $97.00 ebook
and sell it for $9.95 from their site...destroying your business in the
process (if you rely on only one product). If it is a hard product such as
an audio set or video set, they will be much more unlikely to do this type
of thing since there are costs involved in distribution.
For the reprint rights buyer, owning a successful
product can be an awesome start to your business or an expansion to your
business if you can afford the extra investment required.
4. Master Rights - This is the ultimate type of
rights to purchase for your product. When you buy master rights, you also
receive the ability to sell reprint rights to other businesses.
This added benefit comes at a premium price. You will
usually have to pay 3 to 5 times as much for the master rights as you do
for reprint rights.
For example: Let's take a $297 video set for an
example. Resale rights may be $500 (which gives you the ability to have it
dropshipped for $125). Reprint Rights may be $2995 so that you could sell
the product itself and keep all of the money. Master Rights would probably
cost $8,000 to $15,000 so you could sell reprint rights at $2,995 each in
addition to selling it at retail.
Now, I hope that the above numbers didn't get you
confused. They are just meant to be an example. All deals will be
different based on the product and the creator's goals with it.
In most cases, you really shouldn't even be thinking
of paying the premium price for master rights unless you know you have
reprint rights buyers already lined up...or it will take quite a bit of
cash flow from you for a while.
SECTION TWO: When Should You Buy Reprint Rights?
1. Buy Reprint Rights To Get Started Online.
I bought a low cost reprint rights license to get
started online for the first couple of years. They gave me a good
foundation to start with. The product was already done and I received
sales materials to go with it (I couldn't write an ad worth a flip in the
beginning).
You may find the same method will work for you? There
is one caution to keep in mind. Don't buy something just because someone
says it is the best opportunity ever.
Avoid this type of hype when buying reprint rights.
As a beginner, try to find a product you would want to buy yourself.
Purchase the retail version first, try it out, then purchase the rights if
you are still interested.
Owning a product that you bought rights to can give
you a good start. You don't have to worry about writing ads at first or
producing a product. You can jump in, get your feet wet, and start
learning about online marketing. This first product probably won't make
you rich, but it will give you experience for all of your later projects!
2. Buy Reprint Rights For Back End Products
You have your first product out. It is making money,
but what about the backend? All direct marketers know the real profits of
business do not come from your first sale to a customer. They come from
continually selling over and over to the same customers.
You can expand your product line by purchasing
reprint rights to high quality products. This will help you generate
additional cash flow from your prospects and customers.
In many cases, this is the better direction to take
than selling a product you bought rights to up front. One of the reasons
that an author sells rights to his product is to generate leads for other
products they sell. Very rarely, if ever, are you allowed to remove the
contact info of a product you bought rights to. So, selling their product
does generate other backend sales for them.
For this reason, most experienced marketers will
purchase and use reprint rights for backend products.
DON'T BUY REPRINT RIGHTS IF:
1. You Don't Have a Market.
Don't buy a $1,000 reprint rights package if you
don't already have a plan in mind to sell it. Just because it is the most
awesome book on the planet doesn't mean it will sell.
The best situation is when you already have a market
lined up to buy from you, such as your own newsletter list or daily
traffic at your site.
You should examine the product by buying a retail
version. Then, figure a way to sell it. Then, buy the reprint rights.
Finally, go for master rights once the reprint rights have started earning
you a profit.
2. It is Outdated.
A lot of people don't offer reprint rights on a
product until it is already outdated. Instead of updating it, they sell
off reprint rights to unsuspecting buyers.
I made this mistake myself in one case and bought
rights to a tape set which was badly outdated. It cost me $2,000, but it
wasn't worth even a couple of hundred.
I was speaking to another experienced Internet
marketer recently and he told me that he bought an $8,000 master rights
package to a set of CDs when he first got started online. Little did he
know at the time, the whole set was years old and most of the information
on them were wrong now. It was a quick way to lose thousands of dollars!
3. The market is saturated.
This danger will only usually occur for one of two
reasons...either rights are selling way too cheap and everyone is buying
them OR someone buys rights to an electronic book and prices it at almost
nothing.
This again comes back to the point that sometimes a
bargain (especially dealing with reprint rights) isn't a bargain at all.
The cheaper the rights are, the more likely the product will be offered
everywhere and at too low a price for anyone to compete.
How to Find Resale, Reprint, and Master
Licenses...
I have made references and have seen others make
references that the easiest way to find reprint rights to products would
be to do a search for "reprint rights" on the search engines. Well, guess
what, I have never bought a reprint rights package this way.
Most of the sites that come up when searching for
reprint rights aren't selling the types of products you should be buying
rights to. If you could find them simply by using the search engines, then
everyone else could do the same.
You need to put a little more effort into it.
The mistakes I have made in buying reprint rights
came from using the search engines to find them...every time. I was too
desperate looking for rights and a hyped sales letter did the trick to
finish me off.
Over half of my good reprint rights products were
purchased because I was a customer already of the person I was buying
from. I knew they had good products which I could sell.
Several of my products were purchased by directly
soliciting the owner of them. They wouldn't have any posting on their site
about rights, but I would send them an email and offer them cash of $1,200
or so (whatever I thought I was willing to pay). They would usually think
about it and email me back a counter offer.
Some would outright reject the offer. So, what. It
didn't hurt me any. For those who countered, I either paid the counter
price or went into more haggling on price.
I have also heard of other methods. For example, I
have heard Ted Nicholas say that he has called up publishers of older
books and asked for license rights to them. Sometimes if it is a book they
are done with, they would sell rights for as low as $300. It all depends
on what they want.
If you make an offer, all you can receive is a yes or
no answer. So, go ahead and make an offer to people. If your offer is high
enough, the greed factor might step in and bring you the rights even if
they never thought about it before.
Also mention to them that you will leave all
information on the product exactly as it is, so they will receive more
leads for other products they sell. Their name will be published all over
the Internet by you. So, they may receive additional advantages of selling
to you besides the up-front cash.
Terry Dean, a 5 year veteran of Internet marketing,
will Take You By The Hand and Show You Exact Results of All the Internet
Marketing Techniques he tests and Uses Every Single Month" Click here to
Find Out More:
http://www.netbreakthroughs.com
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