Over the last couple of days I’ve learned something interesting and have decided to share it. Being new to the marketing game I’ve come to realize that I don’t have anything to actually market. This appears to be an issue that plagues most new comers to the game. Most online gurus will tell you how easy it is to start an online business, but rarely where to start, or the pitfalls you’ll run into along the way. These are a couple of things I’ve come across that I hope will help anyone who’s new, with some questions about where they can get started if they don’t already have something to sell. Hopefully this will help out with the topic of how you can start marketing without a product.

There’s got to be something.

As I continued to make my way through this One Funnel Away challenge, I came to a bit of a problem. I had begun to understand how to sell, but didn’t have a clue of what to sell. I knew I wanted to be an affiliate marketer, but I didn’t have anything to offer up front. So I did what any good newbie would do in this situation, and googled the heck out of the problem. This lead to a plethora of guru videos and blogs advising me to shoot a YouTube video collection of how to’s and reviews.

Let’s be honest people. There’s a reason I’m choosing to blog and not do YouTube videos. Don’t get me wrong, I plan to eventually venture out into that wasteland at some point, but I’m choosing to progress in a different fashion for now. I like blogging. I can put my ideas out through a blog, in a way that I can’t quite do yet in video. So while I work on that part of my short comings, I’d much rather focus on my blog as my outlet.

More Then Just A Bit of Camera Shyness.

This also leaves out the fact that, as a newbie you have to start building yourself up socially, you don’t just start with a following. I believe this is where most people start to slow down and some possibly quit. I just refused to let that happen, so I continued searching for options that would allow me to stay comfortably behind my computer screen, rather then yelling into my phone. Although the more I talk about it, I may actually have to do that after I post this.

After some pretty in depth searching I hit pay dirt. It turns out there are several ways to create offers around existing products, in the case of affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, the product is already taken care of. In most cases the creators of that product even provide you with material to sell the product, like email templates, pictures, sales videos, and heck even already built funnels. All you really have to do is focus on getting customers to these pages.

At this point you’re probably thinking. Hey if everyone gets this stuff, won’t I look the same as everyone else? How will I compete? This is where crafting your offer comes into play. You stack other perks on top of what the customer will already be getting. You blow them away with value. I bet you’re thinking, doesn’t this take me back to square one? The answer is no, this actually gives you a lot of options for marketing without a product.

Time to stack some options.

So here’s some ways you can add some value to someones already existing product. In my case I picked a couple of really good, really old books. The good thing about really old books, is that they are public domain, which means they don’t have a copyright. There’s some really old gems out there, that are awesome for this, and the kicker is that their messages are just as relevant now, as they were back then. If you do this, make SURE the book is public domain. Scan the book, or if it’s downloaded check it for any errors. Add a nice E-cover to it, and you’re good to go. You just added value.

Don’t stop there. After you have a shiny new E-book, run that bad boy through a text to speech editor, and now you have an audio book to go with your E-book. Another value add. At this point you can always take the gurus advice and record some quick how to videos and make your own private course. Depending on who you’re selling to you could also create your own share funnel and provide that as some added value as well. To do this you’ll need Clickfunnels and if you want to see how it works check out this link here. If you click that link and already have click funnels it will automatically share the funnel to your account, and if you don’t it will give you a preview screen and give you the option to sign up for a 14 day free trial. Just to be transparent, if you sign up using that link, it will credit my affiliate account.

An Outside of The Box Idea For Marketing Without A Product.

At this point your brains are likely oozing out of your heads, but I still have a couple ways you can add value to your offers. Remember how I told you about public domain? Well this next process is similar. It’s called PLR and stands for Private Label Rights. These are products whose rights are for sale, or sometimes for free. So basically once you pay for or acquire the free product, whatever rights are being sold with it are now yours. Sometimes this is the right to resale, others it’s the complete rights to the product. This means that you can change, sell, give away, as well as other things. I could write a whole article about all the things you can do with PLR products but for now just know that it’s an option.

If you’re interested in PLR products and want to see what’s available as something you may want to use to add value to your offers, check out this affiliate link here. Some people frown upon using PLR products, but if you take some time to really make them shine (if that’s allowed in the licensing) they can actually be pretty good value adders.

If You Don’t Want To Create, Maybe Someone Else Can?

The last option for adding value is coming up with the idea and having someone else do it for you. Hiring someone through Upwork or Fiverr is always an option. So rather then you taking the time to create the added value you can have someone else do it for you and then pay them. Doing this could free up your time for working on other things, that suit you better than being a creative.

I hope you find this post helpful in learning how to start marketing without a product. It can be confusing when you’re just starting out and know nothing. Anyways it’s getting late, this post took longer to put together then I thought it would, so there will be 2 posts today. Have a wonderful night, I’ll catch you all a little later on today.