Getting rich by licensing products

Before I opened up my ad agency last year... I was doing a lot of work promoting my own Clickbank products and also writing copy for Clickbank product owners.

At one point, I was talking to several Clickbank e-books owners a week... and they all had the same problem. They had pretty good products, but their marketing sucked.

so what I did was, I'd offer them $500 to $1,000 as a license fee so I could sell and promote their ebook and keep the profits myself.

MANY jumped at the chance and others wouldn't. With some, I just arranged a 50-50 profit share.

But the reason I started doing this was, I've hired a LOT of ebook writers on Elance and other outsourcing sites, and for $500 would get "average" content, if that.

When I started seeing some of these Clickbank ebooks that weren't selling well, I noticed they were very well written... it's just that the marketing was horrible.

So, instead of paying $500 to outsource an average ebook to be written on Elance, I just started paying these Clickbank ebook owners directly, for the ability to "sell" their ebooks as my own. I'd either pay a flat fee or i'd do a % deal.

There are many, many good ebooks on Clickbank that just don't sell right now, because their marketing sucks.

So, for me, it's easier to license out their ebooks and use them as my own, than to pay to get average content on Elance.

Some of the clickbank marketers were HAPPY to get $1,000 just to get something out of their ebooks. Others knew that they had much more potential, so they'd do a % deal instead.

But if you spend some time on Clickbank, you'll find hundreds of potential licensing deals you can do. All it takes is an email or phone call to them.

We like to call it Toll Positions or Toll Booth marketing. The man in Missouri makes nothing, ships nothing, does nothing but receive monthly checks averaging over $150,000.00 a MONTH for the last 7 years. Because...

he has control, an exclusive LICENSE, of a product, once under performing (which allowed him to gain control) and allows a marketing company to do all the work while he collects those big MONTHLY checks...that is the power of licensing.

Do you know who knows about licensing? Hollywood. Disney, Sony, Dream Works...as does the NFL, NBA, MLB, PGA, NASCAR...NCAA and The Ohio State. Ever hear of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?...over 2 BILLION in retail sales alone made 3 guys very rich from their licensing deals.

ADS? There is one running on radio about letting your car "rust in peace" with a Halloween theme to it...local dealers "license" the ad for their market.

There are gazillions of under performing products which can be picked up for a piece of paper, a licensing agreement. Find one, negotiate, sell baby sell.

Also lots of BOOKS, once bestsellers in years gone bye-bye...which can be reissued with some savvy marketing and picked up for nothing more than a piece of paper.

gjabiz

PS. Since retiring, I'm putting together a little review called 53 Years of Biz-Ops; The Winners, The Losers and The Flukes. Contains a whole section on Licensing...which is, in my opinion, the very BEST Biz-Op out there.
Number ONE on my top 10, other than Toll Positions is the PUBLISHING BUSINESS.

Thanks Gordon, good stuff. Looking forward to the book.

If you have great products and copies, and interested to give me exclusive rights for India, I would be very interested.

This isn't something I've ever tried before, specifically.

But, just as a general strategy, one of the best things you can do is try to find "undervalued" assets and sell them for a profit. This isn't just a marketing thing, it's one of the universal laws of successful business. Consider, for example:

In stocks: buying stocks at low price to earnings ratio and waiting for the market price to catch up.

In real estate: House flipping, or renovating beat up homes so you can sell them for a higher price.

Online: website flipping, or buying up good websites that just lack proper SEO and marketing, and getting them higher rankings so that they start making more sales.

It seems like the strategy that Harlan is recommending here is basically the copywriting equivalent of website flipping. The same way an SEO consultant can take a good site and make it great by improving its rankings, a copywriter can take a great (but poor-selling) ebook and make it sell like hot cakes with the right marketing.

There's no doubt in my mind that plenty of marketers specialize in doing this alone. In fact, if memory serves me, Mike Long (one of the IM heavy hitters) doesn't even create products, he just buys the rights to other peoples' stuff and sells it himself.