Selling short reports on physical CDs

You can find out only by testing it?

It may have a big learning-curve? That's to say, even if it can be done profitably, overall, it may cost a lot of money to discover exactly how.

My own complete guesses are that if you're looking at "opportunity-seekers", as you mention above, (a) "immediacy" will be good and a delay will be bad (so that's against the idea), and (b) that kind of traffic will be about the hardest to monetize anyway. So please excuse my suspicion that you may be being optimistic about it. I may, of course, have it all wrong.

The whole venture would cost at least $500. I thought of it because I used to go for some of those ads in different magazines. I figured if you could at least build a list of a few hundred then maybe that list could be monetized.

I used to do just that in 1998 - 2001 or so.

In fact, it was a healthy little business. We did around 35k a month. It died out though in favor of downloadable information products.

I do still deliver my °Information Marketing Insiders° courses via binders CD's and DVD's..

That's because it's huge though and has a higher perceived value at $4000.

Just an idea here why not list the reports on eBay. They still allow digital products as long as they are shipped on a CD or DVD. You would only have to pay a FVF when the item sold.

Okay......

Now that I'm back at the office, I'll add a bit more since I've played this game before.

From 1997/8 o 2001, we ran classifieds in scores of places like Entrepreneur Magazine, Bizz-Opp Rags, newspapers and basically any place we felt we could reach opportunity seekers - it was ALL offlinoe in the beginning.

The ads sold whatever the opportunity we had was - on a CD rom.

They'd call an 800 number and our office took the order over the phone. The credit card, or check was taken and processed over the phone at that time.

At the same time an "order slip" was printed out on the DOT MATRIX printer.

At the end of the day (we took orders 24/7 but "end of day cutoff was at 6PM) all the orders were FAXED to a fulfillment center I contracted with

Also, as we were taking the order for the $19.95 CD... we were upselling all kinds of shit - be it our own products or those of people with whom we had joint ventures.

We ran the whole damn thing out of a small(ish) office in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It was a good business and we sold tens of thousands of those little CD roms.

What were some of the "opps" we sold?

Many but a few notable ones.....

1. A 900 number business
2. A "3rd party skip tracing business (that we quit when that became illegal)
3. A real estate course

Those "old school" enough to be thinking "Hey... this guy sounds like the great Don Lapre"..... that's because I was a young buck and was inspired by him.

I bought and studied everything he did

I then knocked him off - arguably doing it better (I got his attention once and he SAID he should be pissed but my copy was BETTER so he stole some of it - saying "payback is a bitch" I didn't care - we were fast friends after that.)

Anyway......

All that slowly gave way to more ONLINE fulfillment, then marketing in 2001/02 or so.

WHY?

1. It's cheaper
2. It's QUICKER

MOST IMPORTANT....

There was a market shift on the fulfillment side, much like Alexa points out, where they want instant gratification and that's too big to ignore - being of direct consequence to your conversion rate.

If you wanna go offline (you should - lots of prospects there)..... do it with lead generation postcards.

Send a postcard in the mail, leading to a landing page to generate the lead..... and deliver the magnet via email. After that, hit the "upsell" on the other side of the optin like everyone does to make coin.

My clients and I make so much money that way, we almost feel guilty

Do you still use this form of advertising as a means to get traffic or build a list?

Just be careful of one thing most jurisdictions hate freedom for example if you sell in jurisdiction x7 then x7 might send you a letter saying you did business in x7 and owe x7 $4000 dollars so keep that in mind with physical products I know people it has happened to.

Russell Brunson was pushing the CD/DVD thing a few years ago except his method was used to sell an expensive product. He would offer a "free" CD or DVD plus shipping and handling. Any thoughts on if that technique could still work?

some good info here.

I am not sure if people do it anymore, but back in the day I sold little info products on CD on EBAY for $17 a pop. The markup and profit on these were great. I was doing about $80 - $100 bucks a day, and it was fun too.

I realised, there was more profit in building a list online, and videos also. And I think EBAY are clamping down on this stuff a bit, but still very lucrative if you mix this, get your buyres, and then put them in some sort of funnel. It use to work really well for us.