I’m sure most people must be interested in how to make money by selling other people’s products. After all, what’s better than to be the middleman that isn’t concerned with anything.
Imagine running a virtual business from your laptop without having to handle anything related to products. No inventory, no product, no nothing!
Is it possible?
Heck yeah!
Why online?
I’m gonna start off by assuming that you want to learn how to sell other people’s products online. So, what’s the beauty of the online world?
First of all, worldwide reach. Long gone are the days of door-to-door salesmen. We can now reach billions of people worldwide just with the click of a button.
The tools and platforms that the internet provides nowadays make it easier than ever for anyone to promote and sell the products of other people and make money hustle-free as a result.
Now that we got this out of the way, let’s move on to some well-known ways to make money selling other people’s products.
White Label and Private Label Rights
Familiar with the terms? If not, don’t worry, I believe I’ll make it as easy as pie.
First of all, white label rights products are products you can rebrand and sell as is. They are other people’s products that you can take and change their label to make them seem like they are original products.
The caveat here is that you can’t make any changes to the product itself. White label products are typically digital but not exclusively. Even a type of a simple vitamin can be rebranded as a white label product.
Private Label Rights now are quite similar with only one exception. You can make alterations to the product itself as well. Many people use them as content or easy ways to make an ebook (yes many of those you give your e-mail for :P). The problem here is twofold.
First and foremost, those products are typically rubbish. They won’t provide any value to your readers/customers. Secondly, they are a bad way to create content as this content is duplicate. That means it probably has already been used by others as content on their websites, so it may actually hurt your websites if you rely on that type of content and don’t produce it yourself.
Would I recommend this way to make money by selling other people’s products?
Actually no! Besides the debatable quality of those products, there is also the fact that many other people may be using them. At the end of the day, you are not providing your customers with any value whatsoever and that will become evident sooner than you can imagine. Not to mention the fact that some customers may even be pissed off if they find out what you are promoting to them. And believe me, a lot of them will.
Last but not least, the licensing of these products generally varies, so you have to be extra careful there with how you use them.
Let’s move on to another viable method.
Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a simple concept and one that seems to be quite fitting for what we’re talking about.
You just serve as the middleman between the customer and the supplier. The customer orders from you–>you order from the supplier–>the supplier sends the product to the customer. You essentially make money from the difference between what the customer pays you and what you pay the supplier.
Sounds awesome for all of us who want to sell other people’s products. However, let’s examine it a bit better.
First of all, the process isn’t as hands-off as it seems. If your customers have problems with their products, YOU have to handle those problems. After all, they bought from you, for all they know at least. So customer service here becomes an issue.
Another problem is that there aren’t that many quality dropshipping companies. Most of them prefer to provide affiliate programs and just sell themselves directly to the customer, which may make it difficult for you to find a company to work with.
A final point to be made is that profit margins seem to be quite low, since many people are into dropshipping.
So, is dropshipping recommended? It’s a viable way but I wouldn’t really advise it, nor do I particularly like it.
Fulfillment by Amazon
Fulfillment by Amazon is a service provided by Amazon for you to sell your products hassle-free. You basically send them your product and they handle everything after that to promote it and sell it.
But this has nothing to do with selling other people’s products right? Well, not exactly.
What many people are doing is they buy stuff and resell them using this method. You could even resell your old stuff. Anyways, the whole process is known as retail arbitrage and is certainly viable if you want to sell physical products.
However, due to the whole packaging and sending to Amazon, the method is certainly inferior to affiliate marketing in my opinion, but more on that later.
MLM Companies
Multilevel Marketing Companies are another possible way to sell other people’s products.
What those companies do is they have their own line of products for you to sell and promote. You can do so with your friends and relatives, but the potential to scale is really low.
The other way to make money with MLM companies is by recruiting other people into the program. Actually, this is where you can make the most money with MLM. This is not necessarily bad, but with the way they pay (you get paid when the people you have recruited recruit others), this actually starts to turn into a pyramid scheme of sorts, where no one provides value with something tangible and people make money just because others pay a membership below them.
A viable way to go about MLM in order to get over the limitations of the offline world is promoting products through a website. However, you must note that many of those companies may not give you complete freedom and may even make you use their own ready-made websites. This is especially bad since ready-made websites are really bad for SEO and have limited potential to be promoted.
All in all, I wouldn’t imagine why someone would confine themselves to an MLM company and not just go the affiliate marketing way. Which leads me to my next point.
Top Recommended Method: Affiliate Marketing
For those unfamiliar, affiliate marketers promote other companies’ products on their websites (or through any other medium for that matter). When someone purchases the product, the affiliate marketer gets a percentage of the sale as a commission.
Note that the customer does NOT buy from you, the affiliate marketer. They buy from the company itself. That leaves you without all the negatives we talked about in the previous methods.
You just promote the products and rest in the pile of cash you just earned (okay maybe not necessarily a pile :P).
The method is quite popular and you would be surprised as to how many companies provide affiliate programs. From Amazon, to Clickbank, down to individual affiliate programs of companies, the possibilities are practically endless when it comes to products you can promote.
And the freedom that affiliate marketers have is also noteworthy. You are not bound by any particular company really. You can just develop your website in the field of your passion, drive traffic to it and then monetize it with affiliate products. If you don’t like a company or a product you can simply choose to promote a different one.
Do I need a Website?
Technically not. You can just join an affiliate program, get your individualized affiliate links and off you go. Wherever you share those links and someone clicks them and buys, as a result, you make money. Simple as that.
Do I recommend it?
Not really. First of all, there are many advantages to having your own website. You can be established as a brand, you control the way you write your content and you basically have your own online asset. Not to mention what an advantage you gain in terms of traffic generation. Having your own quality website with unique content is the absolute best method to get long-term SEO traffic (traffic from the search engines for those unfamiliar).
Secondly, it’s so easy and cheap to get a website up and running nowadays that it is just a waste to not have one. In fact, the platform I use for all my website hosting and creation, Wealthy Affiliate, provides a powerful, automated website builder that makes everything a breeze. Here is a video of Kyle (one of the founders of Wealthy Affiliate) showing how to build a website in just 30 seconds!
Where to learn about affiliate marketing and website creation
By now I’m sure you must understand the unlimited potential of affiliate marketing and why it probably is the best way to make money by selling other people’s products. The question now is, how do I capitalize on that?
Well, there are countless resources online and simply by searching I’m sure you’ll find many guides and helpful posts. At its core, the process is quite simple. Build your website. Drive traffic to it. Monetize the traffic by promoting relevant affiliate offers to it.
However simple, the process isn’t easy. Also, the sheer volume of often conflicting information online is not helpful. The place where I learned about affiliate marketing is the platform of Wealthy Affiliate. I highly encourage you to check my review of it, where I discuss everything about the platform in detail. The best part is that it is actually free to join.
They provide concise training on taffiliate marketing and building an affiliate marketing website from scratch. They also provide tools that make the whole process a breeze. There is also a community of successful affiliate marketers over there, so lots to learn from them as well.
Note that I’m sharing about Wealthy Affiliate because it is a platform I have truly benefitted from. I was wandering the affiliate marketing world for many years until I came before Wealthy Affiliate. By following the roadmap there I created my portfolio of affiliate marketing websites from scratch that currently fund my dream lifestyle. Not too bad for someone who drifted for quite some time.
A word of caution
Before we wrap up for today, I want to really end this with word of caution. Whatever method you choose or research for online, try to stay away from scams and pyramid schemes. The whole internet marketing space is full of those, so beware. Also, be careful not to get lost in the noise of the online world.
Last but not least, whatever choice you make, try to find a company and a product you believe in. Don’t start promoting products just for the sake of making money. That way, you won’t find success and even if you do it won’t be sustainable. Find a product and a company you like and promote something you can truly believe in and be passionate about.
Verdict on How to Make Money by Selling Other People’s Products
I hope I shed some light on how to make money online by selling other people’s products. For me, affiliate marketing is far superior to all the other available methods and my go-to place to learn about it and pursue it seriously would be none other than the Wealthy Affiliate Platform.
I hope you found today’s guide useful. If you have any questions or comments please leave them in the comment section below. Also, don’t forget to share on social media and follow our pages (social icons in the header) for more awesome content.
Tony,
Founder of Lifestyle Freedom Business