Slumdog Becomes Virtual Property Millionaire

When you think about setting up in business you think of costs, be it premises, wages, utility bills, stock, taxes, etc, the list of costs is daunting.  If there is anything left after all bills have been balanced against your income this becomes your profit. Therefore, put simply, the lower your costs the higher your profit potential.

What is Virtual Property?

Virtual property includes downloadable digital products and information. Examples include, ebooks, audios, videos, study courses, MP3s, member sites, etc. As they are downloadable, once created they cost almost nothing to distribute, i.e. low cost, which equals high profit.

So how can you go from being ‘slumdog’ to Virtual Property ‘millionaire’? (By ‘slumdog’ I mean ‘broke’ or with little spare cash in your pocket).

The cheapest and most simple way to start is to source a book from the public domain. Works in the public domain include books that are not under copyright meaning anyone can take them and resell them either as they are or in a new format.

Literally anyone can get into the virtual property business and go from being broke to earning a fortune online very quickly.

How to find public domain works

As a general rule anything published in the US before 1923 is now in the public domain primarily due to changes in copyright laws at that time.  Fortunately with the aid of the internet it is now very easy to source public domain books from websites such as gutenburg.org.

Obvious examples of public domain content include the works of Charles Dickens and Shakespeare. Others include books on just about any niche market you could think of such as learning the guitar, sea fishing, golf, self help, etc.

The key is to think of a niche where the fundamentals haven’t changed much over the last century. Take learning the guitar for example. Playing the guitar is basically the same today as it was a hundred years ago. So, you source a book on teaching the guitar published before 1923 in the US, have it professionally scanned into a Word document and then you can sell it on as your own downloadable ebook for $27. There are loads of scanning companies, previewservices.co.uk is one in the UK.

All you need is a mini website to promote your product and you’re away. You can go to elance.com to hire someone to make you a simple web site at very low cost or do it yourself with simple web site creation software such and Microsoft Expression or Dreamweaver.

How to add value

This is the clever part. If you ‘flip’ your product into an original format you’ll increase your income ten times or more. Internet users are bored of plain book format, they want audio products, videos, MP3s and other exciting media to learn from.

Some ideas would be to chop up your book and sell it section by section as a home study course. Or turn it into an audio product by reading it out loud and recording it (sites such as nextup.com offer cheap software and a free trial that converts text into speech). Or make it into a video seminar with summary slides and audio.  You can do this easily using Camtasia software available from sites such as techsmith.com.

There are countless ways to present your infoproduct and once done you could batch together 10 products and sell resell licenses to the whole package for $197. Sell five hundred of these in a year, rinse, repeat, and who knows, ‘Slumdog Becomes Virtual Property Millionaire’, could be the headline written for you.