Yes, this will have to do with making money so if you want to make money, read this.
About 45 years ago in 1980 I learned what a cassette tape was like many other people did. Lol
The thing was, I wanted to make my own. Back then the record companies would mass distribute these physical cassette tapes mainly made out of white plastic (Until the 90’s then it was cheaper to use clear plastic) and on these tapes, they had the band or artist name, logos of the record label, copyright information and the names of the songs.
Now you could also buy BLANK cassette tapes! So I would put a blank cassette tape into a little recorder that my parents had for their rehearsals and I would hit a saucer sled with a baseball bat and sing along to the beat, while recording 3 minute “songs.”
By 1982 or 1983 I started to include pre-programmed melodies from a casio keyboard along in my songs.
But the fun part?
Was coming up with my own band name, song names and record label logo! Then drawing the logos on the tape to try to make it look official. (As seen in the picture)
The thing was, I wished I could mass produce them and at least hand them out to all my friends etc. See we had lemonade stands and I even created workbooks to have my own “school” for the neighborhood kids, but I would ask my mom how to copy my tapes.. she tried to help me out, I think we actually did copy some of the tapes and I would hand them out.
At my 6 year old birthday party the “theme” of the birthday party was actually to build your own musical instrument, consisting of a stick, a tamborine and a kazoo and all the kids got to build one.. and then we all played the musical instrument and my mom recorded it and then copied thew main recording for all the party goers.
Now this is where I learned about creating inntellectual property and then making copies.. but I hadn’t yet learned two very important lessons that I would finally learn when I was about 27 years old.
The first lesson is to create the music, information or in the case of “relaxing music downloads” a physical result.. etc FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS, not for yourself. It’s like “SERVING” them with what they are DEMANDING. This is a market research thing.
The second lesson was to share the profits of selling your music, information or physical result with your distributors.
Now I never got a record deal. Even though my father brought me to sony records because he was signed there. it was the wrong department. Lol
But by the time when I was 27, I was broke, had never experienced making my own money. I was living in staten Island.. in that pile of crap house in the hood.. I learned that you could upload your music, ebook or database (Digital product) and then distributors (Affiliates) would sell it for 50-70% commission.
Anything you knew about.. you could write a ebook about.
All you had to do was have a “sales page” where you explain what the book is about in attempts to sell it, and a ‘thank you page” where people would download what they paid for. You submit it to an online retailer for “approval” and you’re off to the races.
There was this online retailer “Clickbank” that I would use back then. it was like MCA records or whatever lol
Sometimes you wouldn’t get approved, like when I tried to submit “get in the pants” but then I just put that one on Mike FIlsaime’s network which was called “PayDotCom.”
But in the end, I had released 50+ products, sold a crapload of other people’s stuff for commission and generated $20,000,000 (Twenty million) for myself and my affiliates.
But this is really all it is. Nowdays things are confusing for newcomers.
I had a guy the other day ask me “Jamie, now that TikTok is out should I use CLickbank? or Instagram.”
I said “Dude.. Clickbank is like an Elevator, Instagram is like a motorcycle..” Youre comparing the wrong things.”
He says “Maybe I asked the wrong question, would you use Clickbank? or Instagram”
Now for this particular student, I gave him simple advice.. I said just use Instagram because I knew he wanted the fast money and to make money super fast, you’re not going to create your own digital product, you’ll take advantage of the affiliate commissions.
How do you get an affiliate commission? By posting a tutorial on Youtube about something people are demanding, and then recommend something with your affiliate link. You can do the same with Instagram.
But in the end, it’s just like how it was when I started in 2004, except back then all there was.. was Google and Clickbank.
Nowadays if you can read posts like this, understand how simple it all is (The foundation) without getting confused with all the different options, you might have a real path to millions. Thanks for listening.