Leverage Your Affiliate Business By Re-using Content

According to Wikipedia, leverage is "A force compounded by means of a lever rotating around a pivot" and "By extension, any influence which is compounded or used to gain an advantage." The latter part of that definition is the most relevant for internet businesses.

Leverage is frequently defined in either financial or mechanistic terms, but it has much broader application to a lot of contexts, including the world of internet marketing.

So how shall we interpret "any influence" for our home-based businesses?

One of the most used ways for an online business to leverage our results is by re-using accessible content. I'm sure you've seen the countless ebooks currently advertised on the internet - most of these are examples of re-using content, although some may have been originally written as ebooks, most originated as a single blog post, or a response to a customer email, perhaps even one one or more Frequently Asked Questions.

In the world of finance, the advantage gained from leverage is commonly expressed as a ratio of some type; e.g.,, a debt-to-equity ratio. Such ratios are useful for accountants, but accountants are not the primary audience here.

What advantage can we realize by leveraging our existing content? Consider the following simplistic example (no rocket science here): Assume that it takes you 10 hours to write a document for use with a single customer and then sell it to that customer for $50.00. You would have earned $50.00, but it took 10 hours of your time to earn that $50.00; in other words, you have earned about $5 per hour (less than the current minimum wage) for your labor and made zero profit.

If, however, you take that same document (adapted to remove any proprietary info) and offer it as an ebook on the Net for $19.95, and that you finally sell 100 copies of your published ebook. You would have earned $1995, less the $50 to create the original manuscript take away another $5 to tailor it to remove any customer/proprietary info, leaving you now with a profit of $1940.00.

That's the leverage advantage, specifically the benefit gained from re-using existing content.

Once we we've been introduced to the concept of leverage, we discover many different applications to our home-based businesses. This article addressed only re-use of content, but there are many other ways. Future articles will discuss other ways that affiliate businesses can benefit from leverage.