CDs & DVDs: How to Move from eBooks to Physical Products

photo credit: Denim Dave

You’ll generally make a lot more money selling CDs and DVDs than you would by selling eBooks.

Physical products have a much higher perceived value than eBooks. They have more credibility as well, as it’s something people can actually hold in their hand.

As a result, people are often much more willing to part with their money for a DVD than for an eBook. They’re willing to pay more, with less resistance.

But isn’t the process difficult? How do you actually go from having a concept in your head to a printed CD or DVD? How do you consistently handle printing and shipping?

The process is actually only difficult in the initial setup process. Once you’ve set things up, it can be very, very easy, almost autopilot.

At one point in my career, I was generating leads for a company whose continuity program was worth over $40,000 per month, shipping well over 1,000 CDs and/or DVDs per month. Here’s what I’ve learned about setting up fulfillment for physical products from that experience.

Printing & Fulfillment – Do it Yourself V.S. Fulfillment House

If you’re doing less than 10 units per week, you should probably do your own printing and fulfillment. Just buy an industrial-grade DVD burner, or even just use your typical built in DVD burner to do the printing.

Creating packaging is not difficult. Just buy blank binders or CD holders and print out covers on your own. Then ship them out. Simple!

It’s when you get to 10+ orders per week that you should start thinking about setting up a real system for fulfillment.

A fulfillment center is basically a facility that will take care of both the printing and the shipping of the product. They’ll handle all the refunds, including restocking of product. They’ll print any quantity of DVDs or CDs you specify and ship them out when you forward them the orders.

Costs range from $2 to $5 per shipped CD or DVD, depending on packaging and other options. For binders of 5 to 10 DVDs or CDs, you can expect to pay $15 to  $40 per shipped product, again depending on the packaging and number of discs.

Most fulfillment houses will have a monthly order minimum.

Finding and Working With Fulfillment

There are a lot of things you should look at when deciding who to work with. If you’re small, minimum order will come into play. Price per unit is a big factor. Whether or not they process refunds and restock product can also be a factor.

You should also talk about financing. Will they give you Net 30 or Net 60 terms, meaning allow you to pay later rather than now? Or will they require payment upfront?

Once you find a fulfillment house that matches your needs, make sure you get all agreements in writing, either in a contract or in email form. In the beginning there may be a contract and things will be more formal; but as your business relationship progresses email generally will do.

Make sure you always do test shipments to various addresses to make sure your fulfillment house is shipping things in a timely manner with good quality products. Get a few addresses of friends and put in a random order once a month or so to make sure things are running smoothly.

One fulfillment house I’ve worked with and would recommend is Speaker Fulfillment Services. Not affiliated, just a friendly recommendation.

Designing and Producing a CD or DVD

What do you actually need to do to create a CD or DVD?

First of all, you need the content. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into sound or video production; but I will say that with today’s technology, you can create truly first class information products for under $1,000.

High def cameras are just a few hundred dollars. Great mics are becoming cheaper and cheaper every year. Great video and audio editing software is inexpensive, sometimes even free.

If you don’t have the skills to do it yourself, you can do it inexpensively by hiring a film student to help you direct the project. It’s not hard to find someone for $15 to $25 an hour to help you produce an entire multi-disc CD or DVD product for under $1,000 total.

Now, once you have the product, what else do you need?

You’ll need a CD cover. This can be designed in Photoshop, or again outsourced.

You’ll also need a binder or book cover and a back cover. Get the packaging specs from your fulfillment house before you start the design process. The front cover of the binder should compliment or match the CD cover.

If you’re working with a fulfillment house, the best way to get them the product is usually to just create a 100% finished product of your own and ship it to them.

In other words, actually print out your binder art, put it in the binder and sticker a CD cover on top of your CD or DVD. Then, email them the digital versions of the artwork.

They’ll then receive the product exactly the way you want it, then reproduce it on their end. It’s much better to do it this way than to just email the artwork over and hope they put it the right way without a sample.

Bird’s Eye View of the Whole CD / DVD Creation Process

To wrap things up, let’s take a look at how the whole process looks from a bird’s eye view.

First, you create the CD or DVD. You encode the CD or DVD in a format that plays in a CD or DVD player, using special software.

You design the front and back covers of the binder or CD case that your product will be in. You also design the CD cover.

If you’re doing your own fulfillment, you would simply repeat this process and ship it out of your own home.

If you’re outsourcing the process, you would then find a fulfillment house, keeping some of the tips we’ve covered in mind. Once you have a fulfillment house under contract, you’ll send them a finished version of your product for them to emulate.

From then, all you need to do is email them an address or forward them an order receipt from your shopping cart. When they receive the order, they’ll ship out the product. Make sure you keep them accountable for their service by testing the order process every once in a while with different addresses.

Those are the basics of handling CD and DVD fulfillment. I’ll answer any questions in the comments.

Cheers,

- Derek

Leave a comment    

Share

About the Author

Derek Pankaew has been building internet businesses for over 5 years. He’s helped businesses go from startup to over $1 million per year, has built successful marketing campaigns in 4 different countries and has gotten new sites to over 30,000 visitors a month in under 60 days. His specialties include SEO, content marketing and increasing conversions.

 

Content is King - Be like this frog prince and make a stack of coin with content. Get your free content marketing guide. To get yours, click here