Achieve Leverage For Your Home Business By Re-Using Content

The Wikipedia dictionary defines leverage as "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 has the most applicability for online businesses.

Leverage is frequently defined in either fiscal or mechanistic terms, but it has a much broader applicability, including the world of internet marketing.

So how can we interpret the term "any influence" for our home-based businesses?

One of the best ways for an affiliate income business to gain the advantage of leverage is by re-using accessible content. Most of the ebooks currently advertised on the internet reflect content that has been re-used, although some may have been originally written as ebooks, most began as a single blog post, or a response to a customer email, perhaps even a collection of Frequently Asked Questions.

Within Finance, the benefit gained from leverage is typically written as a ratio of some sort, for example, a debt-to-equity ratio. Such ratios are useful for accountants, but that is not the audience I'm addressing here.

What advantage can we realize by leveraging our existing content? Consider the following simplistic example (no rocket science here): Assume you could write a single document for one customer in ten hours and then sell it for $50.00. You would have earned $50.00, but it took 10 hours of your time to get that much money; effectively, you would have earned about $5 per hour (less than the current minimum wage) for your time but you would not have made any profit on that sale.

If, however, you take that same document (adapted to remove any customer-specific or proprietary information) and offer it as an ebook on the internet for $19.95, and that you eventually sell 100 copies of your published ebook. You have now earned $1995, and if you subtract the $50 it cost you to create the initial manuscript less another $5 to tailor it to remove any customer/proprietary info, leaving you with an increased profit of $1940.00.

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

Once we become familiar with leverage, we discover many different applications to our affiliate businesses. This article addressed only re-use of content, but there are many other ways. Future articles describe additional ways that affiliate businesses can apply other types of leverage.