Bob Serling – The Asset Licensing Blueprint

143 MB

The Asset Licensing Blueprint

How to make big profits with small assets…
over and over again

From: Bob Serling

About 15 years ago, I had an experience that seemed ordinary at first, but ended up changing my life forever. And I’m betting it will do the same for you.

Here’s what happened. I had just shut down my marketing consulting business to co-found a software company with two partners. And since I had a marketing background, I was in charge of developing all our prospecting materials.

Like any new business, our greatest need was creating an effective prospecting piece that would have a strong appeal to potential customers. And that appeal had to set us apart from our competitors, because so many of them had been in business a lot longer than us.

So I put together a short, but very effective prospecting letter — just a page and a half in length. We then sent it to the COOs of a couple dozen Fortune 500 companies.

The next thing I knew, that letter won our little 3-person company appointments to demonstrate our software to six Fortune 500 companies. A few of those companies ended up licensing our software which put us on a pretty steep growth path.

Now, as cool as this was, it was not what changed my life forever.

That happened next, about 18 months later.

You see, after just 18 months our software company was bought out by a larger competitor which made us all a nice chunk of change and freed me up to pursue other things.

And what I decided to pursue was a way of applying what I learned about licensing software to licensing marketing campaigns. Because with licensing, instead of creating something new for each client, you create something once and then license it out over and over again.

The mindset shift that changed my life forever

The first thing I did was re-open my marketing company. But now, instead of creating new marketing campaigns from scratch for each client, I decided to take only my most effective campaigns from the past and license those same campaigns to dozens of clients.

In addition, because these campaigns had a proven track record, I could guarantee their results and command very lucrative fees.

I started with that little page and a half prospecting letter that had been so successful for our software company. I quickly found a company that sold a completely different kind of software and licensed my letter to them.

They sent the letter to their prospects and waited to see what would happen, hoping that they’d hear back from a few prospects over the next couple of weeks. But instead of taking a couple of weeks, the next day my client received a phone call requesting an urgent meeting in response to their letter.

The following day, my client flew to the prospect’s location, had a short lunch meeting, and came home with an agreement for a $25 million deal!

THAT was the moment I knew with complete certainty that my plan to repeatedly license the same marketing campaigns over and over again would change my life forever. And I continued to license that same letter to 17 different industries — and hundreds of other marketing consultants — earning from $1,750 to over $30,000 every time I licensed it.

So what does all of this mean to YOU? My new program, The Asset Licensing Blueprint, gives you a foolproof blueprint anyone can use to quickly and easily duplicate my success. Best of all, it shows you how to hire inexpensive freelancers to do all or most of the work (including the copywriting) while you sit back and collect substantial licensing fees — over and over again.

I’ll give you more details on the complete program in just a minute. Before I do, let me show you another example you can benefit from.

Google proves that asset licensing works

Asset licensing works for much more than licensing marketing campaigns. It can also be used to quickly create and license small products and services.

So let me show you a real live example of how lucrative this can be. To start, do a Google search on “Power Copywriting for the Internet”. Be sure to enclose this title in quotation marks or you’ll get false results on your search.

When you do this search, what you’ll see is that there are tens of thousands of results returned. And almost all of those results are for web sites that are selling this course.

I originally wrote this course about 15 years ago and it took roughly six hours to complete using my Rapid Asset Creation process. I then sold the course for a couple of years and followed that up by creating two forms of licenses that allowed people to buy the resale rights.

Now, to me, that course is severely out of date because it was written so long ago. But as you can see, sales of the course are still going strong after all this time.

However, I did make a critical mistake in licensing the rights to this course. You see, at the time, I didn’t fully understand the power of using licensing to create long-term streams of recurring income. So I charged a one-time licensing fee, rather than an annually renewable fee.

With that one-time fee, the revenue stopped once I quit licensing the program. But with an annually renewable fee, I would have seen recurring revenue for the full 15 years. So while I made about $225,000 from licensing this asset, I could have easily made millions.

Even so, $225,000 isn’t too shabby for about six hours of initial work! In addition, I’ve created dozens of other small assets that I’ve licensed over and over again to hundreds of businesses. And in my program, I’ll show you exactly how you can do this too, using freelancers to do most or all of the work while you focus on licensing out your assets and collecting substantial fees.

Client Case Study: How to quickly create and license
your own assets to dozens of other companies

Here’s one more asset creation and licensing example I know you’ll find very intriguing. There are seven different ways to quickly create assets you can license to dozens, and even hundreds of companies.

What I want to do here is share a short Case Study of just one of these seven asset creation and licensing strategies. This strategy focuses on creating small, customized booklets that you license to your clients. Your clients then give these booklets away or sell them to their prospects and customers.

Now, you may be wondering why your clients wouldn’t just do this on their own. Some do. But there are literally millions of other companies that need additional products and services to offer to their customers, but they don’t have the skills, the time or the staff to create them.

At the same time, they’re always in need of quality content they can use to provide added value to their customers. And once you understand my simple recipe for creating high-quality content over and over again, you can easily produce dozens of these booklets and license them to as many companies as you’d like.

So let’s take a look at a short case study of exactly how this can be done. One of my original students, who is now a good friend of mine, creates these types of booklets for a number of niche industries. Essentially, these booklets are tips for getting better results in some aspect of your business or your life.

Using my Rapid Asset Creation recipe, he quickly creates the content in about two hours. Next, he has a professionally designed cover created for $100 to $200.

Finally, there are areas on the cover and within the text where the booklets are customized for each client. This is done with a simple “find and replace” operation that takes about two minutes.

In addition, there’s a resource box within each booklet that says something like, “This booklet was custom developed by ABC Publishing. To find out how to get customized booklets like this to use in your business, contact us at: your contact information”.

So not only are these booklets licensed out repeatedly for direct revenue, but they also act as a lead generator. How sweet is that!

So well does this asset licensing strategy work?

I still remember the first time my friend used it about 15 years ago. His very first deal was for 11,000 copies of his booklet that he licensed to a single client at $2 per copy.

Now, $2 per copy may not sound like much compared to what you might sell a booklet for. But by licensing it to the client to use 11,000 copies, my friend immediately made $22,000 on that single project. And that was achieved for around $150 and just 3 or 4 hours of his time.

Plus, because your license is renewable every year, that same project would bring you an additional $22,000 every year for many years — simply for sending out the renewal contract. Not to mention that you can license the same booklet to dozens of other clients for many years.

Now, this is just a quick overview of one of the seven different ways to rapidly create and license small products and services. But it clearly demonstrates how profitable it can be to create and license small assets.

And that brings me to one more critical concept that makes licensing assets the best opportunity for any entrepreneur to quickly gain financial freedom. So let me show you…

3 practical steps to gaining financial freedom

Usually when someone talks about gaining financial freedom, it’s some “get rich quick” scheme that has little or no hope of working. So let me make something abundantly clear right from the start. Creating and licensing small assets is not a “get rich quick” scheme in any way, shape or form.

It requires work and dedication. Now, that work is really enjoyable, but it’s real work that requires real time and commitment. So if you’re dreaming about “push button wealth” or some nonsense like that, you should stop reading this right now, because you are not going to find that here.

However, if you want to build a great income quickly and use that as a foundation to add more and more layers of income and lock in financial independence, creating and licensing small assets is the best and most practical route I’ve ever found for doing that.

Why? Because the asset licensing business uses a 3-step model I call ICE. Here’s what this stands for and how the steps in this business model work:

I — Income

C — Control

E — Equity

Income. When you quickly create small assets to license, you can generate significant income immediately. As you’ve already seen in the examples above, there are literally millions of businesses of all sizes that need products and services that add value for their customers. And they’re happy to pay a reasonable fee to add those products and services to their offerings without having to invest any staff, time or money in developing those products and services.

So it’s relatively easy to close your first asset licensing deals very quickly. And using my proprietary asset creation and licensing process, there’s no limit to the number of products and services you can develop — and profit from for years to come.

Control. Creating and licensing your own assets gives you a powerful element of control that normally would only be available to large, established businesses.

You see, creating a product or service is one thing, but once it’s created, in the traditional business model, you then must find a large number of people to buy it. And it often takes years to build a large list of satisfied customers. In addition, there’s customer service, inventory, a shopping cart to process orders, credit card processing, fulfillment of orders, hiring and managing staff and many other resources that are required to run a traditional business.

However, with the asset licensing business model, you don’t need any of those support elements I just mentioned. All you need is the ability to create dozens of assets that you control through the licensing process. Then hundreds of companies that have invested a tremendous amount of time and money to develop all those other resources essentially loan you the use of them by rolling your products out to their customers and supplying all the other support that’s required to do this.

Instead of having to create all the resources normally required to grow a business, your business is greatly simplified by focusing exclusively on creating more and more assets to license out. And you have complete control over how many assets you create, when you create them and who you license them to.

Equity. If you truly want to achieve financial independence, then you must hold equity in a business or other assets. When a company is sold, it’s the value of its assets that determine how much or how little that company sells for.

Now, when you create multiple assets that are licensed out and generate recurring revenue, the equity value you hold is determined by how many assets you’ve created and how many licensees you have for them. If someone can simply step in and take over running your licensing business without missing a penny in revenue, that’s a business with a substantial amount of equity. And companies will pay significant amounts to buy some or all of your assets.

Over the past 25 years, I’ve sold off a number of the assets I created. On one deal, I received $240k up front plus stock in the company I sold my asset to. The bottom line is this: owning assets that generate revenue and have equity is the key to achieving true financial freedom.

Why the market is ripe for asset licensing

The market has never been better for asset licensing than it is today. Now the truth is, the market has always been good for asset licensing. After all, if you create something that provides a way for companies to make more sales quickly with no development time required on their part, why wouldn’t dozens of companies want to license it from you?

But there’s also a very specific reason why now is the best time I’ve ever seen for asset licensing. You see, because any business can put up a web site for just a couple hundred dollars, the amount of competition in every market has grown considerably.

At the same time, companies have less money and less staff to work with and usually don’t have the luxury of devoting significant resources to creating new products and services. Yet they desperately need new products and services to stay a step ahead of a sea of competitors.

So when you create an asset that adds substantial value to what companies are already doing and they can use it immediately, they avoid having to invest a penny in development and can generate additional profits right away. And it’s this synergistic relationship between you as an asset developer and the millions of companies that desperately need more products and services but don’t have the resources to devote to developing them that makes this the best time in history for profiting from this simple business model.

7 more major advantages of asset licensing

In addition to what I’ve just covered, there are a number of other advantages asset licensing gives you that you don’t get from other business models. Let’s take a look a 7 more of these advantages.

Advantage #1: Create it once, license it hundreds of times

I’ve touched on this already and you’ve seen it demonstrated in the examples I gave you, but this point is so important that I want to emphasize it again. One of the key factors in building any successful business is that it’s scalable. That means that it can be expanded without any significant level of difficulty.

The asset licensing model is completely scalable. Any asset that you create only needs to be created once. Then, with just minor modifications, it can be licensed to dozens or even hundreds of companies.

In addition, you also use the same prospecting strategies and marketing pieces to license your assets every time. So rather than re-inventing the wheel with each new client, the time it takes to service each client is as low as possible. And this frees up more time you can devote to creating even more assets that you can license out.

Advantage #2: The most leverage you could
ever want is in other people’s resources

This is another critical point that bears repeating. You see, what really makes asset licensing so profitable is that you never have to create any of the resources that make traditional businesses so successful. Instead, you count on those businesses to invest all the time and money in creating those resources and then create assets that complement them.

By doing this, you harness all the advantages of those resources but you don’t commit any of the time or money that’s necessary to develop them. You also have very little risk. First of all, you’re only creating assets for companies that already have a strong need for them. So there’s very little risk that your asset will fail.

Second, even in the rare instances where a licensable asset does fail, the time and cost to develop it was negligible, so you lose very little. Then you simply move on to creating other licensable assets.

Advantage #3: Small assets are as profitable — and often
more profitable — than large assets

Contrary to being successful with a traditional business model where “bigger is better”, that’s rarely the case when it comes to creating and licensing assets. There are two reasons why small assets are often more profitable than larger assets.

First, when you use my proprietary Rapid Asset Creation process, you can create a complete asset very quickly. Many of the assets I create take just 2 to 4 hours to have in a finished state.

Second, because the licensing fees for smaller assets are inexpensive to your prospects, it’s easier to close many more licensing deals. But remember, it’s only the fee per unit that’s small, which doesn’t mean that your deal will be small. As you saw in one of the examples above, you can often license thousands of copies of the same small asset all at once, making the profit you realize on each deal quite significant.

Then, by using the attractive fees of these small assets to close hundreds of deals, you can easily hit six and seven-figures with a single asset or a combination of small assets. And that’s a unique advantage that you’d be hard pressed to find with any other business model.

Advantage #4: Your entire asset licensing business
can be run with little or no staff

You can easily run your entire asset licensing business with just you and a part time assistant. As you’ve already seen, you don’t need the majority of the resources required by a traditional business. Your clients provide all of those resources.

The assets you license to them simply leverage the resources they already have in place to generate more profits for your clients. So they’re almost always eager to renew their license with you year after year.

In addition, when you’re creating your small assets to license, you use the exact same process every time, so your development time and costs are minimal. And the licensing process you’ll learn to close your deals is completely repeatable with each client, so it doesn’t require much time, money or staff for any of these areas.

What this means is that your entire asset licensing business can easily be run with just you and an assistant if you choose. You can also build it out much larger by adding more staff, but you are totally in control of that decision.

I personally run my entire licensing business with just an assistant as I’m not fond of managing a lot of people.

Advantage #5: There is often a multiplication factor
for any asset licensing deal

Each asset you license to a client can easily lead to the licensing of 3 or 4 additional assets. Don’t forget, the demand for quality products and services is extremely high in order for companies to stay ahead of their competition. But at the same time, they rarely have the staff, time and money to devote to creating these assets on their own.

So when you create a licensable asset that builds strong customer loyalty or sells well to your client’s customers, it’s nearly certain that creating more assets with similar characteristics will be extremely easy to license to your same clients.

So very often, a common request you’ll hear once you’ve licensed an asset to a client and they’ve begun to give or sell it to their customers is, “This is fantastic, what else do you have for me?”

Advantage #6: Asset licensing doesn’t crash and burn
when technology or culture changes — it just gets stronger

Whenever technology or culture change, a lot of so-called “hot marketing techniques” become obsolete. Take SEO for example. With all the changes to how you win high rankings on Google, Youtube, Bing and others, what worked today can easily kill your rankings tomorrow.

Or how about the browser wars? If your business depends on any aspect of Windows, and sometimes on Apple’s OS, what you’re currently offering could become obsolete with the next update Microsoft or Apple releases.

On the other hand, change is good — very good — for asset licensing. Because changes always stimulate more need in the market for products and services that address those changes, which opens up more opportunities for you to fill by creating and licensing new products and services.

So rather than being at the mercy of changes that can decimate other businesses, you simply ride the wave of change to create greater profits. And that’s an aspect of asset licensing I’ve profited from many times and personally love!

Advantage #7: Everything we’ve just covered can be used
to license your clients’ assets for them

The exact same strategies and processes I’ve covered so far — and I’ll cover in more detail in the next section — can all be used to license your clients’ assets for them. You see, almost every business has existing products and services that other companies in related industries would willingly pay to license from them.

So you can easily apply the same strategies to broker asset licensing deals for your clients for a fee or a fee plus a share of the profits. And since these asset licensing deals are structured to generate renewable, recurring income for your clients, that means you get recurring payments too when you structure your deals properly.

Now, with all these benefits of asset licensing in mind, let’s take a deeper look at…

What’s included in The Asset Licensing Blueprint program

The Asset Licensing Blueprint is a comprehensive program that consists of these major components:

The exact prospecting and marketing system my team and I use in my business to generate clients who are eager to license your assets — and happy to pay annually renewable licensing fees year after year. This focuses on a highly effective form of personalized lead engagement that I developed specifically for licensing assets.
My complete traffic generation program, “The Marketing Ladder Blueprint” for quickly and efficiently building a responsive list for any market. In addition to personalized lead engagement, you’ll also master using larger scale passive formats to build your list and increase lead generation.
7 asset licensing strategies, broken down into simple blueprints you can use over and over again to optimize your profits. I’ll give you more details on all 7 of these strategies in just a minute.
Complete training on exactly how to quickly customize each asset for your clients
Every marketing document you need to effectively license your assets. This includes all the emails, letters, and follow-up pieces used in every step of the marketing process.
Every legal agreement and document you need for your asset licensing contracts
Full support through the Asset Licensing Q&A Hotline where members’ questions are answered on all aspects of asset licensing
And much more

A quick overview of all 7 of my asset licensing strategies

As I’ve mentioned, there are 7 strategies I’ve developed for rapidly creating and licensing small assets. All are very effective, but at the same time, you can easily build a highly profitable company by using just a couple of the strategies if you choose.

That’s another aspect of asset licensing that makes it so potent — you have the flexibility to use as many or as few of these 7 strategies as you choose. So let me give you more details on each strategy.

Asset Licensing Strategy #1: The Ad Baron Strategy

As you may know, I’ve written and licensed out marketing campaigns to hundreds of businesses. Each time, I simply modify a few sections of the campaign to customize it for each client. This usually takes just ten minutes or so and I receive a fee ranging from $2,750 to as much as $30,000 for each campaign.

What makes this even better is that when you use my proprietary ad creation formula, this can be done with practically any advertising medium. You can create reusable email campaigns, Facebook ads and campaigns, pay-per-click ads, landing pages, space ads, direct mail pieces, improved offers — and much more.

In addition, you can easily do this even if you don’t have a shred of copywriting experience. That’s because in this program, I show you exactly how and where to find quality freelancers who will do all the work for you at rock bottom prices.

And you’ll also get all the training and marketing pieces you need to find and close prospects, find and work with freelancers, and identify the hottest markets for working in with this powerful strategy.

Asset Licensing Strategy #2: Private labeling

Any product or service you currently have or that you create can be private labeled for other businesses. You create the product or service and other companies sell them as their own. In exchange, you receive a licensing fee for every copy they sell.

I’ve personally done this with a variety of information products and business services, ranging from inexpensive pieces to ultra-expensive. And this is a licensing strategy that’s commonly used with thousands of products worldwide.

For example, Intel sells and licenses its computer chips to practically every computer manufacturer in the world. Most even prominently display the label “Intel Inside” on their computers. Yet you don’t think of your computer as an Intel brand, you think of it as a Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard, Sony or whatever brand you’ve purchased.

I’ll give you a complete blueprint for using this lucrative strategy to create as many small products and services as you want and private label them to dozens or hundreds of other businesses.

Asset Licensing Strategy #3: Bulk media

This is the strategy you saw in the Case Study where one of my students made $22,000 licensing out his short booklet to a single client in his first deal. And in addition to booklets, you can also do this with CDs, mp3s, user guides, tip sheets and many other forms of content.

With this strategy, I lay out exactly how to do this with a variety of media formats, how to set each piece up for quick customization, how to use them to drive more leads to your business, and of course, how to find the ideal prospects to license your bulk media to.

This strategy has a special place in my heart because it’s the first licensing strategy I ever used in my own business. I conducted five audio interviews with leading copywriting experts, which took a total of five hours, then created bulk licenses for them that I sold to hundreds of other businesses. I made so much money with this single project, that I stopped offering copywriting services and focused on creating and licensing small business products and services. And I’m happy to share exactly how you can do this too.

Asset Licensing Strategy #4: Small services broker

This is actually a strategy that I’ve taught before, but it’s so easy to do and so lucrative, I couldn’t possibly create an asset licensing program without including an expanded version of this strategy.

Here’s how it works — and why it works so well. In any city, there are thousands of service providers in dozens of different categories. Most are very good at performing the service they offer. But 98% of them stink at marketing their services. So it becomes a constant struggle for them to stay in business and pay their bills month to month.

I’ll show you a few dead simple marketing techniques you can use to sell their services for these service providers and get a nice commission for every sale you bring them. I can’t emphasize enough how simple these marketing techniques really are — but since service providers don’t know about them, when you apply these techniques, you can create a massive wave of business.

Plus, as with all the asset licensing strategies I teach, the steps for doing this are the same regardless of how many or how few service markets you work with. So the majority of the work is automated and practically runs on its own with just minimal oversight on your part.

Asset Licensing Strategy #5: Private publishing service

This is an ultra-hot area of asset licensing that almost no one knows about. More and more frequently, businesses, authors, experts and entrepreneurs recognize the significant advantage they get by publishing a book on Kindle and iTunes. Yet few of them know how to create the proper content and then get it published on these popular platforms.

With this strategy, I show you exactly how to create riveting content regardless of who the author is or what the topic may be. And the recipe for doing this couldn’t be any easier. In just two hours, you can create and publish a complete, short book for anyone. So within just a few days, sales can start coming in from both Kindle and iTunes.

This is another strategy that may sound complicated on the surface, but when you follow my step-by-step blueprint, it’s actually incredibly easy to do. And since you follow the same recipe over and over again, you can easily hire freelancers to do the majority of the work while you collect a hefty licensing fee for each publishing project.

Asset Licensing Strategy #6: Lead generation broker

Without fail, every business needs more qualified leads on a daily basis. At the same time, they lack either the skills or staff to consistently generate all the qualified leads they need on their own.

This opens up a massive opportunity to generate leads for them, then sell or license the use of those leads to hundreds or thousands of businesses. With the blueprint I’ll give you for doing this, it’s incredibly easy for anyone to do and profit from right from the start.

I personally know of three different people who have become multi-millionaires by employing this strategy alone. And they had little or no prior experience when they launched their lead generation brokering services. When you see the blueprint they used — along with the unique twist I’ve added to make it even easier — you’ll be shocked (in the best way possible) by how easy this strategy really is to use and profit from.

Asset Licensing Strategy #7: Asset broker — help companies
license their existing assets

The final asset licensing strategy draws on many of previous strategies. You see, within any successful business, there are many assets that could be licensed and generate sizable revenue for those businesses. But businesses simply don’t understand how to do this and they certainly don’t have the staff with the proper skills for this.

So you can easily step in and offer your services to license their assets for them, using the exact same strategies as you use to license your own assets. In exchange, you receive an upfront fee plus a percentage of all profits.

With each of the previous six strategies, I’ll include a section on how to apply them to help license those same assets for other businesses. This alone exponentially increases the number of licensing deals you can make — and your profits as well.

How this program is delivered

The Asset Licensing Blueprint is designed to give you all the training and tools you need to immediately begin creating and licensing small assets. As you’ve seen above, every aspect of this immersion program is designed to accelerate your success.

Let’s take a look at what you get and how it’s delivered to you:

All training materials from my ALB Mentoring program. This material was originally presented as a live, ongoing mentoring program spread over three months — at a cost of $8,750. For just a fraction of that price, you’ll receive all the materials from the original program, covering every skill I listed above along with complete, step-by-step blueprints for implementing what you learn.The materials start with the easiest types of assets to create and license and then move on to the more advanced strategies. The purpose of this is to get you out in the real world creating and licensing assets as quickly as possible. Because this is accelerated training accompanied by a step-by-step blueprint for each strategy, it’s quite possible for you to close your first asset licensing deal within just a few weeks.
The Asset Licensing Blueprint Marketing Toolkit. This powerful resource is packed with every marketing piece you’ll need to license your assets and help other businesses license their assets. You’ll get lead generation pieces, emails, sales pieces, legal agreements and more. It’s all here in “done for you” format. Plus, all documents are in Word format so all you have to do is open them, cut and paste and you’re ready to go.If you were to pay me or any other top level copywriter to create a complete collection of marketing documents like this for you, the cost would easily exceed $75,000. But you get them all in cut-and-paste format as another advantage of being a member of this unique program.
Real life case studies of best practices you can model for your business. I’m a firm believer that one of the best ways to improve your success rate is by modeling the success of others, rather than re-inventing the wheel. So this program includes case studies of some of my most successful asset licensing deals, deals of my students and other entrepreneurs I’ve worked with, as well as members of this group as they report back with their results. Each case study will include step-by-step instructions for ethically modeling these successful practices for use in your own asset licensing deals.
Full support through the Asset Licensing Q&A Hotline. To make sure you can get answers on any aspect of asset licensing, I’m setting up a special Q&A Hotline where I’ll personally answer your questions. Here’s how this works. For the first three months this program is available, you’ll be able to email your questions to me. Then, at least twice each month (and probably more), I’ll answer as many questions as possible and post them to the members-only training site.All questions will be organized by topic, so you can easily find anything you need whether it’s for prospecting… working with any or all of the 7 asset licensing strategies… making sales presentations to clients… generating repeat business from every project… terms of your legal agreements… and much more. This is an all new component that I’ve never offered in any of my previous licensing programs. And I’m including it here to make sure you have everything you need to be as successful as possible.