Refreshing: DVD Production

About a year ago, I started dabbling with Membership Websites, particularly with Online Learning courses which were sold as membership sites.  I found it fairly successful.  I mean, I don’t have any single course that produces thousands of dollars per month, but I have multiple courses that produce income in the hundreds of dollars each month.  The great thing is that these sales of hundreds of dollars are sales that are being produced only through my own sites, not from an outside source.  My niche is a very small niche, and my sites are not juggernauts.

Because the income produced is through my own personal site, I have always felt that if I could get my course on to a large site, I could probably turn these courses into fairly good earners. My problem was, though, that I needed a way that I could get these courses set up in a format that would allow me to sell to customers using larger websites!  I never quite figured out a way to do that, and especially being able to do it where I could easily sell the item in the USA and other large countries, and to do that while I was living in the Philippines!

I figured it out!

I thought about this dilemma for hours over the past year, many hours, but I never came up with a good way to accomplish what I wanted to do.  Until recently.  My first challenge was that since my courses were using a membership site format, I needed a way to get the content on to a DVD or some other kind of media that could be sold for “portable” use.  After doing a lot of research over many months, I finally discovered a way to put a WordPress website on a DVD so that I could sell it through online stores.  Most such stores do not allow you to sell websites memberships, but selling a DVD with an entire website on it is fine.  Figuring out how to do this (it is not as easy as you might first think) really opened a lot of doors for me.

I, along with the help of my niece, took our existing course website and ported it over to a file that we could put on a DVD.  We thought it would be easy, but in fact, the process created a lot of challenges, but we figured it all out and made it work!

My Next Challenge

Well, I then faced another challenge.  The entire course, including videos, audio, and text was almost 3 GB, a lot of content!  I figured that the best way to publish this would be on a DVD disk.  Because I am located in the Philippines, and my target market is outside the Philippines, how would I be able to get the DVDs made and ship them to my suppliers in the USA and Worldwide?

Yesterday, I told you about POD book publishing, using CreateSpace, or other POD publishers.  Unfortunately, CreateSpace does not create data DVDs (they will make Music CDs or Movies on DVD), so that was not a solution.  What I needed, though, was a POD DVD publisher/creator.  After doing some more research, I found two different companies that do exactly what I needed!

Of the two companies, I decided to go with a company called “Kunaki”.  Kunaki allows you to upload your data, and the artwork for the disks and case, then they will produce professional-quality CDs and DVDs for a very low price, and I mean VERY low.

For starters, I had two courses that I wanted to offer on DVD to test out how the system works.  They are both language courses, which I am already selling online. My most popular course is a Cebuano/Bisaya language course.  Cebuano (also called Bisaya in some areas) is the main language spoken in the southern part of the Philippines.  My other course is a Tagalog Course, Tagalog is the national language of the Philippines, but most widely spoken in the northern region of the country.

I started out by getting the whole DVD setup ready for the Cebuano course and uploaded it to Kunaki.  Once I had the data all uploaded, Kunaki would manufacture a disk for me at any time, and ship it usually within 24 to 48 hours.  I had one disk made and sent to my son, who is in the States right now.  The disk was shipped to him within 24 hours in this case.  The cost?  The DVD, which is color printed and in a Jewel Case was $1, and the shipping charge was $4.30, for a total price of $5.30.  My son had the DVD within just a few days.  I wanted to send it to my son first, for testing, so he could check the quality of the disk and make sure everything worked OK.  He checked it and everything was perfect!  Looked very high quality, and worked fine.  Next, I followed the same process with the Tagalog course and it turned out excellent as well.

So many possibilities

After finding Kunaki and checking out their service, I have thought of so many things I could do using their service. There are just so many different things that I could publish on DVD or CD and sell them via mail order!  Kunaki will drop ship all of the merchandise to my customers, and from what I have seen so far, they are reliable and produce a great quality product.  Now, after trying them and seeing what they can do, I have ideas for dozens of products that I can produce and fulfill the orders using Kunaki’s great service!

I feel that finding Kunaki and verifying that they can do what I want and need will open the doors to many more income producing ventures for me!  Also, using the method that we developed for putting WordPress on a DVD makes it where I can produce some excellent quality products to put on those DVDs.  Keep reading my Refresh Series this week and I will be sharing more information on what I am doing with the DVDs, where I am selling them, and how.  Some of what I am doing might surprise you!