You need a new roof on your house. What do you do? You ask your friend who she hired put the roof on her house last year.

This is a shortcut nearly all of us take in life, using the recommendation of other people instead of doing our own due diligence and research.

After all, your friend probably didn’t do any research, didn’t get several different bids, didn’t check on all the references of each company and so forth. Your friend probably did exactly what you’re doing by asking someone who they recommended.

Word of mouth is powerful. When someone comes to me asking for help or coaching, the first thing I ask is how they initially heard about me.

Almost always it’s from another marketer. “I heard Marketer X mention you on a call.” “I read your ABC report because Marketer Y was selling it.” “Marketer Z recommended your products and here I am.”

These folks find me the same way I find someone to put a new roof on my house.

Now here’s the trick and it’s a beauty:

This guy I know – we’ll call him Ralph – is quasi famous in the marketing realm these days. But back when he wasn’t as well known, he decided to white label much of his content. We’re talking about maybe 50 reports, some videos, a couple of ebooks, several courses and so forth. It was a ton of stuff.

He held back his best and more recent products and content for his own use, but everything else was up for grabs with white label licenses.

This means other marketers paid him for the right to sell his stuff, but there was a catch: Marketers who bought the white label rights could not change his stuff in any way. They had to leave Ralph’s name and URL on everything they sold.

Ralph’s marketing friends told him he was nuts because white labeling would devalue the products and his good name. They said he was giving away his business. They said it would be the end of him.

Not true, because here’s what happened:

First, Ralph made a lot of money selling the white label rights to other marketers. He was able to show how well they converted by sharing his stats, and the rights sold like hotcakes to marketers who knew a good deal when they saw one.

Second, these other marketers made a lot of money selling Ralph’s products. Remember, they got to keep all of the profits they made, so they promoted them like crazy.

Third, thousands of people who had never heard of Ralph before purchased his products, read and consumed his stuff and then went straight to the source to get more.

Ralph’s list of buyers swelled to epic proportions. Think about this… these were people who had already read Ralph’s reports or watched his videos. They liked what they saw so much, they clicked over to Ralph’s website to get more of his content. They signed up to Ralph’s list and many of them immediately started buying Ralph’s premium content because they already knew, liked and trusted Ralph.

Whoa.

If you don’t see the power in this, reread that last paragraph again.

Some of these people went on to spend thousands of dollars to get coaching from Ralph, too.

Ralph didn’t need to hard sell to all of these new subscribers because they already knew him and loved his content and products. There was no resistance to overcome.

A marketer they already trusted recommended they buy Ralph’s report, video, course or book. They liked it and became Ralph’s customer, too.

It’s incredibly simple. I wish I could tell you there was more to it, but there wasn’t. Ralph placed a compelling offer in each piece of white label content, right after the title page. “Come to Ralph.com/wow and get a free copy of Blow Me Away Marketing.” That’s it. Names have been changed, of course.

Could you do this yourself? Yes, if you already have products you can white label. But what if you don’t have a lot of content for which you can sell the rights?

My suggestion would be to get busy. Spend a year creating lots of great content, including dynamite reports that solve a single problem. Sell them, build your list, and keep track of your stats.

Then in the second year, offer your list the white label rights. Tell them the stats of how well these products sell. Be sure to include your name, landing page and call to action in every piece of content.

And watch your new customers join your ranks by the flock.

Really, it sounds like a blast to me, and something I’ll be working on myself.