Introduction
Traditional businesses require a lot of overhead to effectively run and manage. You generally have to pay for office space, warehouse space, inventory, and a storefront. You have employees who require a paycheck and benefits. You have to pay for products, or create your own from expensive raw materials. You also have to deal with packaging and shipping.
The info-product business actually has many great benefits over selling physical products:
- Once created, you can sell a digital product again and again without having to create something new.
- Digital products require no raw resources as physical products do.
- Digital products don’t require you to keep stock, package items, or ship anything.
- Selling digital products can be done from home very easily, so you don’t need a physical location.
- You won’t need to hire any employees until your sales volume requires the extra support.
- Once you hire employees, your business can operate mostly on autopilot for passive income.
These are just a few of the many benefits of selling digital products over physical products, and there are definitely many more!
In this report, you are going to learn how to get started with your own info-product business. We’re going to concentrate on marketing online, because the overhead is much lower than trying to market your products offline. In fact, many online marketing methods are free!
Choosing A Topic
The first step is to choose a topic for your information product. If you’re an expert in a particular topic, you might want to consider creating your first info-product in that area. This will make it faster and easier to create the product.
There are two types of markets you will want to consider:
- Desperate markets
- Passionate markets
Desperate markets are those in which the typical user has a problem that he is desperate to solve. These niches include things like acne, weight loss, headaches, back pain, insomnia, and other such niches.
These niches are great for creating information products, because people will often do almost anything to solve their problems, including buying information products.
Passionate niches are those in which the typical user has some type of passion or hobby that they really care about. Examples include niches like golf, baseball card collecting, gaming, fishing, and other similar sports and hobbies.
Choosing A Format
Most digital products are available in e-book format, which is a type of book that is downloadable and read on a computer or other electronic device. But there are other formats for digital products, too.
Video is a very popular format. Some people prefer their information in video format because it is more entertaining, but you have to keep in mind that not everyone enjoys video content.
There are also people on slow Internet connections that cannot view online videos, so you should be sure to offer written content for those who can’t download videos.
Audio is another possibility. You could read your e-book and put it into audio format, hire a voiceover artist to do it for you, or you could offer add on audio files that enhance your product. For example, if you have a meditation product, you could offer soothing music or nature sounds.
You could also use a combination of these formats and create a package deal. This would make your offer more appealing to a wider audience, and it would also make it appear to be more valuable than it might if it were only a single book.
Creating The Product
If you have the ability, you can create the product yourself. Some people can write a 40-50-page e-book in a couple of days to a week, but others need much longer than that.
If you’re not a fast writer or you don’t feel confident with your writing ability, you can always hire someone to write your book for you. You can have a decent e-book written for as little as $200, or you can get a really great book for $500.
If you aren’t very good with technical stuff, you might need to hire someone to create videos for you. You can have a very simple video created for as little as $50, or a longer video for $100-$200, including voice talent.
If you want extremely high-quality, lengthy videos, you may have to pay a bit more, but remember—you can sell these videos over and over again without any printing or shipping costs!
You can also outsource the creation of audio products in the same way you can video. Find someone who has a great speaking voice and have them read your e-book or read a script that you’ve written. This should be fairly inexpensive, costing around $50-$200 depending on the length of the script.
Here are the top freelance marketplaces where you can create a listing based on your requirements:
http://www.Guru.com
http://www.ScriptLance.com
http://www.eLance.com
http://www.RentACoder.com
If you need to take a more affordable route to creating your information product, you can purchase resale rights or private label rights (PLR) to products that have already been created and simply re-brand them as your own.
If you create the product yourself, the only fees you will incur in product development will typically be the cost of the domain (about $10) and the cost of hosting (usually about $10 to $20 per month).
Creating A Sales Page
It’s best to hire a professional to create your sales page unless you know you’re a good copywriter. If your sales page is poorly written, your product probably isn’t going to convert very well.
You may also want to hire someone to create professional graphics for your sales page. This may also increase conversions by increasing trust and confidence.
In addition to the sales page itself, you will have to create a page you can send buyers to in order to download their products after they buy.
You may also want to have a page to send affiliates to so they can get banners and other promotional material to promote your product. Having affiliates is a great way to get traffic and sales without spending money up front for marketing.
You can also use a free template for the design and save money that way, and you can write the sales copy yourself by emulating other products in your niche. Don’t copy, just look at them for inspiration.
Taking Payments
If you want money instantly and aren’t interested in paying a commission to affiliates, you could take payments with PayPal. They charge a very reasonable fee, and they are extremely easy to use.
You can also have affiliates with PayPal if you use a special script. There are many PayPal affiliate scripts available, but most are fairly expensive, and many affiliates won’t trust you to pay them unless they know and trust you already.
If you want to have affiliates, it’s a better idea to use a system like ClickBank. They have an affiliate system built in, and they already have thousands of active affiliates available to promote quality products.
It’s a good idea to pay affiliates at least 50% commission. If there are other products in your niche, you will need to offer a competitive commission rate in order to get affiliates to choose to promote your product over others. You may have to pay as much as 75% if there is a lot of commission.
Still, you pay nothing up front, and if affiliates make no sales, they won’t get paid anything. You may think it’s not good to lose 75% of your money to an affiliate, plus the fees ClickBank charges to process payments, but those are sales you wouldn’t have gotten anyway if the affiliate didn’t send them.
Marketing The Product
Marketing the product is probably the hardest part, but if you have affiliates they can do most of the work for you! This is one reason why it’s such a great idea to have affiliates!
There are many different ways to promote your products. We’re going to take a look at some of the best ways to promote information products.
Article Marketing
This is a great way to get traffic and sales for free. Just write articles of 300-500 words on topics in your niche and submit them to article directories.
Some good directories to submit to include:
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.buzzle.com
http://www.goarticles.com
PPC
Pay-per-click marketing can be tricky and expensive to learn, but once you have mastered it, the traffic usually converts quite well.
The major player in the PPC market is Google AdWords. The ads run on the Google search engine, and can also appear on the “Content Network” if you choose.
The Content Network is comprised of all of the sites that run Google AdSense ads in exchange for a percentage of the revenue earned for clicks that come from the ads on their sites.
This can bring in thousands of clicks practically overnight, but you have to work hard to make sure you write ads that convert well and have a sales page that will maximize conversions. Otherwise you won’t be profitable with PPC.
Forum Marketing
When you post on a forum, you are often allowed to have a “signature” at the end of every post you make.
In this signature file, you can add a link to your sales page. Just keep in mind that some forums do not allow links in signatures, and others don’t allow commercial links.
Before posting, check the forum rules to be sure you’re allowed to post commercial links in your signature. Also, never ask people to click the link in your signature. This could get you banned from most forums.
Conclusion
Creating information products is quick and easy, and it’s much cheaper than starting your typical physical product based business.
You can have your own information product up and running in as little as 72 hours. In fact, you could have one up in just a couple of hours if you use PLR!
If you’re looking for a simple business that can run practically on autopilot, this is exactly what you’ve been looking for.
Get started now and you could be making money in no time!
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