In “Information Product Marketing“, we discussed the potential of making a significant income by creating and selling your own information products, as well as starting your own affiliate program so that you can have other webmasters promote your info products for a fee, usually a commission.
Digital products such as ebooks, articles, ecourses and others that can be delivered electronically over the internet have a tremendous advantage over anything else that you could sell online.
There is virtually no overhead, they’re delivered instantly, and 100% of the profit is yours – minus the commissions you pay your affiliates, of course, should you decide to have your own affiliate program.
Writing and putting together your first information products may seem daunting if you’re not an accomplished author, but it’s a pretty sure bet that most everybody can write informative articles…just write about what you truly enjoy.
For instance, we all have a lifetime of knowledge about something – a favorite hobby or passion – or maybe a problem we’ve helped somebody solve. If you can relate that information, or tell a short story, then you can write an article – and that article can make you money.
Information products can be written on virtually any subject you can imagine, from recipes, to work-at-home, to parenting, to – fill in the blank. But when you’re selling information, you’ve got to make sure it provides valuable and useful tips or advice to the purchaser – it must be of a high standard.
If you’re stuck trying to come up with an idea – or niche – for your product, try Make Your Knowledge Sell from SiteSell.com. It’s a very comprehensive book for helping you not only brainstorm ideas, but it also leads you step-by-step through publishing your idea, and how to market it on the internet. It’s totally free and you can download the ebook instantly!
Is Your Chosen Info Product Marketable?
Unless you have a crystal ball, it’s hard to know for sure whether or not a particular product will sell. You’ll have a much better chance of picking a winner, however, if you’ll do a little snooping around before putting a lot of valuable time into its creation.
You may find there’s not much of a market for the topic you have in mind and that you need to consider another area. You can do a free keyword search using Google’s Keyword Tool and find out if the area you’re considering is searched by a lot of people.
- Visit online forums related to your target market, and get a feel for what others are saying about it
- Websites that offer products or services that are similar to your chosen interest are also excellent places to spend some time
- ask your customers what they need – if you have newsletter subscribers, send an email out and ask them what they’d like to see more of. You can even offer them a free gift (such as a free report) in exchange for their feedback
- a poll on your website works well also.
Start With An Outline Or A Table of Contents.
Check the TOC of other books (and ebooks) that are written about a similar subject as yours (you can do this online at most large book stores) – and this will give you lots of ideas for the most important things you need to include in yours.
Go through the outline and brainstorm each section until you’re happy with the results. The outline breaks the process down into attainable steps – and when you have that nailed down – you’ll need to go through each section and research that specific topic. Have you found out as much as you can about that topic so that your visitors can depend on coming to your website to learn something new?
Putting It All Together
Once your research is done, it’s a matter of sitting down and actually doing the writing – section by section. With your TOC and research already pre-written, it shouldn’t be too difficult to go through (following your structure) and put the first phase of the product together. Some writers even find it helpful to record their thoughts or have another person “interview” them. Once the audio is transcribed, they already have a big portion of their info product in hand.
Having done a very, very rough draft of your book – go back through again and start editing, changing things around, omitting items here and there, and so on until you have a finished draft.
Set it aside for at least 24 hours – then go back and repeat the editing process all over again until you’re pleased with what you have produced. The final step in this phase is to hand it over to a trusted relative or friend who can look it over and give you honest, constructive criticism.
If all of this sounds too time-consuming or downright overwhelming and your budget permits, try outsourcing some or all of the work to places like elance.com or textbroker.com (and there are hundreds of others). You could also purchase and re-write private label rights material.
Enjoy The Fruits Of Your Labor!
Once you have finished your new product – you might consider signing up as a Clickbank publisher. With hundreds of thousands affiliates ready to promote products from their websites, Clickbank could help to potentially put your product in front of millions of customers. They will track all of your sales and pay affiliates’ commissions on your behalf, so that your only worries are getting your next products started.
Your first information product should be a very rewarding experience – one you’ll enjoy researching and writing – whether you write from scratch yourself, or choose to use the help of plr products.
Once you’ve created it and covered the costs (very minimal) of putting it together – all future sales are profit, and you can profit from it indefinitely. You do the work once and the product continues to work for you over and over again.
However you decide to go about it, just go ahead and take the first step toward creating your first info products. Make sure you do your homework before you start writing (take lots of notes) and this will save you lots of time and headaches in the long run. The sooner you get this step out of the way, the sooner your affiliate marketing business is going to take off!
