In Information Product Marketing And Your Affiliate Marketing Business, 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.

Since 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, they can be well worth your time and effort.  There is virtually no overhead, your product can be delivered to your customer 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.

But you need to know before getting started, that writing and putting together your first information products can be a daunting task (unless you’re an accomplished author of course).  However, it’s a pretty sure bet that most, if not everyone, 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 in order to sell your information – it must provide useful, valuable tips or advice to the purchaser, and be of a high standard.

If you’re stuck trying to come up with an idea – or niche – for your product, Make Your Knowledge Sell from SiteSell.com is the most comprehensive book you’ll find anywhere 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.  Nothing is left to the imagination…..and you can download the ebook instantly!

Is Your Chosen Info Product Marketable?

Before spending a lot of valuable time putting a product together, do some research and make sure there is a market for the information that you have in mind, or if perhaps 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.  You can 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 as to 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.

Now, if you’ve decided at this point that all of this sounds too time-consuming or downright overwhelming….

Consider Outsourcing or Private Label Rights Content…

If all of this sounds like more than you’re prepared for – or have time to take on (it does take time and work) you might consider outsourcing the whole job – assuming your budget permits it. Monica, from The Writers Manifesto has written on many different topics, and can even optimize your content for the search engines. You can also find experienced writers at elance.com or guru.com – or you can search online for qualified or recommended ghostwriters.

With a project of this size, you may want to have the person you’ve hired write a trial chapter before committing to the complete project. This way, you will know if you have hired the right person for the job.

Another very popular, less-expensive, and much easier way to accomplish all of this is to purchase and re-write material that other publishers have written already. Just make sure it’s Private Label Rights content with rebranding rights, so that you can modify it to fit your niche – and include yourself as the author.

You can get very professional, well-written material for a fraction of what it will cost you in terms of time and trouble if that’s what you need to do.  Just tailor the purchased information to what you want to accomplish on your website with it. And don’t forget to monetize it – if you choose – by embedding links to products that you promote.

If you haven’t tried any content providers yet, and are not sure which ones you’d like to try, I have included a number of the ones that I have tried and recommend to others in my article Excellent Sources For Private Label Content.  As I have mentioned before, you can get free articles from the article banks such as ezinearticles.com, but in order to modify your content to your liking, you need to pay some of these sites a visit.  You’ll have instant access to more content than you’ll probably ever need.

When you’re ready to pull it all together – I highly recommend you get a superior, user-friendly software designed just for packaging information.  There are a number of them available which will help to make it much easier to create your eBooks.

Once you have finished your new product – you might consider signing up as a Clickbank publisher.  With over 100,000 affiliates ready to promote products from their websites, Clickbank could help to potentially put your product in front of millions of customers. They 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 – and one that you can profit from indefinitely.  Once you’ve created it and covered the costs (very minimal) of putting it together – all future sales are profit.  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.