Best Online Business Models, Part 4: Your Own Information Products
Back to this after a bit of a delay.
In previous installments, we’ve looked at what business models and why you should know what yours is and 2 proven-successful business models; that is, 2 different ways you WILL make money online if you do them right. They were: (1) Selling Physical Products and (2) Affiliate Marketing.
Both of those have made multi-millionaires and boatloads of people make a good living from them and you should seriously consider doing one of them (or more if you’ve already established yourself).
But, there is another online business model that is better than either of them.
More people profit from it and virtually all of the most successful Internet Marketers use it.
The statistics I’ve seen say that this business model generates multi-multi-billion dollars a year.
If you aren’t doing it, ultimately, you should be; here’s what it is and why…
Selling Your Own Information Products
Face it, every day millions of people go online looking for information and being in the business of selling information is a huge opportunity.
Even if you are a physical store or provide services or whatever you can also sell your own information products and make more money than you were.
Many times you’ll find that the information products become the largest and most profitable part of your business.
You might know I am a huge fan and follower of Dan Kennedy. One of his most successful students found out first hand just what I’m saying.
He was a mortgage broker in a good time to be a mortgage broker. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
He decided to start selling his knowledge and create his own information product. It didn’t take long for that product to make more for him, with virtually no effort, than he made as a mortgage broker.
He soon realized that he was losing money as a mortgage broker because if he devoted the time he spent doing that to his information business he’d make more money so he quite being a mortgage broker and is now a successful multi-millionaire all due to creating his own product.
How It Works
It’s pretty simple really, here are the most basic steps:
- Do research to find a product that would be in demand
- Create or have created a product that fills that demand (create it from scratch or use a Private Label Rights package as the basis for your product)
- Create a sales page to sell the product (click here to learn more about how to do that). I would also suggest create a squeeze page to get prospects onto your mailing list.
- Get traffic to your sales (or squeeze) page using the many ways to do that (click here for some ways to do that)
- Collect you money
The steps are simple but they do take time and effort. Internet Marketing is NOT a get rich quick method but it is probably a “get rich quicker than any other way short of winning the lottery!”
Virtually all the steps can be done by other people and once it is set up the “engine” just runs without you spending a lot of time on it.
Benefits of the Selling Information Products Model
One huge benefit is that you own and control the product so you can do whatever you want with it in what ever way you want to.
Of course, unlike affiliate marketing, a big benefit you get 100% of the money earned and, unlike selling physical products, another big benefit the cost of manufacturing, distribution and delivery is negligible.
You do have to have some type of way to accept payments but with places like PayPal, ClickBank, 1ShoppingCart, 2CheckOut, PayDotCom and the rest this isn’t hard. It isn’t even that hard nowadays to get your own merchant account.
You also have to provide customer support but if you have a good product, a good sales letter, and good payment and delivery system then that shouldn’t be a problem either.
Business Model Components
Partners: You’re key partners are the people who help you create the products – the writers, the designers, the technical people, etc. – and, if you use affiliates (and you should) then your affiliates.
Other, additional, partners are those who provide you products and services for the online component of your business. Examples include: Web hosting companies; Autoresponder companies; etc.
Key/Core Activities: This business has 2 core activities that you need to be successful, they are creating high quality products that people want and getting prospects to our sale page, that is, traffic generation.
Key/Core Resources: Key resources will be you ad copy writers and your traffic generation team.
Costs: You’ll have costs for the following things:
- Product research
- Product creation, including writers and graphic designers
- Sales page creation, including copywriters and graphic designers
- Webmaster to take the sales page and prepare it for the Web and put it on the Internet as well as other miscellaneous tasks
- Payment processing like PayPal or 1ShoppingCart
- Web hosting services like HostGator and Blue Host
- Customer management, usually an e-mail management/autoresponder company like Aweber
- Advertising cost, either paid traffic or the things you need to do to get “free” traffic
- Commissions, if you use affiliates to drive traffic.
Offer: You have complete control over the offer and it is a very important aspect of how many sales you make.
Client Relationships: You will need to manage this but, as I mentioned above, if you’ve created a great product and have your other things in order then the primary thing to do is to build a strong relationship with them.
Distribution Channels: You distribute through the Internet, although having affiliates or joint venture relationship is a form of distribution.
Customers: Your customers are potential from almost anywhere in the world.
Revenue: Your revenue will not be tied to your local economy or the limited number of products and services you can offer. You can also easily have multiple streams of revenue that were impossible to do with just an offline business.
Conclusion
Selling your own information products is probably the most lucrative business models for an online business.
Creation, manufacturing and delivery cost are very low, yet revenue is higher than will generally receive with physical products.
There are more costs than you will find with the affiliate marketing model but you received money revenue per sale than more than offsets the additional costs.
It isn’t tied to a market segment/niche, it isn’t tied to a geographical area, it isn’t tied to the type of products, it is a very flexible and powerful model to base the foundation of your business on.
Remember it is as simple as:
- Do research to find a product that would be in demand
- Create or have created a product that fills that demand (create it from scratch or use a Private Label Rights package as the basis for your product)
- Create a sales page to sell the product (click here to learn more about how to do that). I would also suggest create a squeeze page to get prospects onto your mailing list.
- Get traffic to your sales (or squeeze) page using the many ways to do that (click here for some ways to do that)
- Collect you money
The best information products are those with great demand in an area that you are passionate and know a lot about.
Do NOT create products that you haven’t researched to see if there is a demand no matter how interested and passionate about it. That is not a business model than is a hobby at best.
Do you sell your own information products?
Have you found the distinct advantages? If no, why do you think you haven’t?
Leave me a comment and let me know.
Talk soon,
The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdwords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com
O.Y. Don’t forget to retweet this! Use the button below or just copy and paste this into Twitter (or send it out to your list): Best Online Business Models, Part 4: Your Own Information Products http://bit.ly/2azqqm (via @DavidHusnian).
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Excellent post David.
The VERY first dollar I made online was from an information product. I did it completely wrong too…and still made money at it.
It all stemmed from my own curiosity of how to create a Favicon for websites.
I did a bunch of research simply by looking online. I took a bunch of notes, copied all the notes into a file so I could have my OWN step by step process on how to create favicons and…presto…I had my first draft already made up.
Now, all that information was readily available on the internet but it took about 2 weeks to gather all that info and put it all together in a comprehensive guide.
Even though I didn’t do any “research”, it occurred to me, out of common sense that if I was interested in “how to make a favicon” others would be too. That’s when I decided to take all that information I collected from my own research and put it all together in a sensible manner so I could sell the report “Favicons Made EZ”.
So, the whole point to all this is….
Even though all this information can be attained for “free” by doing your own research…it takes time. If you do all the research and put it together in a comprehensive guide, it’s easily sellable because you are saving your customer the time and aggravation to look up and experiment with the same things you did.
So, if you think to yourself “why would someone buy this product when they can research it themselves”…you have actually answered your own question. It’s because you have already done the work. With your info product, you can show someone the expertise they are looking for in a matter of minutes. Like my example about Favicons. Sure, you can figure it out on your own like I did. Or for a few bucks, you can just buy the information an immediately put it to work.
Think about all the stuff you’ve researched online out of pure curiosity. Now think about how many other people may have the same curiosity. Since you are researching it anyway, why not take all your notes and put it together in a pretty package so you can sell it and get paid for your time?
It may not be a best seller, but it you market it correctly and attract the people who are curious…well…you just might make a sale or two.
Good luck everybody!
Jason,
That’s a really excellent comment, it’s better than the post itself
Listen to what he says, there is literally gold there.
Also, if you need to get really professional videos for a lot less than you can get them elsewhere then go to Jason’s iflashvideo.com.
Some really big name marketers use him and I recommend it highly.
Thanks again Jason,
David
I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s “better” than the post itself. Your post actually stresses the importance of research. My comment talks about the dumb luck I got for producing an information product out of curiosity (which isn’t smart as a business model by the way). I just wanted to convey that a lot of your readers ALREADY have information products 90% done…and they don’t even know it.
I’m suggesting that they take all the research that they have already done on various topics and start from there. NOW do the research, gather the killer keywords, tweak the product to match the research (keywords, meta tags, content, etc).
For example, lets say one of your readers is interested in “postage stamps” because their nephew is into stamp collecting. Let’s say they did some research about buying stamps because they want to get a Christmas present for their nephew…..
Well, you could easily take that research you JUST did, gather all the info you collected (copied and pasted) from blogs, recommendation sites, ebay, forums, etc…and take that GOLDEN information and “tweak” it to what the market is looking for.
You would do your keyword research. You would look on Yahoo Answers. You would find all the ‘stamp collecting forums”….and find out what people are looking for.
In your INITIAL research….the one where you were simply looking to find some cool stuff to buy your nephew…you take not of all the sites you visited. If you use Firefox, I recommend using the ClipMarks plugin. This plugin basically scrapes information from the sites you visit and put’s all your notes in one place.
You can check out Clipmarks here:
http://clipmarks.com/
Anyway…after your “curiosity” search for yourself, you may just find that you are looking for the SAME thing that a LOT of other people are looking for.
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Folks,
That is a mini-course on what to do!
Just do it and you’ll make money like Jason has and I have and lots of other people.
But you’ve got to do it and finish it, don’t sit around and don’t make it your like’s work.
As Bill Glazer has said countless times “Good enough is good enough”.
Thanks Jason.
David