How to Create an Information Business

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If you have been trying to make money online and if you haven’t made a fortune yet, the only people who are to be blamed are the ones who created websites like Get paid to read emails, Get paid to click ads, Get paid to refer to your friends, MLM schemes, Pyramid schemes, High yield investment programs etc. These people have completely ripped off people like you and me and it has wasted our time, not just hours, but years. I guarantee that you will never get rich by following these methods.

The people who make serious money online are the people who have created their own information products. They have built a business instead of trying out various “methods” to make money. Just knock this concept into your head: Making money online is NOT a business. Real business means building up a system which delivers value to the customer and earns you a profit on a CONSISTENT basis and which increases over time without the need for you to continuously work on it.

I am not telling you that you should not use these techniques. Even I have used them a few years back. But do not get stuck with it. Think long term and create your own product and let the customers pay you money directly into your bank account without any middlemen involved. In this article, let me take you by the hand and walk through the process of creating an information product and building a business around it.

Why 9 out of 10 Traditional Businesses Fail: The single biggest and most important factor which has been preventing you from starting a business is the fear of losing what you have worked hard to gain. It is true that 9 out of 10 businesses will fail within the first five years. But have you ever wondered why? That’s because traditional business models have low profit margins and involve huge investments. But the business of selling information products online is a completely different story. But the time you finish reading this article, you would be jumping with excitement about how easy it is.

The Advantages of Selling Information Products Online: This is the information age. People are looking to improve their lives by learning more. If you can fill this need with appropriate information, then they will reward you the green stuff (I mean Money!). But wait! I am not recommending you to author a book and put it in Amazon. Never! Even a monkey can put a book in Amazon and most of the authors are broke. Only a very few authors who have hit the bestseller list get exponential profits. I have boiled down the advantages of selling information products in following points.

1. Information products have huge profit margins. Once the product is created, there is no cost involved to replicate the product. If you are selling the information product in a downloadable form, the bandwidth costs are negligible and your profit per sale will not be less than 99% of the sale price.
2. You need not create the information product yourself. You can hire someone who is an expert in the topic, or you can buy the rights for an existing book and frame the chapters into lessons.
3. Information products sold online have a more perceived value than books when you can deliver the information in various formats such as audio podcast, video presentations or downloadable PDF reports and hence you can charge more than an average book.
4. The sales process can be automated and the business need not have too much man power. Right from advertising, getting payments to delivering the product to the customer, there is not need for you to interfere. The only work that you may need to do is answer support questions regarding refund of the product or delivery issues, and that too can be outsourced to someone in India or China.

I hope by now you are convinced that selling information products online can be very profitable. I can see that you are excited to get started. Let me walk you through the steps involved in creating your first information product.

The First Step – Choosing Your Market: You cannot sell a product without a market and you cannot sell it to the wrong market. The first step is choosing the direction in which you are going to proceed. Choose your marketing with extreme caution since you do not want to realize later that you have chosen the wrong market which would lead to waste of time, efforts and money. There are two main factors involved in choosing the right market:

1. Market Demand and Future Potential: If you can identify a need for which people are proactively looking for a solution and if no one else is satisfying that need, you have struck a gold mine. But most of the time it is not always the case. The internet is too crowded and most probably someone else is catering to every possible need that you can identify. But do not lose hope, because there are many useless products out there and many people are not doing a good job. If you can create a better product and deliver more value for the same price, then people would be ready to kick your competitor out of the market and happily buy from you.
2. Your Strengths and Passions: If your information product is about dog training and if you have never trained a dog in your life, then you are not going to succeed. Every man learns something in his life through experience and it is recommended that you create an information product around that topic. For example, a veterinary doctor could create an information product which teaches people how to take the best care for their pets. I have known people who make millions of dollars just selling such pet related information products. Even if you are planning to outsource the entire content creation process, you still need to have a passion in the topic so that you can identify potential weaknesses in your product and rectify them accordingly so that you stand out from your competitors.

There are many free tools online which can help you to measure the market demand. I have used only the Google Keyword tool so far and I recommend you to just use this and not to waste time and money on other paid market research tools unless you have grown your business atleast to $10,000 per month level. This keyword tool can tell you how many people searched for a particular keyword in Google search engine in the previous month. You can find it at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The Second Step – Creating the Product: Once you have identified the market the next obvious step is to create the product. If you are an expert in a subject, you can create your own content. If you have identified a market with tremendous potential in your field of interest but if you are not qualified to create your own product, you have two options. You can outsource the content writing to freelancers who can work on a contract basis to you. You can find freelancers at www.Elance.com and www.Guru.com. These two websites are the largest freelance networks on the internet and you can find experts on almost any possible topic. The second option in creating your own information product is to partner with the author of an already published book or purchase the information re-publishing rights from them and use it to create your product.

A good technique to improve the perceived value of your information product is to deliver it in different formats. Many people (like me) really enjoy listening to the lessons on their iPod or car stereo and would definitely pay a premium for audio lessons. If you are a native English speaker, you can just read out the lessons in a MP3 recorder and bundle the audio file with the product. If you are not a native speaker or if you think you have a bad voice, you can outsource this job too. You can find professional voice over talents at www.Voices.com.

Some people are visual learners. They would be ready to pay double the price of the ebook for a video presentation. Forget about cameras and studios. You can bundle your information in videos with three simple steps. One, condense the the text lesson into bullet points and distribute them into various power point slides. Two, install a on-screen video recording software such as Camtasia Studio (for windows) or ScreenFlow (for Mac). Three, play the audio file and go through the power point slideshow in sync with the audio while recording the screen with the software and BAM! Your video is now ready. This format would be very helpful for people to take notes, they can just write down the main points from the slide.

The Third Step – Creating the Sales Page: This is the most important step of all. If you cannot communicate to the prospect why they need your product, they are not going to buy it no matter how wonderful your product may be. I have seen many people mess up with this step and a poor sales pitch is one of the major reasons why people don’t get rich online. But do not worry, it is not rocket science. Here is a simple guide to creating a killer sales copy which would give you the maximum visitor to customer ratio:

1. Before you write your sales copy, you need to understand who your prospect is. Use your creativity to imagine how would it be if you were the prospect and what would motivate the prospect to buy your product.
2. Write down all the problems and mistakes that the prospect is doing right now and write about it in the sales letter. When a potential customer reads the sales letter and if he or she feels that you are talking directly to them, they would subconsciously feel that your product will solve their problems.
3. Communicate to them the reason why you created the product in the first place. If the prospect feels that you created the product not just for money but to solve their problems, they would be very happy to buy from you. They need to understand that you created the product because you care for them.
4. Today, no one buys a product without social proof. You need to incorporate testimonials of previous customers in your sales page. If this is the first time that you are going to sell the product, do not put fake testimonials. Instead ask an expert in your industry to review your product and you can put up their words on the sales letter. Expert’s proof is the next best thing to social proof.
5. Clearly write down what your product will do for the customer and explain all the benefits that you have compared to other products in the market.
6. Do not put links and fancy logos in your sales page which would distract the customer away from the message that you are trying to communicate. A simple HTML page with a clean border and text with a regular font like Georgia, Times New Roman or Verdana has been universally accepted as the best form of sales page layout.

The science of writing sales letter is called copywriting and it is a subject in itself. Top copywriters who work as freelancers for big companies charge as much as $10,000 per sales copy. You can also outsource copywriting if you have a big budget. Good copywriters can be found on Elance.com starting from $500 per sales copy.

The Fourth Step: Setting up Payment System: Before the e-commerce came into existence, it was as difficult to get the money into your bank account as it was selling the product. People used various methods such as receiving checks via postal mail, direct cash deposit and setting up credit card payment gateways required a lot of legal formalities and a huge investment.

Today, selling information products online is as simple as selling candy to a kid. ClickBank.com offers services which makes selling a walk in the park. All that you need to do is submit your product for approval to ClickBank.com and setup the sales page and thank you page. ClickBank will charge the customer’s credit card and deposit the money in your account. Your earnings will be sent via check every 15 days. You need not even handle refund requests, ClickBank takes care of that. There are other payment systems for information products similar to ClickBank.com, but for a beginner, I do not recommend anything else.

The Fifth Step: Affiliates and Joint Ventures: Once the product is ready for sale, the next big task is marketing. But do not worry, all you have to do is create the product and wait for the paycheck. Apart from helping you in receiving payments from customers, ClickBank.com also has an affiliate network where tens of thousands of people are waiting to promote your product for a commission. Usually an affiliate commission of at least 50% is given away since the unit cost of a product after it is created is negligible.

When people come into the internet marketing space, the first thing they look into is affiliate marketing. There is nothing wrong in being an affiliate and in fact it is one of the best ways to get started making money online. But as I said before, one should not stick to it for too long and should consider creating an information product. But still many people refuse to create their own info product even after several years of hanging out in the internet and these are the people who will be excited to promote your product as an affiliate.

Thousands of people are coming into the arena of making money online due to various reasons and the good news is that the number is only going to increase. As time passes by, you will get more and more people who are ready to promote your products and make money for you and themselves.

I hope you got an idea of how to build a business by selling information products. Let me admit the inconvinient truth that what you have learned in this article is not enough. There is much more to learn if you want to own a successful and profitable information publishing business. Each step in this article can span into an entire subject in itself. I will be writing more articles in this domain. Keep yourself updated by signing up in my email list so that I will let you know when I am giving away new information.

Justin Jackson