There are so many ways to make money online that entire books have been devoted to the subject, with each chapter offering a different idea. Creating and selling your own information products is a very viable method of building an online business - and can be an extremely profitable one too.
Before we look into the ways that you - or anyone - can start to create your own information products, we first need to define what information products actually are. To many people starting out, the very term, information product, is daunting and can put one off. But get past that and you'll soon realize that like most things connected to online marketing, the jargon often hides a simple concept.
In the main, people are searching online for information. When we do a Google search we almost always are trying to find an answer to a question.
Some of those questions are about mundane things and can be answered very easily. But some questions are more complex, more important and more pressing. For those, while one may be able to find answers after long hours of intense research, it is far easier to buy a ready-made solution.
The more intense the question, the more we are willing to pay for an answer.
The difference between online and offline information products is that offline everyone has a view as to how much a 'book' or a 'magazine' is worth and will rarely pay more than the accepted norm. Online, however, it is the information that is valued, and not so much the delivery vehicle. So people will often pay a lot more for an answer to a pressing need online that they will offline.
Information products come in all shapes and sizes. A few to consider are:
Ebooks - Usually PDF files formatted to look like a real book, but with fewer pages. A typical ebook is between 70 and 100 pages, but can be a lot less, or a lot more. Ebooks can sell for anything from a few dollars to hundreds. A price point of $67 or $97 is not unusual.
Special Reports - As with ebooks, special reports are normally supplied as PDF files, but they tend to be much shorter. 5-10 pages is typical. Special reports are usually focused on answering a single problem or teaching a specific method for something and have a lot less fluff and filler than ebooks often do.
White papers - Sometimes the answer to a question can be contained in a page or two - a list of resources, for example.
Videos - with the ease of use of hand held video cameras such as the Flip, and screen capture programs it is very easy now to produce short videos to answer people's questions. Buyers seem to like video products and are often willing to pay a premium price for them.
Audio - spoken word information products - often called podcasts - are popular with people who regularly use MP3 players and Smartphones as they allow folks to learn while on the move. Sometimes it is quite easy to simply read out an article or short report into a program like Audacity to make an audio info product that will sell well.
Membership sites - When information can be delivered over time, in instalments, it can be very profitable to do so from within a membership site. This gives the vendor an ongoing income from subscription fees as well as a frequent opportunity to offer members other offers.
Creating your own information products has one very big advantage. When you sell it, you determine the price and you keep all the profits. And as the cost of creating, producing and supplying digitally down loadable info products is virtually nil, the potential profits can be enormous. You can literally start a real business but with no overheads.
For more on this subject, go to:
http://urlcx.com/yoeb - Your Own EBook Business
In addition to sales you make yourself, you also have the chance to attract and recruit other people to sell on your behalf. In Internet marketing these people are called affiliates. They will promote your product to their lists, and if they incur any advertising costs will be entire responsible for them themselves. You simply pay them a commission for each sale they make.
Typically, you will pay them 50% - 75% of the sales price, which may sound a lot, but consider the sale one you wouldn't have otherwise had, and it has cost you nothing. You may 'only' make 25%, but that 25% is 100% profit. It is a great deal!
Not all info products are created to be sold though.
Sometimes it is better to offer your product as a free gift in return for some body's email address. Building up an email list is a vital part of online marketing and can massively increase your profitability. It is an effort to attract new traffic to your offers, but if you have already got a list of 1000 people to tell about a new information product you've created, you can really boost your launch results with no extra effort.
Creating free information products as giveaways to attract subscribers is very effective and easy to do. It should be a part of all marketers' routine.
Jim Edwards said it best in his book:
EBook Secrets Exposed - http://urlcx.com/ese
Online marketing is, at its heart, about selling. Information is one of the most valuable commodities we can sell. While it is great to be an affiliate for other people, producing and owning your own info products is the best way to secure your personal success into the future.
In closing, you really must investigate PLR's. See my earlier blog post on that very subject. Scroll down, it's there somewhere.
Wishing the best for everyone in this business,
RD
PS - One more freebie resource for you guys:
http://rdavidhale.com - my free giveaway for kick starting your own online business.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Traffic Generation - The Missing Link For Internet Marketers
Traffic is the lifeblood of the Internet and traffic generation is what drives Internet marketing.
A website on its own is like a store at the wrong end of a one-way street: it can be the most wonderful thing that you can possibly create, but with no passing trade the sound of the tumbleweed will be louder than that of the cash register.
Search engine optimization is mainly done to entice Google to send your site free traffic from its natural searches, but search engine traffic isn't the only game in town. There are lots of other ways to get people to visit your site.
There is an ongoing argument among the expert marketers - which is more important, getting traffic or converting that traffic into paying customers? On the one hand you can't convert what you don't have, but on the other, all the traffic in the world is useless if it doesn't turn into buyers.
The reality is that they are not at odds at all - they are simply two sides of the same coin.
It should be simple. Go and tell people about your whizzy new website and they'll come take a look. It is called advertising. Unfortunately it isn't that easy - or simple. You can tell how hard it really is by taking a quick look inside any of the big Internet marketing forums. There you'll find people constantly complaining that Internet marketing doesn't work and that they've wasted years doing everything they were told, building the exact sites that the guru's methods told them to; and yet they still failed to make any money.
When you scratch under the surface you almost always find that yes, they did do everything right, but the methods they were taught fell short at the important part. They were told to build sites. They were tutored in some of the most effective online marketing strategies, but they were not told that the site building was only the beginning. Traffic generation is the ongoing, never-ending process that only starts when the website is finished.
So, doing great on and off page SEO to claim high Google rankings that will send free traffic your way is still and will probably always remain the #1 traffic generation method. But it isn't the only one.
The second most effective way to keep that traffic flowing is to build a list. Too many Internet marketers forget that the cost in time, money and effort of getting a person to visit your site can be quite substantial. So it is crazy to let someone visit your site, do nothing while they are there and then leave. That's a total waste.
Every website should have some means of capturing the email address and name of at least some of those 'lost' visitors so that you can hopefully persuade them to stop by again at a later date.
Once you have their contact details, by means of an opt in form on your site that is linked to an autoresponder, you don't have to pay an acquisition cost for them ever again. Each time you email them with a new enticement to come back to your site they are your own free traffic generated by you.
The third favorite traffic generation strategy is currently article marketing. Writing articles that other people can use on their websites may sound odd, but in practice it can be very effective. The deal is that when they use your article they agree to display a short ad below it - called your resource box - that you write in such a way as to make clicking a link through to your site an attractive proposition.
Each article you write may only generate a few clicks, but get enough of them out there working for you and you'll build up a steady stream of traffic that you'll never be able to turn off.
Article marketing isn't as effective a traffic generation method as it once was, but many Internet marketers still swear by it and base their entire traffic generation strategies on it.
Generating a constant flow of traffic is where your online business starts and ends. Learning its importance and how to do it in the most effective ways is what separates the people who complain that Internet marketing doesn't work for them from those of us who make a great living.
To learn more about SEO, I have a couple of products I'd like you to take a look at.
The first is called SEO Elite:
http://urlcx.com/seoe
And the next is Stupidly Simple SEO :
http://urlcx.com/ssseo
I highly recommend both of these digital products. And there's one more really worth your while:
http://backlinkbattleplan.com/ - Shane MeLaugh's wonderful technique for generating backlinks to your site, an SEO necessity.
A website on its own is like a store at the wrong end of a one-way street: it can be the most wonderful thing that you can possibly create, but with no passing trade the sound of the tumbleweed will be louder than that of the cash register.
Search engine optimization is mainly done to entice Google to send your site free traffic from its natural searches, but search engine traffic isn't the only game in town. There are lots of other ways to get people to visit your site.
There is an ongoing argument among the expert marketers - which is more important, getting traffic or converting that traffic into paying customers? On the one hand you can't convert what you don't have, but on the other, all the traffic in the world is useless if it doesn't turn into buyers.
The reality is that they are not at odds at all - they are simply two sides of the same coin.
It should be simple. Go and tell people about your whizzy new website and they'll come take a look. It is called advertising. Unfortunately it isn't that easy - or simple. You can tell how hard it really is by taking a quick look inside any of the big Internet marketing forums. There you'll find people constantly complaining that Internet marketing doesn't work and that they've wasted years doing everything they were told, building the exact sites that the guru's methods told them to; and yet they still failed to make any money.
When you scratch under the surface you almost always find that yes, they did do everything right, but the methods they were taught fell short at the important part. They were told to build sites. They were tutored in some of the most effective online marketing strategies, but they were not told that the site building was only the beginning. Traffic generation is the ongoing, never-ending process that only starts when the website is finished.
So, doing great on and off page SEO to claim high Google rankings that will send free traffic your way is still and will probably always remain the #1 traffic generation method. But it isn't the only one.
The second most effective way to keep that traffic flowing is to build a list. Too many Internet marketers forget that the cost in time, money and effort of getting a person to visit your site can be quite substantial. So it is crazy to let someone visit your site, do nothing while they are there and then leave. That's a total waste.
Every website should have some means of capturing the email address and name of at least some of those 'lost' visitors so that you can hopefully persuade them to stop by again at a later date.
Once you have their contact details, by means of an opt in form on your site that is linked to an autoresponder, you don't have to pay an acquisition cost for them ever again. Each time you email them with a new enticement to come back to your site they are your own free traffic generated by you.
The third favorite traffic generation strategy is currently article marketing. Writing articles that other people can use on their websites may sound odd, but in practice it can be very effective. The deal is that when they use your article they agree to display a short ad below it - called your resource box - that you write in such a way as to make clicking a link through to your site an attractive proposition.
Each article you write may only generate a few clicks, but get enough of them out there working for you and you'll build up a steady stream of traffic that you'll never be able to turn off.
Article marketing isn't as effective a traffic generation method as it once was, but many Internet marketers still swear by it and base their entire traffic generation strategies on it.
Generating a constant flow of traffic is where your online business starts and ends. Learning its importance and how to do it in the most effective ways is what separates the people who complain that Internet marketing doesn't work for them from those of us who make a great living.
To learn more about SEO, I have a couple of products I'd like you to take a look at.
The first is called SEO Elite:
http://urlcx.com/seoe
And the next is Stupidly Simple SEO :
http://urlcx.com/ssseo
I highly recommend both of these digital products. And there's one more really worth your while:
http://backlinkbattleplan.com/ - Shane MeLaugh's wonderful technique for generating backlinks to your site, an SEO necessity.
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