Information Product Empire

Information products are hot–hot–hot! They’re selling like hot cakes on the web and are turning average people into above-average income earners.

Why? Because the Internet is all about information.

Whatever you’re looking for, whatever you can imagine, you can find information about it on the Internet, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

People want to know who, what, where, when, why, how–NOW. And if you can learn to supply the demand, you can make money. Perhaps A LOT of money.

Here are a few examples of people who turned their knowledge into cash with information products:

• Done For You Fat Loss Meal Programs

A busy personal trainer – who didn’t think he had the time or energy to eat a balanced diet and described himself as a fitness “fraud” – took the proverbial “bull by the horns” and got his diet under control.  Within a matter of days he felt better and had more energy, and suddenly those extra pounds he’d packed on started melting away like ice cream on a hot day.  He decided to share his tips with the world and makes more money with this than he ever did doing one-on-one personal training.

• Registry Easy

Slow computer?  Need to reboot all the time?  Don’t spend hundreds to repair – just download this registry software and clean thing up.  So says the man behind this software company, who turned his teenage geek time into big bucks online.  Hmm – how did you spend your teenage years again?  And could you profit from it now?

• Get Paid to Draw

Like to draw or have take pictures?  So does this guy.  But he’s no “starving artist.”  He learned how to harness the power of the internet to get others to buy his drawings, and makes TONS of money from his talent.  He also makes a TON of money showing others where and how to sell their drawings and photographs online.

See the diversity?

If you have some experience or success at something, YOU can make money teaching others what you know.  Here’s are some ways you can create and use information products:

As a Profit Center

Write about something you know and sell it through direct mail, from your own website or from many of the information product sites around the web. Here’s a great example of information brokering.

As a Lead Generation Tool

Whether you’re selling condos in Aspen, baby grand pianos, or marketing an MLM, information products build rapport and establish expertise. They can also be profit centers in and of themselves, like they are for this guy (click on “Recent Success Stories”).

To Build Your Career

Nothing establishes expertise faster than having your name in print, whether it be on an article, a “how to” report, a videotaped demonstration, or an audio recording. The first time I stumbled across the powerful technique, I garnered a promotion and an “Employee of the Year” award. .

The best thing about information products is that you can create them quickly, easily, and inexpensively. You don’t have to be a trained writer. All you need is a hot topic and a way to tell people about it. Recipes, gardening, celebrities, cars, travel–you name it, you can create an information product to sell.  Try it yourself and see!

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“Best Bet” Resource:

Make Your Knowledge Sell! is the single best product I’ve seen on how to sell information in its many shapes and sizes. From conception to production to marketing, Make Your Knowledge Sell! takes you step by step through the entire process–then throws in tons of resources and insider notes just for good measure. It has information on every aspect of the information industry, whether you want to make books, audio tapes or video tapes. If you’re at all interested in creating info products, you owe it to yourself to take a look.  Best of all, it’s FREE!

The Super Affiliate Handbook

Super affiliate Rosalind Gardner started tooling around the Internet in 1996, swapping seeds and growing tips with other passionate gardeners.  When she visited a dating site a few years later and saw a “Webmasters Make Money” banner, she was intrigued and clicked on it.  A few months later, after setting up and playing around with a dating website, she got her first $10 affiliate check payment in the mail.  She knew she was on to something.

That was 1998.  By 2000, she’d replaced her air traffic controller salary with affiliate marketing income and quit her day job.  By 2002, she was earning nearly $500,000 a year as an affiliate marketer and wrote the Super Affiliate Handbook to tell how she did it.  It was an instant best seller and remains popular to this day because of Rosalind’s step-by-step approach (she updates it regularly as the Internet changes and her skills increase).  She wasn’t a business person when she started and had no prior experience selling stuff online, but she had an idea, a desire to replace her income, and a strong work ethic.  That’s all it took.

Today, Rosalind works just a few hours a week, frequently takes month-long vacations, lives an affluent lifestyle — and makes six figures a month with affiliate marketing. 

I’ve learned a lot from her and the Super Affiliate Handbook and think you can too.  If affiliate marketing sounds interesting and profitable, the Super Affiliate Handbook is a ”must have” resource for your digital library.

Info-Products: Turn Your Knowledge into Cash

Know a lot about something, like gardening, beekeeping, kayaking — or dating hot guys?  Then turn your knowledge into cash by creating an info-product and selling it online.  It’s one of the fastest, easiest ways to make money these days, and people are literally making fortunes selling doing it.

So what’s an info-product?

An info-product (or information product) is simply information that you create (write/speak/video/software) about something you know well that others may like to learn.

For example, let’s say that you have extensive knowledge about how to care for specialty plants in your region. Think others might benefit from your years of experience? You bet! Take all your favorite tips and tricks and turn them into a guide. Know how to raise chickens, find a needle in a haystack, or scuba dive in New Zealand? You could have yourself a infoproduct!  You’re only limited by your imagination.

Here are a few examples of what other people have come up with:

Instant Sales Letters
A marketing wiz took his best sales letters templates, put them together in a collection, and sells them online.  This one product alone has been paying his mortgage for nearly a decade.

Calling Men
A relationship expert shares her tips and tricks on how and when to call and text the datable men you meet.  This product was developed to answer the tons of questions she got on this subject matter from the other relationship books she wrote.

How to Build a Chicken Coop
No only does this product show you how to build a chicken coop that will protect your chickens from predators and deliver delicious eggs, it’s an internet best-seller!  Who’d a thought?

Learn How to Play Piano at Home
A classically trained pianist, tired of the quality of piano programs on the market, decided to produce her own play piano info-product.  She’s been able to replace her teaching income, and now sells info-products and plays in jazz clubs for fun.  No starving musician there!

See the wide variety?  Turn your knowledge into cash!  Just down some of your passions and then take a little time to “flush out” the ideas and see if you have a winner.

How?

Before you do anything, make sure you have a buying market for your product.  This is crucial.  You don’t want to spend time, money, or energy creating something that only a handful of people might buy.  Do your research first.

The easiest way to do this is by going to Google and typing in a phrase that best describes your proposed idea, like puppy training, cooking for two, wedding theme ideas, or whatever, and seeing what’s already available.  If there are millions of pages and lots of paid ads running along the top and right side of the screen, that’s good.  It means you have competition because the market is buying this kind of product.  It’s what you want.  Think about it – how many books or products about your hobby do you have?  Just one?  Unlikely.  You probably have a dozen resources or more.  Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to create an info-product that fills a void in your market, whether it be video, software, checklists, or whatever.  Give the market what they want in a format they haven’t seen before – and you’ll make a ton of money.

If your research turns up few competing websites and few or no paid Google ads, it’s probably because this market doesn’t spend money.  Come up with another idea.  You want to fish where there are plenty of fish to take your bait, not in a vacant field.

If you have an existing business, you can also use infoproducts to educate your customers. If you own a jewelry store, for example, you could create an infoproduct to show what to look for in a diamond. If you’re an accountant, you could produce a “business startup accounting checklist.” By giving your customer valuable information for little or no cost, he’ll be more inclined to trust your advice and buy your product or service.

I first saw this idea in an article about a used piano salesman who created a “How To Tell If Your Used Piano Is Worth The Money” pamphlet in which he revealed the dirty tricks some second hand dealers use to make a used piano sound like it’s in better shape than it is. The pamphlet was distributed to students free of charge through piano teachers in the area, and brought in a huge response from parents not wanting to get ripped off on this major purchase.

It’s a clever tactic you can modify to suit your own needs.

If you’d like to learn more about creating an infoproduct, I highly recommend Make Your Knowledge Sell! by Ken Evoy and Monique Harris. Not only is this course a great bargain – it’s free! - it walks you step-by-step through creating an infoproduct so you’ll have marketable material by the time you finish. See for yourself.

Could you make money with an info-product?  There’s only one way to find out…

Affiliate Programs: Make Money Selling Other People’s Stuff

Affiliate programs are one of the hottest trends on the web today, with good reason. If you’re looking for an easy way to add to your income without spending a lot of time doing so, promoting different affiliate programs could be what you need.

Here’s the basic premise: you sign up in different affiliate programs and promote another company’s goods or services in exchange for a percentage of the sales you send to them. There are no sign up costs to participate, and because visitors you send to the host sites are usually “tagged” with a traceable “cookie”, you can get credit for the sale for a certain length of time if the customer returns to buy later (although this varies from program to program–read the fine print on any agreement).

Affiliate programs are strictly pay-for-performance and the ultimate “win-win” situation. Businesses get an army of salesmen to promote their product or service (not to mention TONS of advertising), with no payroll costs–and individuals are able to sell great products, with no inventory, handling, or fulfillment hassles.

Here’s how you can make money with affiliate programs:

1.  Easily establish a web presence. Want to make money online but have no product to call your own? No problem! Determine what your site is about, and find existing products to promote until you can develop a product of your own. Visit AssociatePrograms.com to find suitable products. Sign up for Allan’s newsletter while you’re there.

2. Create an instant backend. Have a great product but nothing else to offer your customers? Join and promote several affiliate programs relevant to your website and collect a percentage of the sales.

3. Easily add to your bottom line. Once you’ve established a web presence, people are going to ask you about your vendors. Why? They want to know the fastest way to get up to speed. If you’re satisfied with your web host, merchant account, tracking software, etc., recommend them to others and collect a percentage as an affiliate. It’s only good business sense, after all.

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“Best Bet” Resources

If the affiliate programs idea appeals to you but you have no idea where to start, download these resources and get on the FAST track to success:

Super Affiliate Handbook

Rosalind Garner collected her 1st affiliate check for $10 back in 1998.  Over the next two, through hard work and by making lots of mistakes, she was making $10,000 a month and quit her day job.  By 2002, she was raking in $400,000+ per year as an affiliate, and these days, she does six figures a month – working a few hours a day and taking month-long vacations.   This book shows you how to do the same…A LOT faster, and without all the trial and error she went through.  A “must have” for your affiliate library.

 

Google Cash Sniper

This program will have you up and running fast and profitably within a matter of weeks.  Super Affiliate Chris Fox shows you step-by-step how to find a niche, do keyword discovery, set up a website, and promote the heck out of it.  Once you’re done, you’ll have a network of sites that not only score well on Google, bringing you TONS of targeted, hungry buyers for FREE, but that fill your bank account as well.  I’ve been online for a decade and learned some stuff I’ve never seen.  Awesome!