3 Reasons Why Informational Products Sell So Well

Despite the state of the economy and the fact that most people are struggling to make ends meet and get by, curiously enough some parts of the economy are still going very strong and some niches and product markets are still doing very well and are in fact thriving in this downtrodden economy. One instance of this is informational product sales.

An example of an informational product would be like an electronic book, also known as an eBook, based on weight loss. A self-proclaimed guru in the field of weight loss writes a book based on everything they know about weight loss or everything they've researched about weight loss and then takes it to an online affiliate network and sells it to people online.

Informational products have always sold very well, so much so that there are specific affiliate networks which exclusively deal in the sales of digital products and a great deal of their inventory is made up of these kinds of products.

Take ClickBank, for example. Here is an affiliate network which exclusively deals in digital products, and a vast majority of their products are eBooks. ClickBank generates sales of over $1 billion every year just to give you an idea of how big the informational product marketplace is and how often people are willing to pay and pay well for an informational product.

This begs the question of, when the same information is generally available elsewhere on the Internet and for free at that, why do informational products sell so well?

Convenience

The vast majority of what people pay for when they purchase one of these eBooks is convenience.

eBooks are available for instant download to your computer as soon as you pay for them, and with the way and language with which these products are promoted, the consumer gets the idea in their head that this book is the be-all end-all solution to their problem, so if they can find that solution as soon as they purchase the eBook; well when you think in those terms, it's no wonder why these products sell so well across the board in all kinds of different niches from health to how to do everything in between.

(Perceived) Quality

The second reason informational products sell so well is because of the perceived quality associated with them.

Often times the merchants behind the product, the person who wrote that book themselves, puts far more time into the promotion of that product and specifically into the creation of sales page for that product, more time than they spend writing it itself.

They make an elaborate sales letter on their sales page which explains why this is the best product which anyone will find on this particular topic of interest anywhere be on the Internet or on bookshelves in a physical format.

Inexpensive

The last reason for why informational products sell so well is because they are relatively inexpensive in most cases. Most eBooks sell for anywhere between $15 and $30. For most people, it's easy to justify a purchase of $30 or under, especially if as I talked about a moment ago that product guarantees the solution to their problem.

Receiving an instant solution to an ongoing problem which you may have had for a long time and for a cost of under $30 at bat, it's no wonder for why these informational products sell so very well. And consequently it explains why so many people get into the business of writing their own informational product in hopes of it selling very well.

Repurposing Content For The Web - How To Reuse Your Old Content   Information Product Creation - Use Different Learning Modalities To Reach Your Target Audience   The Top Two Mistakes of First-Time Information Product Developers   Creating Info Products in Competitive Niches - The Myth Exposed   How to Make an eBook Into an AudioBook   

6 Steps to Creating Your Own Information Product That Even A Newbie Can Follow And Create Success

In this article I'm going to give you the six steps to creating your own information product. If you follow step-by-step through the process you will be able to create your own information product and be able to market it to your exact audience. This is going to be highly valuable if you are clueless on how to create your own product.

Step one: In order for you to even know what you're going to create for your product you need to select the audience that you will be helping. For anybody who is clueless on where to begin it's as simple as selecting the audience that you want to target. An example of a target audience would be men that have huge bellies. Another would be men who want to get their ex-girlfriends back.

Finding a target audience is going to be the most important structure step that you take in creating your own information product. You will need to have a target audience that you focus on in order for you to come up with a product that will be in demand.

Step two: Once you've selected the audience you will need to find out the problems that they are having to create a solution. Let's take the same example above of men that have huge bellies. The first thing that you want to figure out is what your target audience's problems are and if they are actively searching to solve them.

The best way to find your audiences wants and desires is to go to forums with a bunch of your target audience asking questions and voicing their issues and concerns. This is an easy way of doing market research and understanding the ongoing problems that your target audience is going through. You will be able to find out information to help you create multiple products if you want.

Step three: Once you know who your audience is and the problems that they are facing you will need to get the information to solve the problems. If you have no clue on how to solve their problem you will need to do extensive research to find solutions. In many cases the information is free online. The hardest part about getting information will be the time consumption it takes to find all the different answers. You will be surprised on how many complex problems are available on the Internet, for free, if you do detailed research.

Step four: Create the product. Create a table of contents from all the information that you have gathered from your target audience and then write out the body based on the information you've gathered from your research. This is as simple as you referring to to all the information that you of research and writing in a compelling way with your own words.

Step five: Create your sales copy for your product. You'll need a sales page in order for you to be able to sell your product to your target audience. The sales page that serves as your advertisement to what your product will offer. The best advice I've received on creating a compelling sales copy is to list a ton of benefits that your target audience will receive if they buy your product.

The easiest way to find the benefits inside of your product is to carefully go through your product and any time when you see something that is incredibly important write it out in benefit form. On your sales page list the benefits that your target audience will receive and reference to the page number they will find it on.

Step six: You will need a payment processor in order for you to be able to receive payments. The easiest nontechnical payment processor is Pay Pal. You will to set up the technical aspects of delivering the product. You also need to set the technical aspects of receiving payment. Make sure you set the price of the product at an affordable price to your target audience's financial ability. Follow these six steps and you will be able to have your own information product up and running in no time.

Repurposing Content For The Web - How To Reuse Your Old Content   Information Product Creation - Use Different Learning Modalities To Reach Your Target Audience   The Top Two Mistakes of First-Time Information Product Developers   Easy Ways to Find Content For Your Audio Products   

2 Step Process to Create an Information Product in 1 Day

In this article I'm going to share the two-step process I use to create information products in a matter of hours. I will show you how simple and easy it can be to create your own products. To build a successful online business you need to be able to create products on a regular basis to keep up-to-date with changes in your niche and as your customers let you know what else they want and need from you to help them overcome their challenges and reach their goals.

The two steps are preparation and creation. Preparation is crucial to making the process as quick as possible. I am working on the assumption that you know your niche, know the topic you are going to create the product about. Otherwise there will be an additional step you need to take, namely research which would mean it would take you longer to produce the final product. The other key to fast product creation is choosing the right medium. The two fastest types of product to create are audio and video (the type of video where you just talk to camera) compared with an eBook or slide show style video (both of these are useful in certain circumstances).

The preparation part of the process could be done in about an hour. The basic idea is to brainstorm all that you know about the topic of your product and then organise it logically. It's a good idea to get into the zone creatively first. Just a few minutes of deep breathing and relaxation will help you to empty your mind of other distractions and optimize your brain waves to enable the ideas to flow. Don't judge anything, just write down anything and everything that comes to mind. It can be helpful to set an alarm for say half an hour and just capture as much as you can in that time. Then you need to group the ideas together and decide on what order to present them to convey your information as clearly as possible.

The creation part of the process will take as long as the product you want to create. So a 1 hour audio takes 1 hour to record with maybe just a few extra minutes to set things up and save and edit the recording afterwards. You are going to record based on the notes you created in the preparation stage. It takes some nerve to start with but there really is no need to write it all out like a script. So there are the two steps it really is as simple as that.

Repurposing Content For The Web - How To Reuse Your Old Content   Information Product Creation - Use Different Learning Modalities To Reach Your Target Audience   The Top Two Mistakes of First-Time Information Product Developers   Creating Info Products in Competitive Niches - The Myth Exposed   How to Make an eBook Into an AudioBook   

Biting the Bullet and Learning How to Program

Sometimes impatience can be a virtue in its own right. Simply put, being impatient is one of the best catalysts for taking action that wouldn't normally be that urgent.

After four plus years of working in the tech space in one form or another (web design, iOS development, enterprise software etc.)-and always being on the biz dev/marketing/sales side of the equation-I've gradually moved closer and closer to the conclusion I reached several weeks back: I need to learn to program.

Startup people usually fall into two buckets: builders and sellers. But in the early stages of a startup (read: prospective company), marketing and sales just don't matter. If you are a non-technical, business-oriented founder, its really easy to convince yourself otherwise. You can spend a lot of time working on the periphery of what actually matters-building decks, designing logos, constructing product positioning. These things are still important and can ultimately make a big difference in how successful your startup is. But you can't put the cart before the horse until you've determined you're building something people actually want.

Steve Blank defines a startup as "a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". In other words, a small group solely dedicated to running back-to-back experiments until they find something that works. In my mind, I picture a team of oil drillers in a dry desert. They pick a square piece of land (a space in the market) and start drilling holes all over kingdom come until they find some evidence that they should stay in that spot and keep drilling. The faster they can fail, the faster they can hit black gold, or in reality product/market fit.

Which brings us full circle: the only way to truly test whether you are building something people actually want is to put it in the hands of real people. Which means you have to build it. You. Have. To. Build. It.

Now this doesn't mean that you have to set out to become a full-stack software engineer. I know I will never reach that level and that's not my goal. The goal is to be able to build prototypes that people can touch and experience. I'm a seller by nature and always will be, but to be a better co-founder, I want to be a seller who can build. If you can put a team together of sellers who can build and builders who can sell, I believe you are exponentially increasing the chances that you can run enough experiments in a market to find a reason to keep drilling.

The process of converting yourself into more of a builder may seem really daunting at first. But if you are in the same boat I'm in, I would encourage you to look back at your time on the Internet over the years and you may know more about programming than you think. I remember having a MySpace page a million years ago. I was unsatisfied with how it looked and remember trying to hack those ugly ass themes from one of those generators so it wouldn't look like complete shit. It was a bunch of trial and error-messing around with widths, divs and switching out images-but it was programming. Then during the web design days, I remember being impatient waiting for programming changes to get done, so I would log into cPanel, open various.html files and figure out how to make the change myself. It wasn't perfect, but it was programming. See where I am going with this?

I'm only 4 week into this process so I can't offer any advice as someone who has successfully crossed the coding chasm, but I can tell you what I've been doing and maybe you can give it a shot. My strategy has been two fold: 1) to build an actual iOS app using Xcode to get hands on coding experience and 2) read several books to gain a theoretical understanding of programming to anchor my learning.

Two books I've been reading are:

Practical Programming and Head First Programming which also uses Python as a baseline. As far as hands on programming, I've been working my way through the Xcode tutorials and Google's App Engine Tutorial. I'm pretty happy with the progress I've made so far and am hoping to have the app fully built by the end of the summer.

Repurposing Content For The Web - How To Reuse Your Old Content   Information Product Creation - Use Different Learning Modalities To Reach Your Target Audience   The Top Two Mistakes of First-Time Information Product Developers   How to Create a Three-Dimensional Product   How Gamification Can Turn Businesses Into Winners   

2 Ways to Quickly Create a Product to Sell

In this article I'm going to share two of the quickest ways to create a product to sell online. If you are looking to start up your own business then creating products that you can sell and deliver via the internet is the cheapest and easiest solution. Indeed the internet can help you at many stages of your product creation. It's an excellent source of ideas and an easy way to research whether there is likely to be a demand for your product. You can access and download many of the resources you might need for creating your product. And, of course, it is fantastic for launching your product in so many different ways.

Expert Interviews

Conducting and compiling interviews with experts in your niche is one of the fastest and easiest ways to create a must-have product. It may seem a daunting prospect to approach these leaders but surprisingly many of them are only to happy to give you an interview. They love to talk about their area of expertise and are eager to reach out and get their message to as many people as possible and make a big impact. If you really are intimidated then you could start by interviewing rising stars who are successful but less well-known.

To prepare you need to consider what questions your potential customers would like answered. You can start by listing the questions you want to know the answers to or wanted to know before you moved on to a higher level of understanding and experience in your niche. However I strongly recommend that you survey your potential market regarding the challenges they are facing and most want solutions to. It would be helpful to send your interviewee the questions in advance so they can be fully prepared.

Articles/Blog Posts into an eBook

The second really quick way to produce an online product is to use articles or blog posts that you have already written and compile them into an ebook. Even though people could potentially get all of this information for free by reading all your articles or posts, you are making it quicker and easier for them by combining them into one source. You are also giving them a structure so that can grasp how all your nuggets fit together to help them learn and achieve the desired end result. Apart from cutting and pasting the information into the right order, you will need to tie it all together by adding a suitable introduction and final summary.

Repurposing Content For The Web - How To Reuse Your Old Content   Information Product Creation - Use Different Learning Modalities To Reach Your Target Audience   The Top Two Mistakes of First-Time Information Product Developers   5 Simple Steps To Creating A Digital Information Product Using A Resource Report   

Tips for Creating a Product That Will Solve Someone's Problems

This article is about creating products that solve people's problems. To be honest if your product doesn't solve someone's problem, in fact a problem for a lot of people, then it's probably a waste of time creating it. People buy for two main reasons. One is to avoid the pain of a challenge of some sort and the other is because they believe the product will bring them pleasure in some form. However the greater motivator is pain. People will be more likely to spend money to solve an issue that is really hurting them in some way and will pay more to overcome a challenge in most cases than to just to experience pleasure.

Having explained why it's best to create a product that solves a problem, preferably a common problem, here are some tips on how to do that. One way to identify a potential challenge is to look back over your own life. Customers will be attracted to you because they feel you can relate to them, that you have something in common. So it stands to reason that they might well be struggling with the same issues that you have in the past. So think about the challenges you've overcome and don't belittle your achievements e.g. it can't have been a big deal because I was able to solve it.

Of course, the best source of ideas for your product are your market, your potential or existing customers. So ask them what their current challenges are. If you have a list, send out an email. If not, think about where you could connect with people in your particular niche. Are there forums or groups that you could get involved with? Just by skimming through the posts you will probably get a good idea about what people are most interested in and of course, you can ask them directly too. If you want to increase your response rate then offer them an incentive - something that they perceive as valuable but that is low or no cost to you.

If at all possible, arrange to speak directly with potential or existing clients to really dig deep into what problems they want help with. Offer short free consultation calls where you actually do most of the listening by asking them questions about what challenges are holding them back and what they would like to achieve. Record these to analyse later as they will be a goldmine not just for creating your products but also for your marketing resources. If you do these things then you will find it easy to produce a product that meets your market's needs and therefore sells.

Repurposing Content For The Web - How To Reuse Your Old Content   Information Product Creation - Use Different Learning Modalities To Reach Your Target Audience   The Top Two Mistakes of First-Time Information Product Developers   Creating Info Products in Competitive Niches - The Myth Exposed   Tips for Editing Your Audio Products