Latest posts by Joe Pawlikowski (see all)
- Top 5 Apps All Small Businesses Need - May 12, 2013
- 5 Crucial Tips for Buying a New Smartphone - March 9, 2013
- 5 Steps To Turning Around Your Finances - February 20, 2013
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The old model isn’t dead. It just doesn’t work as well as it used to. You can absolutely fund your blog by running display and text ads alongside content. The problem is that in most cases you can’t fund much else. The market for display ads has been in decline for about five years now, and bloggers have had to come up with new ways to earn money from their labors.
On his site The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman once described 10 time-tested ways to make money. Chances are your blog makes money from one, or maybe two, of his listed methods: audience aggregation and perhaps commission from affiliate sales. Those methods can work well enough under the right circumstances, but for the millions of blogs competing against each other for attention more often than not the circumstances are less than ideal. It might be time to look into some of the other money making methods.
Selling information products
The very first method is also the most familiar. “Make a physical product, then sell and deliver it for more than it cost.” In this brief description Kaufman errs in one way: he defines a product as physical. Given the available media on the web, our products no longer need be physical. We can create digital products and still deliver them for more than they cost to produce. In fact, given the advantages of the non-physical nature of the web, we can often sell them for a higher margin than physical products.
The great advantage of information products is that anyone can create them. No matter who you are, you can create a product that disseminates information to a willing audience. Of course, just because everyone can create an information product doesn’t mean everyone can create an information product that appeals to a critical mass of people. That takes skill and credibility, traits that not everyone possesses.
If you are a skilled creator and have credibility with an audience, then you can create information products to sell on your blog. Done correctly, they’ll prove far more profitable than CPM ads and affiliate links that bloggers currently employ.
What types of information products?
An information product, put simply, is anything that presents new information, or else presents information in a novel fashion that allows for easier consumption. Here are some quick and obvious examples of information products.
- Ebooks, which are the most common.
- E-learning videos.
- Podcasts
- Webinars, which are like e-learning videos.
- Email newsletters
Any one of these, or a combination thereof, can become a premium information product. With skill you can create something that people will find valuable. With credibility you can actually sell what you’ve created.
When creating an information product you’ll focus on your established niche. Mommy bloggers might write a manifesto on raising children in a green household, for instance. A tech blogger might write a guide to discerning information about the latest gadgets. You can even get meta and teach people how to create information products. That’s what Bob Serling did with Info Millions.
How to sell information products
You can sell your information product as a one-shot deal, and perhaps that’s your best bet if this is your first time selling a product online. Yet it far from the most profitable. Even if you create an ebook you can sell for $5, it takes plenty of sales to add up to something meaningful. Chances are you’ll want to employ one of these two methods.
The add-on sale
A successful add-on sale centers on a flagship product. That might be an e-book or a series of e-learning videos. Those are heavily marketed as being useful to people in a particular niche. When people want to find out more information they go to a landing page which gives them more information on the product than they could possibly process. It’s not until they’ve agreed to buy that the additional opportunities appear.
The first way to create an add-on sale is to offer customers additional products immediately. The fitness industry routinely employs this method when selling products. Customers will agree to buy a $50 exercise program, but will then be directed to many more landing pages for supplemental materials. They’ll go through each of these landing pages, each of which presents an opportunity to add to the sale. Customers who choose to add these materials can double, triple, or even quadruple the price of the original product.
The second way is to follow-up some time after the original sale. This normally involves getting the customer to opt into a mailing list of sorts — or otherwise to not opt out. After the initial sale the customer will receive an offer for a similarly useful information product. If they were satisfied with the original they stand a good chance of buying the next product. This can be a less pestering method, since it gives customers enough time to use the original product before receiving another offer.
Subscriptions
The most profitable way to sell information products is by subscription. Charging customers every month leads to a steady stream of income. It can also allow you to charge a small amount for a product you’d price much higher; in other words, subscriptions can amount to payment in installments. Customers might feel better about paying $5 per month for something rather than $60 up front.
If subscriptions are the most profitable ways to sell products, then why doesn’t everyone do it? Because it also involves the most work. When people buy a subscription they expect periodic value. If they’re paying monthly, they expect new and unique value month after month. That means creating valuable products regularly, rather than as a one-time deal. The costs of acquiring new subscribers is also high, since people are discerning about recurring costs. Fail to deliver one month and it can cost you many subscribers, significantly impacting your financial projections.
Those with time and motivation could do well with subscription sales. The risk-reward factor is high, but so is the rate of failure.
What else you’ll need
In order to create and sell information products you’ll need more than just your computer. You’ll need certain tools to help you along the way.
A selling vehicle. If you’re a blogger, this is simple. You have an audience, and that audience is the intended target of your products.
A payment system. You’ll need a merchant account with a payment processing company, so that you can accept various forms of payment from your customers. This will cost you a portion of every sale, whether a percentage or a flat rate.
A landing page. A landing page is the main sales material for an information product. You’ll need one of these to help convince people to buy your product.
A marketing budget. In addition to a landing page you’ll probably want to purchase pay-per-click ads, so you can attract visits from people searching for terms related to your product.
Recording equipment. If you’re writing text-based information products you wont need these. But if you want to do webinars, e-learning videos, or podcasts you’ll need a video camera and microphone. Don’t trust the ones built into your computer; chances are they’re not of a high enough quality.
Credibility. We mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. If people don’t know who you are and what you’ve done, they likely won’t buy anything from you. You have to show people that you’re credible before you sell them a product.
It certainly is an involved process, and it will take plenty of time to get off the ground. But done properly, creating and selling information products can prove to be the most profitable venture for your blog. With some skill, credibility, and effort nearly any blogger can create these products. They sure beat waiting around for the display advertising market to pick up.
This whole area is very competitive and trying to break into it with traditional backlikns to your own site to get found via the search engines will take forever. What does work tho is Social media. You dont need to rank high in google if you can get your site found via facebook etc.
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IN Blogosphere things are changing around and peoples are earning much from affiliates then Adsense .So in this way your guide is helpful enough .
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It is very interesting article but I agree with Tommy that traditional backlinking is not enough and nowadays it is very important to be good in social marketing.
Twitter: blogshopwin
I think an e-book is a great idea. Maybe I will take some of my articles from my blog and put together an e-book. I have been using the traditional ways up till now, Adsense etc. Having written several pieces on my blog, once I add a few more it would be easy to make an e-book.
Thanks for the tip!
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Well i think we selling any stuff online, we need to marketing it completed i.e good promotion to get the short term results.
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I find the idea of creating an ebook daunting. It’s just too much darn work! (call me lazy). I can’t afford to quit my daytime job to go write an entire book on a subject! If I did, I probably wouldn’t be mucking around with some blog in my spare time. Same goes for the other things mentioned. Email newsletters demand that I creat new “information products” constnantly. I know first hand about a number of cases where people are making good cash with a pure backlink/ad based model. (I’m talking $800-1000 a day). Why can’t I be one of those people? Why should I have to turn to very time consuming projects such as “selling information products” There has got to be a better way.
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Well nice points. But initially it’s vital to show the important of your product so that people usually find it useful for them. You should briefly explain the features and how it’s different from same kind of product.
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I heard this tips before..but after reading this again.It refreshed my mind.
Thanks
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I truly agree to your tips. Getting a customer on a monthly subscription is a lot better than a one time fee. That way, we can expect a steady stream of income every month. Thanks for the post Joe!
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nowadays, amount of products marketed online is huge, so while getting use of all the social platforms possible, you should emphasize on the originality of your product as well, whether it is price or novelty..
Great summary!
Information is one of the fastest growing industry and should remain so for at least next couple of years.
It’s a good time to share your knowledge
Jean-Luc recently posted..Corum Convictions – 3e Trimestre 2012
I think putting together an eBook does not have to be that difficult, especially for bloggers. If you write consistently on your topics, you can take all the posts that are related and put them together in an eBook that you can give away on your blog, which builds your list and sets up a base for the next one.
Twitter: teesort
Can you tell me some more information product? I totally agreed with your post. Product information and product reviews can lead to more sale and traffic.
Properly organized and helpful information can sell well, it’s a fact. The main challenge is marketing, it’s an art to position yourself so that people can easily find you.
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Nice Post. Thanks for sharing. I am looking to go into product selling concepts and even in affiliate marketing. I hope these selling tricks will work
thanks for putting this article together. As many people have pointed out, if you’re a consistent blogger, you blogs you’ve already written can be compiled into their own ebook. But best of all they have already been reviewed by your audience so you know if anything needs to be tweaked or if the material needs to be updated, you’ve already crowd sourced a bit of your editing.
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Thanks for your information. I agree with you, Credibility is very important factor to sell any product. Without credibility, it hards to make sale although you offer the quality product.
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I think subscription service is little difficult to handle. Before selling any product, a blogger need to set his authority to the audience.
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Back to ebooks! I like the idea of selling something with information, but it is marketing, and this can be difficult considering how much free information you can find on the web.
The landing page is the most essential piece in my opinion. This is where you really SELL the product. There really is an art to building these.
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very helpful for someone like me that is really selling products online…Thanks a Lot Joe!
Twitter: Dating_Advice4u
Traditional backlinking methods are not enough now, only Social networking and nothing else and soon we’ll see when a new strategy will take the place of social networking. It is becoming more and more difficult for newbies and anyone who is struggling as an affiliate to succeed in this business.
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I was join affiliate network for two years and I was working hard but my income is still the same. I think it is time for me to create my own information product.
Advertising and gaining the customer’s trust is a surefire way to make a sale and generate a lead. These days, social media is where it is at to target a whole group of people and generate sales leads. Excellent article!
Without authority within your target group you get nowhere. You must consequently build on your authority. Else everything you businesswise do on the internet will get you nowhere.
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