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Selling Information Products Online (Step-By-Step Guide To Building A Profitable Niche Marketing Business - Part 18 of 27)In my experience, before most people set up an online business they’ve already got a pretty good idea about what they want to sell. It’s often something they’ve worked with in the past or something they use in their spare time, like model aircrafts or football memorabilia. The Web, they believe, is the perfect way to get those products to the public with little expense. But not everyone comes online with an idea in hand. In this chapter and the next, I’m going to look at two kinds of product you can create and sell on the Web: information products and software programs. Let’s start with information products. On the Web, information products mean e-books. These are small books that are downloaded from the Web (like this one) and are usually aimed at niche markets. It costs a lot of money to make a print book and if the market is small, few publishing companies are going to bother with the risk and the expense. E-books cost little more than the time it takes to write them. And anyone can write an e-book! You don’t have to be John Grisham or the world’s leading expert to write a book. Everyone knows something that other people don’t know, whether it’s how to fix a TV or how to tell the difference between a blue tit and a crow. You don’t even need to write it yourself. If you’ve got an idea for a book, simply find yourself a ghostwriter, tell them what’s on your mind and get them to write it for you! Finding a Writer If you don’t want to do the writing yourself, finding a writer for your e-book is dead easy. Finding a good writer though is a whole other ball game. Everyone and their aunty thinks they have what it takes to win the Pulitzer if someone would just give them a chance, but even most college graduates have a hard time constructing a sentence, let alone writing a complete book. And you don’t want any old book. You want a book your readers will enjoy reading in a style that speaks to them. If you’ve already hired someone to write your newsletters for you, they’re probably going to be the first person to ask. Every time you hire a new writer, you’re taking a risk. You’ll have no idea how talented they are, how much they know about your industry or how well they can write in the style you need. A writer you already work with though, does know about your industry—and you know how well they can write. If you don’t have anyone on call though, Elance is a good place to search. Again, check the portfolios carefully and pay attention to people’s feedback. Elance encourages its clients to review the work of the people they hire. These are great pointers to the reliability and skill of a writer you’re thinking of hiring. One little tip for hiring writers on Elance is not to pay too much attention to the amount of work the writer has done in the recent past (another little piece of info Elance gives you). You don’t want to hire someone who’s too stressed to give your book the attention it needs, and just because someone’s new to Elance, or doesn’t use it very much, doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot of experience. They might have a lot of clients outside Elance. In short, you want to find someone who can show you an e-book they’ve already written and ideally on the subject and in the style you want. Now, once you’ve made the hire, it’s important to remember that you’re paying someone to do the writing not the thinking. It will be up to you to supply the writer with all the information he needs to get the job done. The more you help the writer with the ideas you want the book to contain, the greater the chance you’ll get the product you want. And finally, don’t be surprised if the writer demands that you stump up some cash in advance. On Elance, a deposit of as much as 50% isn’t uncommon. This a result of all the unscrupulous buyers who have bought services and not bothered to pay the bill. Too many writers have been stung in the past and most of the more established ones will want to see at least some cash to know you’re on the level. There’s often room to negotiate the deposit though, and you can sometimes use milestones to lessen the risk on both sides.
What Can You Write About? In essence, there are four categories of books. Of course there are a plethora of subcategories in each of these main categories, but the main ones are: Pleasure Books Inspirational Books Study Books How-To Books “Do-it-yourself” and self-improvement books. Straightforward approaches, pictures and analogies that teach everything from archery to amateur zoology. Although all these types of books sell, the how-to-books and guides are by far the best sellers on the Web. You don’t have to be massively original here. The most profitable books are those that offer a slightly new take on a topic with proven popularity. There’s no point in picking a subject that only interests you and your best pals. I’ve found that these are the ten most popular—and most profitable—topics for “how-to” e-books.
Those are pretty general, and clearly you’re going to have to generate ideas that focus on a particular topic. A book entitled “Making Money” isn’t going to sell many copies; a book entitled “Making Millions in Your Pajamas” will. When you’re looking for a topic, first make sure it’s a subject that you do actually have some knowledge about—or alternatively, make sure you hire a writer who does. If you’ve found a subject that no one else has touched, or even come close to touching, it’s unlikely that anyone will want to read it. The reason that there are millions of romances on bookshelves—and almost all of them the same—is that publishers know they sell. And like you, they’re interested in making money not breaking new ground. So how do you assess the popularity of your chosen topic? Here’s a simple three-step process:
And what does all this information tell you? First, it tells you whether there is a market at all; and secondly it tells you whether the market is saturated. Choosing the right topic
Ebooks and guides on various subjects have been prospering in the recent past. Anything you can put in a physical book, you can put in an Ebook. You can sell just about any content — as long as you have an offering that has a market and an ability to get it (legally) to your customer. Yes, there are exceptions. In some cases you might be competing with big companies with a chunk of the market share. Here are some categories that you may pursue: Personal advice, motivation and self help sites There are several sites aimed at the individual - mainly motivational and self-betterment sites. Such sites offer tips, articles, advice and counseling on how to build self-esteem and self-confidence and reduce stress for a happier life. You may also provide great inspirational quotations, inspirational stories, motivational poems, and other resources to motivate and inspire your visitors. It could include psychology tests, IQ tests, emotional intelligence tests and personality tests for self-help improvement. The market for personal advice and counseling, especially for students is pretty big. You can provide educational counseling through such sites. Professional advisory information and training is covered in a subsequent category. Fitness and health, diets, weight loss sites These sites provide complete guides, articles, tips and counseling on proper eating and exercising habits, benefits of diet and exercise, fitness techniques, diet articles and diet tips, weight loss, as well as some of the popular diet plans. It includes tips from fitness experts, reviews of fitness and diet programs, message boards, forums and discussions on health and fitness. Information of various nutritional and diet supplements, healthy and non-healthy foods can be included. Some of the popular fitness and health sites are eDiets.com and WeightWatchers.com. Not all the sites are comprehensive in nature; most in fact focus on some specific program(s) and try to promote those programs to their members. Members are provided not only great details about some proprietary programs, but also personalized guidance to suit their individual cases. Members are also able to share their experiences. Generally, such sites will also offer privileges and discounts to their members to avail of fitness equipments or nutritional supplements or membership of fitness clubs. Credit Help websites This category includes sites offering access to consumer credit history records and related content, for example ConsumerInfo.com and CreditExpert.com. Such websites also offer credit counseling and tips as well as credit consolidation services. Articles, guides, and tips for credit improvement are provided. Medical research websites These sites focus on medical issues and/or health insurance. Medical research websites provide an extensive listing of research resources on various diseases and promotion of health through public education. It includes clinical information as well as information about doctors and hospitals in all states. Information on medical ethics and fraud is also provided. Medical Journals, publications, and articles are often presented. Such websites are a good resource for lists of National Institutes of Health, medical encyclopedias and dictionaries, and extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs. Apart from these, all information related to Medicare and health insurance can be found on these sites. Consultants, paralegal and legal researchers and consumers are amongst those who have interest in such sites. You may also like to consider a site that provides information on health and medicine for the general public or for a specific target group, say women, nursing mothers. While there are quite a few sites that offer this type of information free, there is room for those that can provide uniquely targeted information. Alternate and complementary medicine and therapy is another area evoking considerable interest and audience. Personal Finance and Investment Finally, once you have selected your subject, it’s just a question of putting it all together and making the sales. Show it to your friends and colleagues to get their feedback, add some pictures to break up the text if you can, and upload it onto your server. Your basic sales method is likely to be through a website, but e-books also make great bonuses, joint venture opportunities and ways to add extra value to your sales. Information products have two great advantages. First, they’re dead easy to put together. If you’ve always thought of yourself as a bit of a writer and want to do it yourself, you can have fun and hit the keyboard. If you’d rather pay a pro, you can probably make the money back once you’ve shifted about thirty or forty copies—follow my marketing methods and that will take you less than two weeks. Best of all though, information products give you an unending stream of revenue. Once you’ve uploaded the book onto your server and set up the website and payment system, they money pretty much rolls in by itself. There’s no shipping, no inventory, no fiddling about with order sheets. You just keep an eye on the marketing, make sure the users keep coming and count the number of times people download. Put a series of books like this out, combined with my marketing methods and you’re looking at a very nice way to make a living.
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