Selling Information Products Online.. How Viable It Is Today?
One of the attendees of the Internet Income Summit asked me how viable it is to sell information products online these days?
My answer was short and quick, I could not get to the details. But overall this is what I explained him..
- Today’s consumer is almost over informed, demanding to know everything about everything before they make a decision. This can be a real pain if you’re selling vacuums or cosmetics, but it’s great when you’re selling information.
The question is, how do you go about selling information? How do you convince people they want to pay for something they could easily come up with themselves if they were willing to do the research? Actually, that’s pretty simple. The first thing you want to do is establish yourself as an expert on your subject. Easier said than done, but trust me it works like a charm if you can get it right.
This could be something you do for a living, something you do casually or something you studied in school. As long as you have enough know-how and experience to convince your consumers you really do know what you’re talking about, you’re going to be in an excellent position to make money selling information products online.
The next step is to choose the right medium. Are you going to be selling e-books or audio tapes or tele-products? Is this a full course set or a single piece? Believe it or not, each of these sells best through a different medium. Ebooks tend to do well with a simple sales letter, while full course sets go great with a website. Any type of information product will sell well through retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and you can easily launch a Squidoo page or personal website to market your products.
A word of advice? There are too many “gurus” out there selling information and ideas. The best way to make money selling information products online is to look past your own interests to identify a need, then target your products towards that. For example, Internet marketing products are selling like hot cakes right now; however, the advent of Web 3.0 technology is going to put a serious glitch in some of today’s hottest marketing techniques, so make sure you’re staying ahead of the crowd.
One concept that gurus like Frank Kern and Jeff Walker have made incredibly popular with information products is preselling. What’s that mean? It means if you’re in the middle of putting together a course, book or audio program that you think is going to sell like hotcakes, offer people the chance to pre-order at a reduced price and have first dibs on finished copies.
Your customers are more inclined to buy because they’re saving money and you’ll have an idea of what the public interest level in your products is going to be before you pay for manufacturing.
Before we go, let’s take a second to talk about sales letters. I mentioned earlier that sales letters are still a very effective way to sell information products; however, if you’re going to sell in today’s market you have to let go of some of yesterday’s selling techniques. There’s an old saying in the marketing community that pushes the need to “sell the sizzle, not the steak.” The problem is, there are so many products out there that have pushed the sizzle and fallen flat on their face when they had to deliver the steak that your customers don’t trust promises like, “You can make $10,000 a week!” They know these results aren’t typical.
Be up front with your buyers and it won’t take long for your information products to start flying off their (virtual) shelves.
As the Summit progressed I demonstrated many of these things from the stage to this person. For example I explained him how I plan to launch the Pre-Publication DVD’s of the Internet Income Summit at a reduced price as a limited time driven offer shortly. How I wrote the sales letter for the event myself and why to this day it is my highest converting sales-letter. How the offer to join the summit was time driven etc