Why are e-books the perfect information product to sell on the Internet? Here are the reasons…
• 100% profit margin
• No printing costs
• No inventory to store
• Quick and easy to update
• No shipping costs or delays
• Higher perceived value than regular books
• Quick, simple, and inexpensive to produce.
If you can write an e-book you can then convert it into another format – an audio or mp3, a video, a webinar, etc. We call all these information products (or info-products).
Creating and selling information products online can be broken into these steps:
1. Coming up with information product ideas (finding the problem)
2. Researching to find the solution
3. Writing the infoproduct (eBook, Kindle, e-course or tutorial), or creating a video or webinar that presents the solution
4. Putting up the product where your target audience can access it
(for example on Amazon, Clickbank, JVzoo, Warrior+, eJunkie, etc); or your own website.
5. Marketing your product
Coming up with the product idea and marketing the finished product are some of the biggest problems for beginners. Marketing and promoting information products is a detailed course in itself.
In this post, let's look at coming up with ideas for information products.
When you pause to think about it, most people, when they go online, are looking for solutions. And they leave a footprint of their questions, frustrations, problems, wishes, and searches online – in Google's auto complete and search databases, on Amazon, the Q&A sites like Quora, in the forums – to name a few.
The forums in particular not only record all this information, most of the time they will even have the answers to the problem or frustration; answers that have been left by the more knowledgeable, and helpful, "netizens" on the forum. A lot of the time you don't need more than these answers and solutions, (plus some empathy of course), if you chose to write a product or short report on the problem.
And yet many people find it hard to come up with product ideas. Or when they come up with an idea they get bogged down by self-limiting beliefs, fear of competition, feelings of inadequacy, etc.
Here's an example. Someone went to a forum and posted this:
"I feel nervous whenever I have job interviews, so now I'm heavily leaning towards drinking some liquor before every job interview I get.. Alcohol really helps me open up and act down to earth. It would calm down the nerves as well. I'm just worried about it affecting my ability to think straight. Has anyone ever tried something like taking a shot of vodka before a job interview?"
Here is a problem many people can relate with. Maybe you have some
experience with it yourself? This would make a great topic on which to create an information product to help thousands of people out there who have this problem.
Look at the search volumes for the search term "USA jobs":
550,000 people in the USA are searching every month for "USA jobs". If you aggregated all related searches, such as "jobs in California, "jobs in Los Angeles", or "find work in…", "jobs hiring' or even "interview preparation" there must be millions of people in the USA alone looking for work.
Assuming that only 0.005% (or 1 in 200 people) of that population have this problem, we are looking at say 5,000 people who might be looking for a solution (or who might benefit from your solution) every single month – in the US alone!
5,000 people looking for a solution how to overcome the nervousness they get interviewing for a job opportunity! So, this is a classic example of a problem where you can write a one-problem-one solution type of short report for Kindle (2,500 words to 5,000 words).
But maybe someone has already created an information product to solve the problem?
A check on Amazon returned no result that specifically mentioned
nervousness during job interviews. Below are the closest related
results:
But even assuming there were already 10 books on Amazon on the topic, this would actually be good news. It would mean that others have identified this as a profitable niche in which to create an
information product.
You should never fear to compete, because with information products
maybe you have a unique take on the topic that resonates with others
better than the other products on the market. Maybe the other books on the topic have been written by experts (psychologists, human resource people for example, or ordinary folks who never experienced the problem themselves!)
Your book could compete favorably because:
- You have experienced the problem first hand and so you could bring your unique experiences into the mix (readers would relate better to what you wrote, meaning your book would get better reviews)
- Maybe you can explain your solution in a way that convinces people to actually take action on the solution you bring to the table
So far, so good – there is lots of demand for a solution to this problem, plus, people are discussing this problem on a forum, which means you can find the solution simply by researching on the forums for solutions others have proposed.
The next question to ask at this point… would people with this problem pay for this information?
There is a lot of free information online, but many people don't have the patience, or the knowhow, to navigate all around the web looking for simple solutions. They would gladly part with $5 or so if you could help them find the solution they are looking for, quickly and effortlessly.
So, the best way to check if people are paying for information in this niche, before you go ahead with creating an information product, is to go online on sites like Amazon and Clickbank. You can also use the keyword tools to see if the people in this niche spend money buying related stuff online. We're talking about people looking for jobs in this example, so it would be encouraging if you find that resume-writing services are selling very well for example, or resume-making software, etc.
This research also points you to other information products you can create to sell to this market after they have bought your first product, whatever format it was - ebook, video, Kindle book, and so on.
Another approach would be to niche your infoproduct to target a much smaller market that you can identify that is full of people who spend money on information. Take a look at this book below that the search on Amazon returned:
This author targeted physicians with this interview product!
In the next posts, let's look in greater detail at other ways to come up with product ideas.
You brainstorn using a brain-dump technique to find nuggets among the things you know, skills you have, and come up with ideas for information products - products people will be willing to pay you something like $3 for. This system is good for generating ideas for Kindle books
