What are information products and why would I buy one? Information products can vary from a membership website to a downloadable ebook. You can purchase information products through the internet and get immediate access to them. Because of this, and the ease in which they can be accessed online, information products are hugely popular as the means to create a portable income for many affiliates around the world.
Examples of information products might include:
- A free ebook
- A downloadable report
- Access to video training (Access on the right >>>>)
- Membership websites
- Online training courses
- Webinars
Affiliates promote online information products to earn commissions and this allows the owners of the products to advertise and find more customers through websites, content, Youtube and online (and offline) advertising. The main cost involved in promoting information products is advertising since there is no warehouse, staff or storage considerations for information products. Affiliates are used to find customers for information products.
What is an affiliate?
Owners of information products sell them on the internet through their affiliates. The affiliate receives a portion of the profit from selling the products – up to 50% in some cases. This is because the information products don’t have as much cost involved in storage, postage or customer service. It is virtually all done automatically over the internet. The information products themselves are just that – information, and this can be given over the internet in the form of video and other digital methods including text and pdf. files which can be easily accessed by anyone with an internet connection and a laptop.
Why would I sell information products?
The great thing about selling information products is that once the systems are set up you can make a very flexible income from selling them online. You can also scale up your sales once you have found a suitable way to advertise them. Once you have set up an advertising process, leading customers to your website, you can slowly increase your budget over time, once you have put yourself in a position where your sales are larger than your advertising budget.
For example selling a $100 product while only spending $10 in advertising would make you $40 assuming a 50% commission on your sales( $50 commission – $10 advertising = $40). Once you have achieved a profitable ratio of advertising spend to commissions you can simply increase your budget and without having to do any further work you can scale your profits upwards.
Some of the reasons to sell information products are:
- It offers a scalable income source – leveraging your income using online technology
- It offers a flexible working schedule – work anytime day or night and around existing commitments
- It offers a geographically flexible income – work anywhere in the world.
- You are your own boss – income is directly relevant to performance
- It offers potentially unlimited/uncapped income
Should I make my own information products to sell?
Making your own information products is how many successful entrepreneurs have made their money. However, the main problem with this is finding a market and selling your product. Your product may not sell and in the mean time you will have spent months creating it before realizing how difficult it can be to sell, or if there is even a market for it. It is a much quicker process to sell other people’s products first, and learn the key skills of marketing an online product. Once you have successfully made money by doing this you can apply the same skills to selling your own digital product.
Finding a product to sellÂ
There are literally thousands of products available online which you can promote through your website straight away. Simply type “‘your niche‘ affiliate product” into Google and you should find a suitable product to promote. Do your research and only promote products which you, yourself would use and which you can legitimately say give value to the customer.
Building a sustainable income from selling affiliate products
Selling affiliate products requires a bit of training and a few key skills. As an affiliate your job is to find the customer and you can do this by providing value and offering free information in the hope that some of your visitors will want to opt-in to your email list and purchase one of your products. Selling a $100 item is all well and good but you will need to sell a lot of them in order to build a sustainable income from your affiliate business. They key then is to create multiple income streams from various online sources; sell high ticket items, monthly memberships and build a list of subscribers.
- High ticket items – Selling a higher value digital product allows you to make a larger commission on each sale. Rather than trying to sell multiple items at $100, sell higher value items at $1000. This means a commission of $500 for each sale rather than $50 – for potentially the same amount of work.
- Monthly residual income – selling monthly membership to a membership site allows you to make monthly residual income from each sale which you have made for the lifetime of the the customer. Assuming the customer continues their membership, you continue to benefit from having referred them.
- Build a list of subscribers – Building a list of subscribers puts you in charge of your traffic. Website traffic (visitors) is one of the main ingredients for any successful online marketing campaign. Relying on Google, YouTube or any other means of traffic which is out of your control is a little precarious. Build multiple traffic sources and get a list of subscribers with an auto-responder like Aweber.
For more information on building an online business, traffic sources and mindsets, subscribe to my email list on the right of the page. Or take a look at this video for more information.