How To Start Your Own Info Product Internet Business – Step 1: Choose a market & 5-minute market Litmus Test
Selling information product as an internet business is great because a typical info product is digital - that means zero reproduction cost, zero delivery cost to your customers (can be delivered via email or web), and no inventory control needed (unless you are selling, say, a piece of licensed software).
Info products have high profit margin - again, zero reproduction and delivery cost - you get to keep almost 100% of what you sell! Not many businesses can boast that.
As an additional benefit of owning your own info product internet business - freedom! The entire product creation and selling processes can be systemized... like any other true business should be.
Info products can come in many shapes and forms - simplest to develop would be to a report (ie. PDF), it could be in audio or video (higher perceived value, but information could be the same as in your PDF!)
I've put together a process overview on how your can start your own information product internet business. This will be a multi-part blog post.
Step 1: Choose a market & 5-minute market Litmus Test
Perhaps you are in your own marketing? Then that's great because most likely you can identify who are people in your market, and what kind of problems they (or you) are having.
Take one of my very first info product for example:
http://www.NewAquariumGuide.com
My market is fish keeping hobby - or people who want to get into that hobby.
Make sure you have a clearly defined market - "people who like animals" is too broad, "people who like dogs" is better.
Something that may help would be to go into a bookstore or online magazine website and see if there would be an actual magazine written for your market.
Now, perform a market research. Type in your "market" in Google search and note if there are advertisers for your market:
Advertisers are the listings on the right hand sidebar of the search result page. In this case, there are quite a few advertisers for "fish keeping" keyword which is actually great news! It means there is a market for it.
Now you'll want to use Google's External Keyword tool and perform a search on your market and see what the search volume is like:
As you can see there are 18,100 approximate searches for keywords related to "fish keeping" (keep in mind this figure is for broad search type, see Google's explanation on match type). If you would like a count that is more accurately reflective of actual search, then drop down to Phrase or Exact match types.
This is where you would want to gauge whether or not you would like to proceed with this market. "Fish keeping" has a good number of advertisers (which means there are money to be made), and has "decent" search volume - Yes, it's a relatively healthy market to get into.
My market selection rule-of-thumb:
- At least one-full page of advertisers on Google's search result page for your "topic" search.
- At least 10,000 searches for your "topic" in Google External Keyword Research Tool (broad search type).
Note: Come up with your own market selection guidelines as you gain more experience in developing and selling info products.
Step 2: Identify a desire or problem
Step 5: Write up your sales message
Step 6: Drive traffic to your sales message
March 20th, 2011 at 4:03 am
How 2 join
May 23rd, 2011 at 10:16 pm
hi i am interested and have been for a while ive just gone broadband but my biggest drawback, still. is no credit card or visa to purchase over the net so i find whatever helpful information to try and work something out but to have 97% of the work done would be great if only i can make a transaction. thnks