If you want to make a good living from an information product business, you will need to build up loyal customers who will keep returning to you to buy more e-books, courses etc. The way to do this most efficiently is to be able to contact people that have already bought information products from you. To do this, you need a mailing list.
A mailing list is built through having an opt-in box on your website. People who leave at least their first name and e-mail address in this box and then click to confirm in the e-mail will receive momentarily will form your mailing list. Sometimes you may have to entice people to leave their details with you, by offering a free report or a newsletter, for which they need to leave their first name and e-mail address in order to access it. You can automate the sending of the free report out, by the use of an auto responder.
If you get yourself a good piece of auto responder software, you can arrange several lists for every one of your domain names. This kind of knowledge about and access to your clients is important in maximizing your profit from information products, because you should ideally have a mini website for each separate information product you are selling. That way you will appear as an expert who has faith in their product, rather than a Jack of all trades.
As soon as a person joins your mailing list, they will automatically receive an aut0 responder e-mail. This will give them the download link for the free information product you offered as a ‘thank you’ for joining the mailing list, but which will also advertise and promote the information product which you are selling.
In every auto responder e-mail that you send out, you should have a link by which people can unsubscribe from your mailing list. You may find that your auto responder program provides this for you automatically, so check that out. Providing an unsubscribe link lets people know you are running a legitimate business and are not interested in spamming anyone. You will know that everyone on your mailing list is at least potentially interested in buying your information products.
Trust of this kind is important in building any online business such as one based around information products. People will usually need to see your company name five to seven times before they trust it enough to buy from you. That is the beauty of auto responders which allows you easily to drip-feed information to your mailing list so that they get used to seeing your name.
That is why it is important to ensure that every email you send out is of good quality, and is useful to the people on your mailing list. Don’t spam and don’t make your e-mail pure sales pitches. You should send the first couple of emails without attempting to sell any information products at all. Don’t panic about that – you are building up reputation and loyalty.
You can later go to your mailing list and interact with them. Get them to tell you what information products they would like to see from you. That way you can be assured of finding a receptive audience for them.
When you get a thousand or more names of loyal, responsive people on your mailing list you can get the maximum benefit for your information product business by split testing your e-mail campaigns to see which results in most conversions.If you look after your mailing list well they will look after you well and keep bringing their business back to you. Part of looking after your customers is reassuring them that you will never sell their e-mail addresses or sell them on to a third party.
It is quite well known that you can make good money from selling information products on the internet. What puts a lot of people off trying that for themselves is that they think it is too difficult and time-consuming to write e-books, which are the biggest selling information products which yield the most profit. The good news is that that assumption is wrong!
You can write an e-book very quickly, with little effort, using a number of different methods.
Method 1
Put a series of articles together on different aspects of a topic. You may well have written articles before and if you own the copyright to them or if they are PLR articles with resell rights, you can very quickly assemble them into e-book to sell. All you need to do is add a front cover.
Method 2
Interview an expert. If they agree to share their knowledge in an e-book which you then sell, even if you agree some deal whereby profits are split, you can make great money by selling this expert e-book.
Method 3
You can automatically get a testimonial and build a case study into your e-book by using this method of ‘following’ someone as they learn something. For instance, suppose you have one information product which is detailing a fitness regime or learning some kind of IT skill. You can support this first information product and sell a second product, and get someone else to do most of the work!
How?
Send out an e-mail to your mailing list. Find someone who is willing to try out your first product and who is willing to communicate with you. You can offer them your first information product for free, of course. What they have to do in return is send you regular progress reports about what parts of your initial e-book or e-course they have tried and what progress they have made. Have them agree that these e-mails will form part the information product.
Of course then, when you have decided between you what the person’s goals are in using your information product, you need to e-mail them a system by which they should be able to achieve their goals. You should swap a series of e-mails with the person trying out your information product. You can use the feedback to improve your information product. When you’re ready to make up your information product, collate them together and do a spell check, grammar check and proofread them. Put them together in a Word file which you then convert to PDF.
That gives you your e-book! You can also incorporate this client’s testimonial into your information product so that it has even more credibility. Of course, you can do this whole system with any number of people.
So, for anyone who thought it was too difficult or time-consuming to write an information product, there are three easy ways to do it.