Dollar Secret

Why Information is the Perfect Product

You need to be selling information–here’s why.

For over a decade now Internet Marketers have been touting the wonders of selling information to people. I’m here to tell you–they were all right! I’ve been selling information for a few years now, and earning many times more than my old day job used to pay (and the amount I earn goes up every year).

Information is the perfect product for three reasons:

1. It’s easy to produce.

2. It’s inexpensive to produce.

3. It can be immediately received.

Information Is Easy To Produce

Informational products are very easy to produce if you already have some knowledge on a subject that is considered valuable by others. Fortunately, given the huge diversity across the web, it’s hard to come up with an informational topic that is not of value to somebody.

For example, if you want to write a report on how to save money on your taxes, and you’ve been working for the IRS for ten years, then it’s just a matter of organizing what you already know and laying it out into a report.

Or, if you’re a plumber and you are always running into problems with certain kinds of products, you can write a report detailing the best shower heads, faucets, toilets, sinks,

etc. to buy when building or remodeling a new home. Again, you already have the knowledge. It’s just a matter of organizing it into something useful to other people.

To produce this knowledge, you may find it helpful to come up with a table of contentsfirst. Then just flesh out each chapter into a few pages. Or you might find it easier to simply start typing your knowledge out into your favorite word processor. When you’re done, you convert the document into a PDF file using free tools and you sell it. Sounds easy, right? Well, it’s a bit more involved than this paragraph makes it sound, but yes, it is rather easy to do. Certainly easier than creating a “brick and mortar” product.

Here’s a great site for finding out what kind of topics people are interested in reading about. This site has laid out goals and tasks for a large variety of things (like losing 10 lbs or learning to play golf, etc.). The information is almost perfect for building reports around, and the site has lists showing popular goals (read: what’s marketable).

http://www.mygoals.com/

Here’s the software I use to convert documents to PDF files for free. It doesn’t matter what Word Processor you use, since it installs as a printer and you just “print” to it.

http://www.pdf995.com/

Information is Inexpensive to Produce

This really goes hand in hand with what I’ve already said. If you already have the knowledge, getting the information into an organized format really only requires time.

Even if you don’t have all of the knowledge you need, doing research online to fill in the holes is also very inexpensive–usually free.

However, just because it’s inexpensive to create the informational product doesn’t mean that the information itself is not very valuable. There’s not a How-To book written in the world that contains information you can’t get for free somewhere else. The question is: how long would it take you to find it all? People buy How-To books because they want it all in front of them in a nice, easy package. That’s why informational products sell so well.

Information Can Be Immediately Received

Another one of the reasons that informational products sell so well is because the visitor reading your sales page knows that the product will be immediately received. They don’t have to go shower, get in the car, and take a trip down to the bookstore to get the information. They don’t even have to wait for Amazon.com to ship it to them after they ordered it online. No, they will get it right now. That’s a big selling point for a lot of people. Plus, it’s easier on you as the creator of the product. You don’t have to pay a printer to print the books. You don’t even have to burn CD’s. There’s no shipping to do, either. It’s much less expensive, and a lot less hassle, than traditional informational products like books.

Don’t Look Now, But…

Yes, information is definitely the best thing to sell online–but it’s not problem free: at least, not the way most people are trying to sell it. The next section discusses these problems.

Information Is Not Problem Free

Information’s four main problems.

Yes, informational products are the best products to sell, especially online. However, that does not mean that there are not some real problems involved in trying to sell them, especially now when the idea has caught on and competition is growing fast.

Informational products can been problematic for four reasons:

1. You have to convince people of its value.
2. You have to price it right.
3. Refunds, refunds, refunds.
4. You have to have a good sales team.

You Have to Convince People of the Value

s information valuable? Of course, everybody knows that. People buy books, watch the news, read newspapers and magazines–all which they (or somebody else) had to pay for. They’re willing to spend the money because they know that information is valuable.

Is digital information valuable? Again, of course it is. However, because people aren’t getting a physical product, it takes more work to convince people of its value.

For example, with a book or a magazine, a person can pick it up on the stand at the store and flip through its pages. They can see what it contains and read parts that are of interest to them in order to make the decision of whether or not the information is worth buying.

You can’t do this with digital information like PDF reports or ebooks. People can’t flip through the pages. If you give them a copy to look at ahead of time… well, let’s just say that’s not a good incentive for them to come back and pay.

So you need a sales letter that really demonstrates in convincing language how valuable the information contained in the report or ebook really is. Unless you’re a skilled copywriter (or like me, an individual who’s had a lot of practice and beat his head against a lot of digital brick walls), it can be hard to provide a strong enough sales pitch to get people to pay $47, $67 or even $97 for an ebook.

That brings me to the next problem with digital information products.

You Have to Price Them Right

Yes, digital information has value, but you can’t put it on the shelf. It won’t one day be really valuable just because it’s really old. You can’t snap it up for a quick browse while you’re waiting at the doctor’s office. So that puts questions in potential customer’s minds about how much they are willing to pay for your information.

Let’s assume that your sales letter has convinced them that they would benefit from the information you have to offer. That’s a great first step. But you also have to convince them that it’s worth the price-tag you’ve put on it.

If you’re trying to sell an information product for $47, $67 or even $97 (and many of them are priced that way), it can be tough to achieve a good conversion rate. This is especially true if you have competition who’s willing to work “on the cheap”, slashing their own prices for similar information. Yours might be better, sure, but it’s hard to convince people of that sometimes–remember, they can’t flip through the book first.

Refunds, Refunds, Refunds

The plague of over-priced digital informational products is the refund request. Since people aren’t getting a physical book, they expect a lot of value in what they download to read. They demand an info-packed PDF that will really bring home the bacon.

If you fail to deliver, you will receive refund demands left and right. It’s hard enough to convince somebody that your information was worth $47, $67 or $97, but once you’ve convinced them it is, it’s even harder to keep them convinced so they don’t request a refund.

You Have to Have a Good Sales Team

If you’re going to sell digital products, you need a generous affiliate program, one that’s reliable and has good terms. You might have the best product in the world, but making it take off all on your own, without the benefit of a strong sales force, is very hard and expensive.

You want to be generous with your affiliates, but you still want to make money yourself while not setting the price so high that the conversion rate plummets. That’s not an easy balance to strike, especially if you’re new to the world of producing and selling informational products.

There’s A Better Way

The purpose of this report is to teach you a solution that takes advantage of all of the great aspects of informational products while minimizing the problems. The traditional methods of producing a product and selling information online are getting much harder because of competition–but it doesn’t need to be hard.

In the next couple of sections I’m going to discuss a better method, the $7 Secrets method, that I’ve formulated to make it a lot easier to earn a living through creating and selling digital products online.

Sources : By Jonathan Leger, www.JonathanLeger.com, www.7DollarSecrets.com