Information products are vital especially for an Information business.
You’ll need them because that’s what you’re going to sell to make money. Although you can also sell affiliate products.
Info products are also used as free giveaway products (a “bribe”) on the optin page of the sales funnel, in exchange for the prospect’s name and email.
Therefore you’ll need them to build a list as well.
A sales funnel is a series of pages specifically designed to collect the name and email address of your prospects and build your list.
In your sales letters, you’ll need to have about 3 Information products (free bonuses).
Therefore the ability and skill to easily create Information products are very important for the success of your Infobusiness!
This guide will show you how to generate new ideas for Information products, how to create them including several tools and resources…
And you’ll also discover a step by step business model or strategy you can use to actually sell your Info products and build a successful Infobusiness!
And as a bonus, I will show you how to find profitable niches as well.Table of Contents
What Is An Information Product?
An Information product (or Info product in short) is a product that simply put contains information about a specific topic (or niche). A quick example is an ebook that teaches you “How To Learn To Draw Pencil Portrait Like A Master”.
The format of the Info product could be an ebook, video, audio, webinar, email ecourse, etc. As long as the product is sharing some information it’s an Info product.
In the Info product business, we sell Information products to prospects that are looking for information about a specific topic.
Typically these prospects buy Info products in order to learn how to solve specific issues, problems or challenges they’re facing.
Anyone can find information with a quick Google search, or find videos on Youtube.
But these are usually articles, videos or maybe free ebooks that are generally speaking short and lack comprehensive detail.
In a lot of niches, people are willing to pay money to buy Info products to receive more in-depth, thorough and complete information!
In hobby niches like golf, table tennis, swimming, yoga, etc., prospects are usually very passionate…. and they’ll buy a lot of Info products to learn ALL they can about their passion.
How To Create
Information Products
First of all, it’s a good idea to be familiar with all the types of Information products you can create.
These are the major ones:
- ebook
- audio
- video
- templates
- checklist
- mind map
- info graphic
- software
- email ecourse
- special report
- webinar
- interview
You can create Info products in any of those formats. Software doesn’t necessarily provide information, but a lot of Infobusinesses sell software as well.
Those easy to consume Info-products like templates, checklists, mind maps or infographics are usually used as free bonuses in sales letters.
Or they’re used as the free Info product (also known as a free giveaway, freebie or free lead magnet) on the first page (optin page) of the sales funnel.Sales Funnel Definition A sales funnel is just a handful of webpages, and their goal is to collect leads! The most basic sales funnel (the one you should build first), consists of just 3 pages.
An optin page that gives away a free Info product e.g. a checklist or a video. A one-time offer page, which is a sales letter that sells an Info product and a thank you page! For the complete guide on sales funnels read my other guide.
You can combine several product formats together to create a bigger, more valuable and more expensive Info product. For example, a course that contains maybe 6-7 videos, 2 checklists, and an ebook.
You can turn Info products (digital products) into “physical” products, but this is an advanced strategy, not recommended until you’re successfully selling Info products in digital format.
For example, you can turn your ebook into a book, or a video into a DVD… Or a bundle of info products e.g. a couple of videos, an ebook, some checklists and a mind map into a home study course.
Turn Your Knowledge Into Info Products
You don’t have to be an “expert” to create Information products. You just have to be one step ahead of your prospects. Teach them what you already know.
It’s important that you pick a niche that you love because you’ll have to keep learning all you can about that particular niche.
As your knowledge and skills improve you can share your new insights with your audience and create new and more advanced Info products.
Keep in mind that in almost all niches the best selling products are the ones aimed for the beginner. There’s more demand for the basics than the more advanced stuff.
Here are just a few examples:
In the Internet marketing niche, 70-80% of the audience (the majority) needs to know the basics to go from $0 to $5K per month.
And only 20-30% already know the basics but need to go from $5K to 20K or more per month.
In the weight loss niche, the majority of the audience needs to go from obese to a little less obese.
And only a much smaller portion have successful completed that phase and need to lose their last few pounds.
In the learning a language niche, the majority of the audience needs to learn the first few words and sentences.
And only a much smaller portion have almost mastered the language and need the more advanced programs.
You can create Info products to teach the basics, and at the same time, you can learn and master the more advanced material yourself.
If you love the niche you’ve chosen then you’ll enjoy that process. And then you can create more advanced products!
This means you don’t have to be a 100% expert or master before you start creating Info products and an Infobusiness!
Information Products Examples
Here are some examples of Info products in different formats.
Mind Maps
The mind map in this example is a free bonus as part of an offer in the yoga niche. The ecover doesn’t have to be exactly like this one. Mind maps are great Info products to use free bonuses in sales letters.
Video Course
This is an example of a video course. This product contains over 100 videos with step-by-step instructions to learn pole dancing combinations and techniques.
Audio Program
This example of an audio program contains 4 audio’s to cure insomnia and sleep better. It comes with a guide that reveals a specific diet to sleep better…
For more examples, you can go to Clickbank Marketplace. It contains Info products in a wide range of niches.
Now let’s take a look at a couple of different ways to generate info product ideas.
How To Generate Information
Product Ideas
Here are several methods to help you generate product ideas. Always think of your prospects. Give them what they want… you want to please them.
Don’t include the features or information that you personally like. Think of what they would find valuable.
Find Out What Your Market Wants
Forums are a great way to learn what your prospects want. Read the topics and you’ll know what they’re asking, talking about and the issues and challenges they’re facing.
You’ll get an understanding of what they want, so you can create Info products that will help them solve those challenges, issues, and problems they’re facing.
Get Product And Topic Ideas
You can also look at Amazon Kindle ebooks to see what kind of topics other authors in your niche are writing about. That can give you ideas too.
Use the categories on the left side to drill down to your specific niche:
You can then sort by ‘Average customer review’ to see those ebooks that your prospects love the most.
For example these are the kind of ebooks and topics you’ll find in the Photography niche:
These two best selling ebooks from a huge list of other ebooks.
If we’re in the photography niche maybe we can create Info products on “forensic art” or “Adobe Photoshop”. People are buying products about these topics.
These are some other topics from best-selling ebooks in this niche:
“Drawing and Painting Beautiful Faces”
“Photography Demystified – For Kids!”
You can also look at your competitors’ products to get topic ideas. Be curious about all the products within your niche.
You’ll find your competitors by simply searching Google using keywords related to your niche. For example “learn golf”, “golf tutorials”, “how to play golf”.
Find websites selling Info products in the search results. Those are your competitors.
Look also at the ads that appear in the search results (usually on the right column), those too are your competitors if they’re selling Info products.
Model What Works
Once you have topic ideas for new info products your goal should be to create a better version of that ebook or video course your competitors’ are selling.
You don’t want to create just another ebook or video course on the same topic, and you can use a different product format too, e.g. videos if you want to.
You can read the sales letter or product description to understand what’s it all about. Find out its weaknesses.
What features or information does it lack? Then try to create a better product without those flaws!
Checklist To Improve An Existing Product
You don’t have to be an inventor in order to create successful products. In fact, inventing products is risky, you’re more likely to create a failed product.
The best way to create products is to improve existing products within your niche!
Use this checklist to discover ways to improve a product.
- Can it be made faster or easier?
- Can I add more to it? Can I subtract from it?
- Is it too complicated? Could it be simplified?
- Could it be combined with something else to make it more practical?
- How can I totally rework the concept/product?
- What is wrong with the current product?
- How can I improve it? Exactly what part needs to be improved?
- What are its weaknesses? Can you eliminate or reduce them? Can you replace them with something better?
- What are the things customers don’t like about this product and how can I change those things?
If some of your competitors are successfully selling software you can buy their software. And then analyze it and find its weaknesses.
Then try to create a better version of it.
Think of all the features it lacks and add those to your own software.
You can also read the sales letter, or find youtube videos that demonstrate it in action to learn about the features of the software without buying it.
This is what I’ve done with CashCopyInSeconds™.
There are other copywriting software with swipe files, but I’ve tried to include much more swipe files than they have and a wider variety of handy features.
You can use that same technique on any other product format, not just software. For example video courses… read the sales letter to learn the topics they cover in the course.
Make a list of anything they lack, perhaps there are important topics they don’t cover.
Think of all the ways you can create a better video course, perhaps more in-depth… and you don’t necessarily have to make a video course.
The information can be presented in an ebook, audio program or any other formats.
Modeling is not cloning or copying word for word. You’re just trying to improve an existing product.
There are a total of 25 different ways to generate Information products, and I explain each one of them in extensive detail in Product Generation Mastery.
It’s a 100 plus page guide that will give you the whole thing.
Now let’s take a look at some tools to actually create your Information products.
Tools To Create
Information Products
Here are the various tools and techniques you can use to create different types of information products.
How To Create eBooks
You can use OpenOffice or LibreOffice to create ebooks. When you download any one of those you get several applications.
Use the OpenOffice / LibreOffice Writer to write ebooks. It’s like MsWord, but it can convert your document into a .pdf file.
I’ve made another step by step guide showing you how to write an ebook with OpenOffice or LibreOffice.
You’ll know how to make a nice looking ebook simple and easy.
How To Create Videos
You can create video courses with a screen recording tool and a headset. You don’t have to use an expensive headset or mike.
There are a lot of screen recording tools.
These are some of the more common ones and they allow you to edit your videos as well.
Screencast O Matic
Free Screen Recording
EZVid
3 Types Of Videos
A very common type of video is the PowerPoint presentation video. You won’t appear in the video you (if you don’t want to).
You’ll talk and teach while showing PowerPoint slides that contain bullet points with a summary of what you’re teaching.
In the power points, you can also add images and other cool things.
Here’s an example that I’ve made:
I’ve made another step by step guide showing you how to make PowerPoint presentation videos using LibreOffice Impress or OpenOffice Impress.
Another type of video you can make is the screencast video. You won’t appear in the video.
You’ll record your own computer screen, for example, to show your viewers how to use Adobe Photoshop.
Yet another type of video you can make is to film yourself, so your viewers can see and hear you speak. You can record these kinds of videos with your smartphone.
To put the videos of your video course online, you can upload them to Youtube, and set their privacy to “unlisted”.
In that way, they won’t be visible on Youtube.
Put the links to those videos on the thank you page (or embed the videos on the page), and your customers will be able to access them.
How To Create Audio Programs
All you need is a headset and a tool to record and edit your audio files like the free and popular Audacity.
You’ll then upload the .mp3 files to your website or an online storage service like Amazon S3, and then give your customers links to those files so they can download them.
Audio programs aren’t the most popular Info product format. A good way (but certainly not the only) to use them is as a free bonus product in your sales letters.
For example, if you’re selling an ebook one of the free bonuses could be an audio ebook.
Just record yourself reading the ebook with Audacity, and you’ll create an audio version of the ebook.
Some people prefer to listen to audiobooks rather than reading so they can find that bonus really useful.
How To Create Software
You can find a software developer at Freelancer or Guru.
Create a complete and well-detailed document containing all the features you want in the software. And also draw a diagram of how the software should look like.
For example, specify where you want the buttons to appear. Then find a freelancer and give him the document and the images.
There will always be freelancers who ask for a very high price so be careful about that.
If you’re not sure how much to pay I suggest you join software development forums and ask them how long it can take to build a software like the one you want.
You can also ask them how complicated it is to design the software you want, and how much you should pay someone to develop it.
If it can be done in a few days, or it’s not complicated the job can be done for $150 or less.
How To Create Mind Maps
There a lot of different mind mapping tools and I’ve tested a lot of them. I use ImindQ – it’s great but not perfect.
It can export your mind map to a pdf file, but you can’t specify the zoom factor (a feature I wanted). You can try it free and see if you like it.
Bubbl.us is worth mentioning too, but currently, you cannot export to .pdf file.
Mind maps are good Information products to give away as free bonuses in your sales letters.
They summarize and digest a lot of information into quick and easy to understand mind maps.
They’re also good as lead magnets on the optin page of your sales funnel.
How To Create InfoGraphics
You can use Canva which is a free tool to create Infographics. This video shows you how to use Canva to create Infographics:
Canva has a good article on how to design Infographics, it also contains a lot of good Infographic examples.
Infographics are fast and easy to consume Info products.
They’re best used as free bonuses in sales letters, or as lead magnets on the optin page of a sales funnel.
How To Create eCourses
An ecourse is just a series of follow up emails designed to teach a particular topic or subject.
For example “How To Build Your Own Boat From Scratch – 7 Day eCourse”
But email is not the ideal way to teach. So what you can do is put the content of your ecourse on your website or Youtube.
You can write articles or record Youtube videos.
Then create a series of 7 follow up emails, and the emails will just give them a brief overview of what they’ll learn, and put a link so they can read the whole article, or watch the full video.
You can send one email every day, or every other day.
Whether you write articles or make videos is totally up to you.
Do what you feel comfortable. I prefer to write articles, I’m not comfortable speaking in a foreign language. I’m naturally more good at writing. Use your strengths!
How To Design eCovers
For Your Information Products
There’s a lot of designers you can hire to design ecovers, these are some of the ones I’ve used:
- DesignInca – I’ve hired them for ecovers. On their portfolio page they don’t have much examples of past work yet.
- Warrior Forum – In this forum they have an entire section where you can find and hire designers.
- Fiverr – Most of the freelancers on fiverr provide very low quality graphics. So look carefully at their portfolio before you pick someone. If you’re lucky you can find someone good but they can be really cheap.
- eCover Expert – Decent ecovers.
Image Editing Tools
In addition, you may need to edit some of your graphics before putting them on your website, products, etc., here are some handy tools:Luna Pic – they have two particularly useful tools. One is to remove a background from an image and the other is to make rounded borders (in case you really want to).
TinyPNG or OptimiZilla can be used to compress images before you upload them to your website. A lot of images can slow down your website, so compressing them to reduce their filesize is a great idea!
I use Canva sometimes to edit images and put text and shapes onto them. It’s free. The images you see on this website where done with Canva.Canva gives you lots of free background patterns, but if you want more you can get 494 more free patterns. Please read the FAQ, you do have to give credit but it can be hidden in the source code of your html.
If you need photos, you can use the following free resources. Read their FAQ because some may need you to give credit to the author.
https://www.canva.com/photos/free
https://www.pexels.com
https://www.freeimages.com
http://www.1millionfreepictures.com
https://gratisography.com
https://unsplash.com
https://picjumbo.com
https://pixabay.com
http://compfight.com
https://www.everypixel.com
https://libreshot.com
https://stocksnap.io
https://search.creativecommons.org
https://freerangestock.com
https://www.lifeofpix.com
These are paid resources, in some cases, they have free images but may require credit.
Believe it or not even with all those free resources sometimes I still cannot find a good image, that’s when I have to resort to a paid option:
https://www.dreamstime.com
https://www.123rf.com
https://www.shutterstock.com
https://www.istockphoto.com
https://www.freepik.com – This is the one I used.
The Information Product
Business Model
This is a proven info product business model and it isn’t that much complicated, and it has been used to build Information businesses that generate up to 50K a month.
These are the components you require: Sales funnel – You want to build a sales funnel because that’s a very good way to build a list.
The more traffic you send to the sales funnel (ideally use paid traffic), the bigger your list gets. One of your goals is to keep increasing the size of your list and a sales funnel can help you accomplish that!
Info products – You’ll need to create Information products because you’ll need to use them in your sales funnel.
Plus you’ll need them because that’s what you’re going to sell to your list. Although you can also sell affiliate productContent Site – This is a website, that you’ll use to put your content (articles or videos) on it, in order to really help your prospects solve their current issues or challenges they’re facing.
Your goal is to help your prospects as much as possible. Become their trusted advisor!
Email Your List – Email your list regularly (daily, or every other day), with helpful content. You can link to some of the content you create on your content site, or any other helpful videos, etc.
You can also recommend your own products, or affiliate products as well! That is how you make money.
You can also promote your products on your content site.
The content you give them on your content site and in your emails should really help them, so much that they’ll start to like and trust you. When that happens they will buy the products you recommend!
That’s a very proven strategy that you can use to build a successful Information business.
Your goal in the Information product business is to become a trusted adviser for your audience.
You want to help them in any way you can, and give them ALL that they want and need to solve all their problems, issues or challenges they’re facing.
This also means that if your prospects need a certain product or service, but you don’t want to develop it, find someone else and sell their product as an affiliate.
For example, in the golf niche, you can certainly sell Info products to teach your prospects on how to play golf, etc.
But those same prospects need golf equipment and accessories like golf clubs.
If you don’t like the idea of selling physical products you can join affiliate programs and sell them as an affiliate.
Selling Information Products
Sales letters will do the actual selling of your Info products. In your emails or on your blog you’ll only recommend (promote) your products.
You won’t try to sell them… The selling should be done on the sales letter!
A sales letter is like a long letter that contains all the details about the product.
It tries to persuade a prospect to purchase it and contains order forms so they can actually buy the product.
I made an entire guide on how to write a sales letter.
- Free Bonuses
When you write a sales letter to sell an Info product you’ll typically have to add 3 additional Info products (free bonuses) as part of the offer.
Those 3 Info products will increase the overall value of the offer, and you’ll increase the conversion rate of your sales letter. Which basically means you’ll get more sales.
Note: 90% of the time you’ll give them Info products as free bonus, but you can also give them free updates, private forum or private group, coaching call, etc.
A very important component of an Information business is the sales funnel, so let me share with you some more detail about that…
- Sales Funnels
Every business needs to get fresh new leads (name and emails of your prospects) every day, so that you grow the size of the audience that follows you. You grow your list.
And to get those leads we use a sales funnel. The most basic sales funnel consists of just 3 pages, an optin page, a one time offer page and a thank you page.
Drive traffic (ideally paid traffic like Facebook Ads) to your sales funnel, and you’ll generate leads regularly.
The optin page will give away a free Info product, but this should be quick and easy to consume. A good example is a checklist, template, swipe file or a video. This is known as the lead magnet.
The one time offer (oto) is a sales letter that sells an Info product that’s very relevant (on the same topic as much as possible) to the lead magnet.
You should reduce the normal price of the Info product by about 30% so they’ll get a special offer that they’ll only see on this on one time offer page.
The thank you page is the page they’ll go to download their products.
Sales you make from the Info product on the one time offer page will recuperate (liquidate) some or preferable all (known as break even) of the money you spend on paid traffic.
So you’ll basically get new leads regularly at zero cost. That’s the real objective of a sales funnel.
So in the most basic sales funnel you’ll use 2 different Info products.
It’s always recommended that you start with a basic sales funnel (consisting of just those 3 pages, an optin page, a one time offer page and a thank you page) to keep things as simple as possible.
Use the K.I.S.S principle in anything you do in your business, it stands for “keep it simple, stupid”.
Or else you can set yourself up for confusion and frustration which can demotivate you. That happened to me several times.
Once you build a successful sales funnel you can experiment with more advanced funnels containing a one click upsells, downsells, order bumps, etc.
Competition In the InfoBusiness
There could be dozens of “experts” in a particular niche, and you can still start and build a successful Infobusiness in that niche, because of two reasons:
1) As their trusted adviser or “expert” your job isn’t just to create and sell Info products.
You have to produce content (in the form of emails, articles, videos or other formats) in order to help them!
That’s why I’ve created an entire content creation course…
If you do a good job at that you’ll naturally attract an audience that likes you because your content is really helpful and useful!
You can create more and better content than your competitors to help the audience of a particular niche as best as you can!
2) You’ll attract people who are naturally drawn to you simply because they like you more than someone else. They’ll prefer to learn from you instead of one of your competitors.
They connect with you better perhaps because it’s the way you talk, the country you’re from, the experiences you had, your age, your story, a combination of those… or a number of other reasons.
This means you should try to be yourself in your communications (emails, articles, videos, etc.), and you’ll find an audience that likes you for who you are. You have a unique personality, just be yourself and they’ll find you real and genuine!
Find A Profitable Niche For Your InfoBusiness
You need to pick a niche that you love because you’ll be spending a lot of time creating products and content about that topic.
You’ll also need to keep learning more about the particular niche so that you can share your new discoveries, knowledge, and skills you master with your audience to help them grow.
Remember you don’t have to be an “expert” to create Information products. You just have to be one step ahead of your prospects.
But not all niches are profitable and some are more than others. You have to perform some research to make sure you find a profitable niche.
To find a profitable niche, follow these 3 guidelines:
- #1: A Large Audience
The niche needs to have a sufficiently large audience of people that are looking for information on the topic. Because the bigger the audience the more products you can sell!
You can use keyword research tools, e.g. Keyword Finder to find out the approximate size of a niche. Just type keywords your audience might use when searching Google, and it will tell you how many people search those keywords every month.
Don’t try keywords like “table tennis” because it’s too general. You don’t know the intent behind that keyword.
A large portion of people searching for that keyword aren’t looking to buy Info products on that topic.
On the other hand prospects that would be willing to buy Info products about table tennis are more likely to search for keywords like these:
learn table tennis
table tennis tutorials
table tennis mastery
table tennis techniques
table tennis strategies
table tennis coaching
table tennis classes
table tennis courses
And the keyword research tool tells us the monthly search volume for each one:
You should make a list of keywords as big as possible, and then add up all their total monthly search volume. And generally speaking, if the total monthly search volume adds up to 8,000 or more it’s a sizable enough niche to be very profitable.
If the total monthly search volume is less than that the demand is very low, and I wouldn’t consider a business in such a niche.
If the total volume is about 25,000 or more that would be a large enough niche for maximum profit!
- #2: Competition
Your audience (the prospects in a particular niche) needs to be willing to spend money for the information they’re seeking.
Here’s an example of a bad niche:
People searching for information on how to trim their beard aren’t going to buy an Info product about that.
Because a couple free Youtube videos can provide them with all the information they need.
So if you want to create an Info product make sure there are already Info products being sold right now about that same topic. This means there should be competitors.
If there are no competitors, it basically means the niche is not profitable, and no one is willing to buy Info products about that topic!
You can search Google e.g. “how to trim beard” and see if there are any Info products and how many.
Selling Information products isn’t a new thing, if there’s a profitable niche there will be competitors, almost guaranteed. There’s no such thing as an “unknown or untapped niche”.
- #3: A Vast Topic
You cannot sell just a single Info product (e.g. an ebook) if you want to make good income from the Infobusiness.
You’ll have to sell multiple Info products, and in addition to that sell other products or services that your audience needs (as an affiliate if you don’t want to develop them yourself).
Therefore consider choosing a niche whose audience need to learn a LOT of different things to solve their problems, challenges or issues… so that you can create multiple Info products.
If you can teach them everything with just 1 ebook, that you can sell for about $47 that’s not going to be a profitable niche.
For example I know a successful business owner in the ‘table tennis’ niche selling several Info products (each about $47) on diverse topics:
master the basics
service mastery
forehand loop mastery
backhand loop mastery
forehand smash mastery
footwork, agility and speed mastery
and more…
That’s a profitable niche.
Generally speaking if the niche is related to a hobby you can sell multiple Info products, because hobbyists are passionate people and they’ll buy all they can.
You’re an entrepreneur (technically speaking an Infopreneur) and you’ll free to own multiple businesses.
Some niches are more profitable than others, in one niche it might be hard to make more than $2K a month, and in others, you can make $25K a month or more.
So some niches pose a limit on how much money you can make.
But you’re free to own multiple Infobusinesses. It’s always recommended to start just ONE business, grow it until it’s successful, and only then even consider starting another one!
Conclusion
We’re in the Information Age. People use Google mainly to find information. That’s why information products and the information business are so popular and in demand.
Information products can be used by any type of business, not just an Information business.
If you have an e-commerce store you can create e.g. buying guides, product comparison or review guides.
Those give prospects important information that will help them choose the best product for them. Buying guides explain the various features of a product, very useful especially for more technical products like laptops or cameras.
If you have a brick and mortar business free information products can be used to build your list. For example, give away a free report that contains some best tips or techniques about what you do.
This also sets you up as an “expert” and people love to buy from “experts.
So consider the various ways you can use information products in your business. They’re like tools that help you get more traffic, leads, and customers.
Do you have any particular questions or comments about Information products? Leave them in the comments below.