Posts Tagged ‘information products’

One great strength shared by successful ClickBank vendors is their ability to network. Vendors need to be able to entice lots of affiliates to promote their products to thousands of people in order to build a large list of customers.

Some people think they can simply launch a product on ClickBank and sit back and watch money fly out of their computer. That may have happened to a few people, however, it is more realistic to expect that you’ll have to build strategic alliances to increase the reach of the product or service you want to sell. This is where networking comes in.

Here are my top tips for networking and building a strong foundation before a launch:

1. Know your product or service. To start, you should write down a one-line sentence describing your product that would be easily understandable by any person you meet. For example, “A coaching programme for people who want to start a business.”

It’s also important to project product sales so you can work toward that goal. Many people write down a figure that represents the amount they want to earn in a tax year – $50,000, $100,000, $250,000 – and the number of paying customers they need to obtain to reach that figure. For instance if your product is $50 you’ll need 1,000 customers to hit your target of $50,000 in a year (plus there will be expenses on that figure to account for).

2. Build your credibility online. Find five websites in the same niche as yours. Slowly get more involved with those sites, become a regular reader and commenter and offer to write a guest post for their site. This will generate a link back to your site and help build your credibility online.

3. Determine social network targets. I’ve set a target for myself to achieve 10,000 connections on the three major social sites:

* 10,000 Twitter Followers
* 10,000 Facebook Likes
* 10,000 YouTube Friends

Your figure could be lower but it’s something to aim for before you launch your product or service. As a rule, if you plan to promote your product through social networking channels, you’ll need to get your social figures high since most people are so distracted online that only a small percentage will read and click on your links.

4. Email the experts. Make sure you have an email process in place to do so. You’ll need a plan for writing to the well-known bloggers and site owners. Keep these emails to a few lines, show enthusiasm and be as helpful as possible. You’ll be amazed by what help, advice and opportunities you might get back from the “Internet celebs.”

5. Attend industry events. Determine which relevant events are taking place over the next 12 months and make a point of going to five events. Spreading these dates out will ensure that you have a constant flow of emails to and from new contacts and opportunities from a variety of sources. Additionally, the contacts you make in “real life” can be more powerful than online.

Networking is a continual process and is a huge part of business. Scheduling networking time into your calendar is just as important as scheduling time for product or service creation, if not more!

About the Author

David Edwards is the founder of www.asittingduck.com and is currently the SEO Director at Webfactore Ltd.

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed why moving from affiliate to vendor, or doing both at the same time, is a great idea. I also discussed how to pick a topic or niche. In this part, I’ll answer a couple of other common questions I get asked.

Don’t I have to Be an “Expert”?

This is something I talk about often with our customers who are starting a search engine management consulting business. They feel very insecure, as they think they have to be the most knowledgeable expert in this field in order to begin marketing their services. That’s simply not true.

In order to be valuable to someone (a customer), you simply need to possess information that they don’t. That’s it. Not ALL the information, or the LARGEST resource of information, or anything like that. Knowing more than your potential customer and being able to present that information to them creates the value.

This can even be true when you are less of an “expert” than your potential customer. Let me give you an example. I’m a complete home theater nut. Projectors, TV’s, Pre-amps, amplifiers, speakers, sound formats, Blu-ray, etc.

I consider myself an expert on all of these things. However, I haven’t had a lot of time to focus on the latest home theater craze: 3D. It would be VERY valuable for me to have someone prepare a report (an information product!) on the various standards, equipment, and integration techniques for this technology. This is called information or content aggregation, and it’s essentially a research project. It just requires going through all of the available information online and in print, etc., and aggregating (summarizing) all of the content out there in one cohesive package. This would create a highly valuable product for an expert like me, and could easily be researched and created by a non-expert.

Can I outsource this so I don’t have to do it all myself?

Information products are excellent candidates for outsourcing. You can outsource the entire thing, or just the pieces you want help on. There are many people that make a full time living online creating information products for people. These are people that truly enjoy research and writing and the whole creation process, rather than trying to find ideas and markets and trying to sell their own products. The key is to find out the parts of information product creation that you enjoy and that you’re good at (very often the same!). These are the steps to do yourself, and the others are perfect for getting others to do them for you.

How do I outsource ?

The first challenge is to find a place where there are contractors waiting to do work for someone like yourself. There are several options, but we find the best overall place to go is Elance. The quality is very high, and there are plenty of choices there.

When picking someone to work with, I recommend you pick a person that specializes in creating information products, and someone that has a portfolio of examples you can examine to determine their quality level. This is not to say that someone completely new wouldn’t be able to do a good job, but you have to ask yourself if you have the time to risk your project to a complete unknown. Usually, it’s better to pay an experienced person a bit more to lower your risk.

One thing everyone wants to know about is cost, so I’ll give you an example. We recently outsourced a whole information product that required a lot of research (50 page ebook and a 1000 word sales script) for about $750 USD. This will give you some idea of the cost. It’s incredibly reasonable, and only takes a few sales to make your money back.

The biggest thing to focus on during the outsourcing process is managing expectations. The key is to ensure that you know what you want, that your outsourcer knows what you want, and that he/she can deliver what you want in the timeframe specified at the appropriate cost. This is harder than it may seem!

If you spend a LOT of time upfront specifying what you want, you can typically be successful in managing expectations.

Here are the things to focus on:

Deadlines – Make sure that the work can be completed in the timeframe by which you need it.

Chapter titles and summaries – This may seem like you’re having to do a lot of the work, but it’s time well spent. It doesn’t have to be the final version of the product, but the more you can give your outsourcer about what you expect, the better the whole process will be. You can be clear that they can still exercise their creative powers (that’s one of the reasons you’re hiring them) and make changes, but it’s a starting point for both of you to work from.

Voice, tone and style – In some markets, a casual or fun tone and writing style is important. In others, you need a more serious one. Make sure your outsourcer knows what you’re looking for.

Overview of the audience – Give your outsourcer as much detail as you can about the potential audience. This will only help them as they craft your product.

100% original content – Make very clear that you need original content. Research from sources is just fine, of course, but the finished product MUST be their own work product.

Specify font size, margin size and spacing (and/or just use word count) – A 50 page document can be a very small amount of content if the fonts are huge and lots of spacing is used! Ensure that you’re getting the amount of content you’re paying for.

Table of contents/Index – Do you want or need these?

Check in regularly – Don’t wait until the product is completed to check on progress. Request regular updates over the life of the project and check each chapter as it’s done. This will ensure that you’re on the same page.

Revision policy – Ask and make sure you understand what the creator’s revision policy is. What if you don’t like what’s being done? How many times and what scope can you change and still stay at the same price point?

These are the biggest things to get correct up front and to track during product development. In order to help, here’s an example (PDF / Word) of the product spec sheet that we use to communicate back and forth with outsourcers.

These tips on getting started and outsourcing should help get you on your way to creating a great product, but check back tomorrow for the final part, when I’ll talk about how to get affiliates to promote your product!

Update: Part 3 is now available!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.

Written by: Steven Clayton, Guest Author

When I first started out in Internet marketing, my focus was on affiliate marketing. Specifically, I was really concentrating on marketing ClickBank products. I was able to make a wonderful income doing this, and became one of the top affiliates for one of ClickBank’s best sellers. At that time, I was making this product owner approximately $1 million dollars per year.

That was wonderful, as I was making that too (with a 50% commission split), but as I found out that I was only the 4th (!) largest affiliate for this product owner, something occurred to me. I was working VERY hard, and wouldn’t it be nice to be the product OWNER and have 100’s or 1000’s of “me’s” running around and promoting my product instead of just benefiting from my efforts ? How about if I just had the top 4 affiliates of this vendor? It was a pretty compelling question, and one that set me out on a journey to become a vendor as well as an affiliate.

Fast forward to the present, and my company has sold 10s of millions of dollars of our own information products over the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE affiliate marketing and I do it every single day… but having your own products is a very special feeling and a nice distraction and diversification from the “daily grind”! The information product market is enormous (by many counts approximately $4 billion dollars) and ClickBank themselves have a healthy 10% or so of that market. This makes them the ideal place to launch your information product business.

We teach a lot of folks how to build information products, and when people are just starting out they seem to share a lot of the same challenges:

• What topic or niche do I pick?
• Don’t I have to be an “Expert” ?
• Can I outsource this so I don’t have to do it all myself? How do I outsource?
• How do I attract affiliates to market my product for me?

I think giving advice on these four large “problem” areas is a great way to help you start to move from affiliate to vendor.

What topic or niche do I pick?

Information products are pretty simple. First, you identify a market or a niche. These are groups of people who share a common interest. For example, organic gardening. That’s a group of folks who are all interested in a very specific activity. The goal of a marketable information product is to simply find out what that group “needs” and deliver it in the form of an ebook, videos, software, or some combination of these digital products.

So, in my organic gardening example, perhaps we could create an information product that educates and makes recommendations with regard to the proper fertilization techniques for organic gardening. The idea is that you find a market, you find out what the market wants or needs, and then you deliver it in the form of an information product.

So what constitutes a great market? In a perfect world, I would say it’s three things (you don’t always have to meet ALL of these conditions to have a successful information product).

First, you want an “evergreen” market.  An evergreen market means that it won’t be going away anytime soon. The classic example of that is weight loss. For the foreseeable future, everyone will want to continue to try to lose weight.

Second, you want a market where there are searchers online looking for information. This can be determined by looking at Google’s external keyword tool and the volume of searches for the main and related keywords. In our example, we could input “organic gardening” into the tool and see that there are plenty of people looking for information out there.

Finally, we’d like to see a market where there is the potential for people to buy multiple products or multiple related products. This means that as you continue to build your list of customers, it is more valuable as you could sell them more items over time. People interested in losing weight is the perfect example market. It’s evergreen, there are plenty of searches, and people will typically invest in multiple products and related products.

We know what a perfect market looks like, but where do we find ideas? I’ll tell you my biggest “secret source” for finding ideas . The “Dummies” books and the “Idiot’s Guides” books. There are THOUSANDS of titles that have been created for these two franchises. Each of these thousands of books cater to a market that is perfect for an information product.

These companies have already done the market research and the analysis to determine that there’s a great market for  these kinds of products. All you have to do is find one that interests you, and then decide on your particular “slant” on how to enter that market. For example, perhaps you found organic gardening (that’s a great market and there are Dummies books for that), and after some brainstorming and checking existing material and online search volume, your topic will be “organic gardening to feed a family of 4,” or you could go with our fertilizer example from earlier. That’s the way to use these resources for ideas that can blossom into a great information product.

In the next part of this series, I’ll answer the common question “Don’t I have to be an expert?” and talk about how and why you should outsource. Be sure to check back tomorrow for much more info!

Update: Parts 2 and 3 are now available!

About the Author

Steven Clayton and his partner Tim Godfrey are the creators of a number of best selling information products in the Internet marketing niche, along with many other markets. Their Info Prodigy course (teaching how to create and market information products) is currently closed to new members, but you can get on the waiting list and get a free and very detailed 26 page report that gives away even more secrets right here. In addition, don’t forget to sign up at www.blueprintaffiliates.com to see excellent examples of affiliate resource pages.