You know you need your own product in order to stand out from the crown and realize the maximum income from blogging. Now the question is, what is the best product to sell?
Long before I got into blogging, I was an Internet marketing and sold countless things on the Internet. Of all the things that I’ve sold, by far the easiest and most profitable was the information product.
Information products are eBooks, downloadable software, membership sites and any other products that are delivery electronically and have no psychical shipping and handling.
What makes information products so much better than any other products? The reasons are many but they can be boil down to these main ones.
They Are Easy To Create
Most bloggers have enough blog posts to make many eBooks. My first info product was created by taking a collection of posts from my blog and repackaging it.
You may think that your readers would never go for an eBook of repackaged blog posts but you’ll be wrong. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have many pages of blog posts, most new readers are never going to check your archives. As far as they’re concern, all the content in your eBook is brand new. Even if the reader has been a long time reader and read most of your posts, chances are he would have forgotten most of it so to him, your eBook would be new as well.
Cost of Goods Sold Is Near Zero
The nice thing about an info product is the cost of goods sold is practically zero since there’s really no per unit production cost. All the costs are tied up in the initial creation and that can be near zero as well depending on how you go about producing it.
I used to have an online store that sold computer cables and accessories. One of the reasons I chose that niche was because of the high mark up and I was able to pay affiliates a 20% commission and still make money. However, as high as the mark up was, it’s nowhere close to the mark up that an information product can achieve.
Because your cost of good sold is next to zero, you can afford to offer affiliates an insane commission level and still make money on it. Look at some of the info products on Clickbank. Many of them pay up to 80% commission!
Pricing Is Based on Value
Because an information product is all electronic and has no psychical presence, the pricing is based on value instead of on looks and feel.
When you go to a store and see a product, you form a price in your mind based on how the product looks because you’re buying the product you see in front of you. With an info product, you’re not really buying the words in the eBook or the presentation in the video. You based the price on what the information is worth to you. You’re buying the effects those words and images can create if you apply them.
Pricing of info products can be all over the map. They range from free to thousands of dollars. And since the value is in the information and not the form its delivered in, you’ll come across thousand items that can be considered a great bargain to free items that can be considered a waste of time.
Price Changes By Changing The Delivery Medium
The information on most blogs are free. Unless you’re the Wall Street Journal, you simply won’t be able to charge a subscription fee for their content. However, if you move your content to a different medium, the situation changes.
For example, if you repackaged your blog posts into an eBook, you might be able to sell it for a few bucks or use it as a bride to get your readers email address.
Now take that eBook and turn it into a real book and it will sell $20 or so. The information is the same (with a few updates here and there) but because the delivery medium has changed, so has the price.
Take that book and turn it into an online course and the price changes again. Take the online course and turn it into a live seminar and again the price will change.
Through all this, the core information has not change but the price went from free to many hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.
Why would people pay thousands of dollars to attend a Rich Dad Poor Dad seminar when they can get the same information by simply reading the book? Because people place difference value on the delivery medium. A live seminar is seem to be worth more than a book.
By repackaging your information product into a new medium, you extend the life of the product and will make more money.
Scales Easily – Everything Can Be Automated
By far the most attractive feature of an info product is its ability to scale and be fully automated. When you have a physical product, scaling becomes a lot harder. You have to buy more raw good, hire more people, expand facilities, etc. With an info product, you just get a bigger server.
Thanks to numerous software, both paid and free, the selling of information products can be fully automated. And that’s really the key to this whole thing. You want to automate everything so the income becomes passive. This gives you time to do the more important things in life.