Free E-Course - Information Products That Sell

Posted by Walt Hanson | July 11, 2008 .

Finding the Right Market: This is the most important step in creating your information product. Sure the quality of the product is important and sure the sales letter can be the difference between having moderate sales and hitting the jackpot, but if your product isn’t in a good market, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, it doesn’t matter how stupendous your sales letter is, if there isn’t a demand for the product. Finding that great market is the first and most important part of the process. So, the question is where can I find the best markets? In order to find a great market you have to first understand what makes up a market. A market is made up of buyers and seller’s. Since you are targeting buyers, you have to find out what the characteristics of a great buyer are. I have come up with five characteristics that great buyers should have.

Characteristics of Great Buyers

Make sure they have money to spend. This sounds simple, but you have to make sure that people are going to be willing to spend money, order to learn about their interest. You don’t want to target people who don’t have much disposable income.

Make sure that they are repeat buyers. If they have spent money in the past on products in their market, then they are willing to do it again. They are always looking to gain more knowledge and they have already proven that.

People who have a passion. You want people that eat, sleep and drink that market. They will do anything to pursue their interest in that market and are willing to pay top dollar for items that are related to their interest.

People who are insatiable when it comes to the market. They never get enough of that certain market. No matter what they buy and what they learn, they are always wanting more, more, more.

An available market that’s easy to reach. You need to have a market that is easy to find and easy to contact. Whether that is online or offline. You need to be able to easily advertise to that market. You need people that are readily available to you.

A Market with those Qualities: Business Owners

This is a huge market filled with people who are yearning for information. I’m not talking about targeting the large corporations, I’m talking about the small business owners.

There are always new small businesses opening everyday. There are always businesses that go out of business and there are always more taking their place, these people are new prospects. It’s a rotating door of new potential customers that never stops.

If you come up with a good product that’s going to really help them, customers will line up for the rest of your life. It’s not a product that will ever lose it’s worth. You don’t always have to keep on creating cutting edge products that lose their value over time.

There’s guys that have come up with one product and have pretty much been set for life. They’ve established themselves as an expert and selling other products in that market are easy. People will always pay more for what an expert or guru is selling.

Let’s see how well they do on the characteristics of great buyers. Business owners have lots of money to spend. Business owners have money to spend when they open their business, they have to, they need to spend money to start it up. Either they have the money or they have taken out a loan or had investors raise the money for them.

They don’t look at it as spending money if they are going to improve their business. They look at it as an investment and that is a huge difference. We think of paying bills as expenses and it’s always harder to fork over the money for an expense than it is for an investment. People like buying houses and cars, because they are investments.

They are also repeat buyers. Business owners buy things over and over again for their business. Most business owners have inventory, so they have to keep on buying more and more of it.

Most businesses also have to buy equipment. They might have to buy cash registers, machines to assist their business, pay employees, pay the bills etc.

Business owners also have a passion. They have a passion for running their business and they have a passion for making money and for making more money than they do now. Opening a business is a huge undertaking. It’s also a lot of work, so you know that they are passionate about it.

Business owners also have an insatiable thirst for knowledge. They never stop wanting and yearning for more knowledge. They are always searching for new ways to improve their sales. They are always looking for adjustments that can be made to improve business.

They are also always looking for more ways to keep their customers happy and keep them coming back. Repeat business in the life blood of a successful business. They are also always searching for new ways to save money.

This could be on saving money on equipment or inventory costs or shipping costs etc. They are always looking for ways to motivate their employees and empower them to be at their best. They are also always searching for new ways to keep them happy.

Employee turn-over is a huge problem because it costs a company so much money. They have to train new people and usually new workers aren’t as productive as veteran workers, costing the company money.

The market for business owners is huge and they are located all over the place. You can find businesses online all over the place. Business owners are also easy to talk to, offline.

You can mail out postcards to them with a short sales paragraph with the url to your sales page. Business owners have their own online forums, they are constantly doing searches on search engines for advice on improving their business.

Breaking it into Niche Topics

The great thing about this topic is that it has so many sub-topics that you can center a certain e-book around. You don’t have to break it down too far, but you can still avoid competition by breaking it down some. The most effective way to sell gerbils. That would be breaking it down too far.

You can write many e-books that are just about helping businesses make more money. There are also so many different types of businesses out there that sell different products or services.

- Exploding Retail Sales
- Reducing your Spending on Inventory
- Keeping your Customers Happy and Coming Back
- Finding the Greatest Employees
- Empowering your Employees to Greatness
- Making your Business Run like a Well-Oiled Machine

That’s six topics just off the top of my head. You can break those down even further and expand on them if you would like. The possibilities are just so wonderful.

Product Creation

I approach Internet Marketing differently than some people do. I welcome new people into it and don’t view them as competition, but instead as someone to work with. I look at them as another resource. They might be a future joint venture partner, they might write me copy or articles, they might build a web site for me etc.

More and more people have woke up to the idea that if we, Internet Marketers, worked together then things would be so much easier and everyone wins! You can potentially affiliate their product, do a joint venture with them, add them to your mailing list etc.

One way to work together is to outsource some of your work. There is only so much time in a day and too many people waste too much time doing things that other’s could do for them, probably just as good as them, if not better than them. You don’t want to be doing customer service constantly because you don’t make any money doing customer service, hire someone to do it for you. That’s just an example, there are many other tasks that you could delegate to others.

The more time you have to create products, the more products you can create. The more products that you create, the better the chances are that you have a major success. The more products that you have in circulation also means you have more streams of income coming in.

The Writing Process

As a writer, you should always be trying to improve your writing skills. It’s important to improve the speed of your writing. Doing this really helps you write more e-books and like I said before, more e-books is a very good thing. More money, more streams of income and a better chance that one of them is going to really hit the big time jackpot, because there’s more of them.

Writing information products that solve problems is different than writing a book that entertains people. The styles are completely different. A writer that writes books for entertainment worry about the word usage, while writer’s in our business worry more about the information. You don’t have to think of the best word in the world for every situation, but you do need to make sure that you have very informative content.

Something that I really believe in, is getting to the point. People buy your e-book because they want answers and want a problem solved. The sooner you get to answering those questions and solving their problem, the better. They didn’t buy the e-book to be entertained. If they were searching for entertainment from a book, they would go down to the local Barnes and Noble.
You have to show people step-by-step how to solve their problem. Don’t give them tips or advice, they can find that stuff for free. The bottom line is this, if you were in the customers shoes, if you had their problem, would you pay for your product?

Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is a terrible thing. It costs people like me money. The first thing that I do to avoid writer’s block is to make sure that I go into the writing process with a clear head. I’m not going to be worrying about anything else that’s going on or have any distractions around.

The second thing that I’m going to do is to just write. Don’t worry about my spelling or if the writing flows, just get it down. You will always be able to come back to it later.

The last thing that I like to do is to have a couple of e-books going at one time. By that I mean that I’m writing about a couple of different topics at one time. One day I might be in rhythm in a certain topic and be able to write about one topic that day and not the other.

Some people don’t like this idea. The problem with it is that if you get too many projects going at one time and never finish any of them. Well you have to finish projects, so if you have a problem with finishing things, I wouldn’t recommend this strategy, but it really helps me.

It especially helps if I’m writing about something that I’m not really interested in. Let’s face it, there are so many different markets and niches out there, we can’t be fascinated by all of them.

Sales Copy

Okay, so now a person has found that great market and niche and have wrote this brilliant e-book. They now need the brilliant sales copy to accommodate your product. How in the heck are we going to write this killer sales copy, I’m not a professional? Well, if you don’t hire a professional to do it for you, hopefully I can help.

I talked about improving your writing of e-books, but this also goes for your writing of sales copy. I love outsourcing my work, but when it comes to copywriting and you sell a lot of different e-books, it simply gets too expensive to hire professional copy writers.

Unless, you have this unbelievably good e-book in an unbelievably good market, you probably won’t want to pay the high price of a great copywriter. So, become a professional yourself.

I talk about the importance of your time, all the time and how important it is. Time is money, but it is also knowledge. The extra time you save can be spent studying and learning things.

With that extra time you have, you could spend it learning as much as possible about copywriting. Learning to be a great copywriting is not only going to save you a ton of money, because you don’t have to pay someone to do it, but also because the better you get at it the better your conversation rate and sales are.

One way to improve your copywriting is to study professionals like Michael Fortin or other professionals and different web sites. I think that the best way to learn is to practice at it and keep experimenting. I will get into testing in my next section.

I really like this resource

http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/index.htm

It’s a great way to test your headlines, to see if they appeal to a person’s emotions. You have to appeal to a potential buyers emotions.

Appealing to their emotions leads them to the ever important impulse buy. Don’t feel guilty about appealing to people’s emotions. The only way that you should feel guilty is if you have a bad product that wouldn’t help them. If you have a good product that you feel is going to help them, then say what you need to in the copy to get the sale.

Grab their attention. It’ obvious, but they won’t read the rest of your sales page if you don’t grab their attention. That is why the opening headline is so important. The job of the opening headline is to get the reader to read the next words after the headline. It’s that simple. After you have you have your opening headline and a second smaller headline, you get into the intro part.

This is a good spot for you to have a professional looking picture of yourself. It only has to be a head shot and it can be fairly small. I’ve heard that a sales letter is just like how you sell a person, in person, but you are doing it online with the written word. People like to buy from someone that they know. They won’t know you, but a picture gives them an idea of who you are.

It’s always good to start your main body of text with an introduction or a story. Either a personal experience or someone else’s where the person triumphs over long odds and solves the problem that you’re talking about.

Different markets have different types of buyers and with this different type of buyer, you need different types of copy. The fundamentals are the same, but if you’re talking to a business owner or someone that wants to make money, you have to appeal to their pocket book. Get them to think of it as an investment and not an expense, like I said before.

One reason that people buy money making products all the time is because they think of it as an investment. I’m going to spend x amount of dollars to make xxxxxxx amount of dollars. That is the mind set that a person takes.

If you’re selling a cure to an ailment. You have to sell them on the fact that your product is going to work. The information in your e-book is going to solve their problem. It all comes down to solving a problem.

Getting more sales gives a business owner more money and that solves a problem. Maybe they wanted to invest more money into their business with that money.

Maybe they want to take a cruise, but didn’t have the money. The extra money you help them generate solves that problem. They can use that money to go on that cruise.

Bullets are a good thing to have in the sales copy. It is like a check list and when people want to solve a complex problem. They think of having a checklist and crossing things off that checklist when they have completed that task.

Testimonials should be sprinkled in throughout the copy at appropriate spots. Right after you’ve finished a good point, but they still might have reservations about a certain thing. Bang, hit them with a testimonial.

Urgency should be used at the end of the copy. Tell them that time is running out and if they don’t act now they will miss out forever. This also reinforces the importance of you calling for them to take action and make their life better and solve their problem.

Testing

This is an important step and far too many people skip this step.
They don’t get any feedback on their product or on their sales page. There are a lot of reasons to do this step.

Let me first say that you should tell them to be brutally honest and let them know that it won’t hurt your feelings. Lots of people won’t tell you exactly what their opinion is because they don’t want to hurt your feelings, well then nothing gets accomplished. If you’re worried about feedback, you probably shouldn’t be writing e-books, because people are going to have opinions on it and you can’t please everyone.

The first reason is that you want to see what people think about your product and sales page. It helps you correct things and make them better. These are people who would be potential buyers and their opinion is very important.

You could ask them if they would buy the product, especially after reading the sales page. This also helps you find the best price point for the product. You could ask them how much they would pay for a product like yours and what they think the price should be. Determining the price point is an important thing, you at least get opinions.

Another reason that you want people to read your e-book for free is to get testimonials. If they really like the e-book, you could ask them for a testimonial, you would be surprised how many people are willing to do this. Testimonials are a powerful asset that you will be able to add to your sales page.

Testing the sales page is an ongoing process at the beginning of your launch. You always want to increase your conversion rate and a good way to do this is to test it. Even if you have a decent conversion rate, one change could explode your profits. I usually don’t suggest that you do drastic things, unless it’s been a total nightmare. Usually tweak some headlines, move a few things around, things of that nature.

You could also experiment with the price of the product. It might be priced too high and changing that will greatly improve your conversions. You might be having great sales and could make a lot more money by pricing it higher.

Marketing

I always tell people that you can have the greatest product and the greatest sales copy in the world and none of that matters if you can’t get people to see your sales page. There are a lot of different strategies for doing this.

Some strategies work better than others for different people and for different products. Again, you should do some experimenting after you have your product and sales page ready. Some products are easier to affiliate than others, some products are easier to find joint venture partners for than others and some products are just plain easier to market than others.

You might think that products that are easy to market are products that are high quality, well priced and have good sales copy, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes the market for the product is just too small or just too hard to find. This can be a huge problem and that is why I told you about finding markets that have the characteristics that I talked about earlier.

I love doing joint ventures with people who have large and targeting mailing lists and I love having an army of affiliates selling my product. Some people have trouble attracting people to do a joint ventures with or people to affiliate their product.

Here again, if you plan on relying on joint venture partners and affiliates to sell your product, you need to choose a market that has plenty of both. You have to ask yourself if there are quite a few people out there that have a mailing list that caters towards your product.

This report is for informational purposes only. The author can’t make any guarantees of making money, written or implied. The author disclaims any personal loss, liability or risk involved in using the information in this e-book to try and make money. There is risk involved in trying to make money online and you should be aware of that and if you can’t handle that then you shouldn’t try it.

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