This is part 3 of a multi-part series on how to create a profitable info product. Be sure to read part 1 which outlines niche selection and part 2 which discusses how to actually create your product.

The products I’ve created have earned me an average over $4,000 per month in profit. I’m currently working on creating more info products in even more diverse markets and I’m sharing what I’ve learned from my past experience so that you can make a profitable info product as well. If you’re read the previous parts to this series then you’ll already know what niche your product will be in and how to actually make the product, but now let’s discuss how to sell your information product.

How To Sell An Information Product

One of the first things you’ll need to decide is where you plan to sell your product. There are several different options you can choose from such as an online marketplace like Clickbank or e-Junkie, your own shopping cart system like Infusionsoft or simply Paypal.

Where To Sell Your Information Product

Why I chose Clickbank: Plethora Of Affiliates and Ease Of Use

Affiliate Support:

One of the main reasons why I use Clickbank is because of the massive affiliate support. If you have a great product (or even just something that’s unique) it’s not uncommon for an affiliate come along and promote your product without even having met you before. In fact, I have one affiliate that’s helping me earn a few hundred dollars every month from one of my products that just found it through the Clickbank marketplace when he was looking for a product to promote on his website. I rarely run into someone that doesn’t have a Clickbank account either so this makes the barriers to getting an affiliate to promote your product much lower. If you use your own in house affiliate software solution it can turn some people off because they don’t want to put the effort into signing up for your affiliate program, entering tax information, address etc. etc.

Ease Of Use:

It only costs $50 to get your first product approved in Clickbank and every product after that costs just $29. So it’s a very low fee to get your first product into the marketplace. The hassle of dealing with sales is also handled by Clickbank for you, so they will charge tax where applicable, deal with the merchant fees for various credit cards etc. and every few weeks I just get money direct deposited into my account. They take roughly 10% of the sale price which is admittedly a large chunk but for the advantages I think it’s worth it especially when you’re doing you first product.

How To Sell Your Information Product:

I’m going to cover the two main ways I make money selling my information products and I want to start with the easiest way first.

The Easiest Way To Sell An Information Product:

Selling to your own email list of interested prospects is the easiest way I’ve found to make money with an information product. (I use Aweber for my newsletters). When I first released Niche Profit Course in mid 2010 well before my blog had over 5,000+ RSS readers I did a small internal launch to my list of less than 1,000 people and about 30 people bought my course in 24 hours which was around $2,500 in profit. Most that bought that day did so because they were the same people prodding me to create a course in the first place after reading how I made $42k with Amazon’s affiliate program back in 2009. It was much easier for me to sell the course to my email list because I had already developed a relationship with them over the course of providing dozens of free articles and content via my blog. It also didn’t hurt that I could provide credibility by showing that I actually made that much money with Amazon too with income screenshots / videos.

You can apply this principal of selling from an email list to any other niche and frankly it’s much easier to sell via email in niches outside the internet marketing / online business space because there are so many bad products in the space. This is why I’ve had so much success building email lists in other niches because people aren’t as jaded and skeptical when it comes to signing up for an email list.

Affiliates Can Also Help You Sell Your Information Product:

I did a test late last year launching an information product in a niche about how to get better at Halo since that’s technically how I got started making money online in the first place as a professional Halo player. I had already sold several thousand dollars worth of Halo lessons. So I literally just created a product using the steps I outlined in part 2 of this series and put together video content based on the common mistakes most players make and then put it up on Clickbank.

I started getting sales immediately from people that were promoting my course via Facebook and my PPC readers out there that want to make some money by promoting my Halo course check out this page ๐Ÿ™‚

So that product is an example where if there is a market demand and not a lot of competition affiliates can literally provide all of the sales for you; however, whenever possible try to avoid relying on affiliate support alone to dictate your success.

How To Support Affiliates:

One of the easiest ways to support affiliates is to provide resources for them to help sell your product such as banners, email swipe files and anything else that will help them sell your product.

Banner Advertising: Here are some of the banners I had created for Niche Profit Course back when I first launched the product:

I hired BannersMall.com to help me out and would recommend you try them out as well. Very quick turnaround and quality work.

Building Affiliate Relationships: Some affiliates can help you generate thousands of dollars in sales and it’s important to build relationships with your affiliates. I try to send personal emails to affiliates I see pushing a lot of sales and see if there is anything I can do for them.

Affiliates can help you drive a ton of sales, but it’s a lot of work to find valuable affiliates to help promote your product that’s why I try to focus on selling information products via my own marketing first and foremost.

The Importance Of A Good Landing Page:

A landing page is designed to convince people to buy the product or service that you’re pitching. If you can improve your landing page by even an extra percentage point it can mean thousands of dollars in additional sales and that’s why good copywriters can cost thousands of dollars.

I frankly still suck at landing pages and it’s something I’ve decided in 2011 that I’m either going to really learn how to do right or just continue paying others to do it for me. In fact, I don’t even want to try and pretend like I’m an expert so I’m just going to link to a book that covers it all much better than I could. It’s called Landing Page Optimization and it’s written by Tim Ash. So if you’re interested in saving some money by doing your own landing pages then read his book for some advice on how to get started.

About the only thing I’d like to add is that my video based landing pages have consistently outperformed the old text style format that I’ve split tested them against. So if you’re looking to do your first product consider doing a sales video instead of writing out long copy.

Closing Thoughts

Selling information products is a huge business and frankly it’s an even bigger business outside of the internet marketing / online business that you probably see most frequently. I’m in the process of doing several more information products in these less talked about niches because there is a ton of easy money to be made with them. As always, I’ll be sharing real life advice and income figures based on my experiences selling information products in the future so stick around to see more income updates.

What else would you like to learn about selling information products? I’ll be hanging out in the comments below…