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.
Table Of Contents
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 ๐
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…
Hey Chris,
Great post, I was wondering if you had experience with E-Junkie or any other product promoting websites. Working on a great niche, need to decide who and what to go with. Who or what would you recommend besides clickbank to promote a product?
Thanks!
I’ve used E-Junkie and was never really impressed. For starters their website is entirely flash based so I can’t use Roboform to store my password there lol. But I do have some friends who use E-Junkie that like it and it’s very low cost at only $5 a month or so.
Good stuff, Chris. The advice I like most is to create info products outside of the IM/MMO niche. Certainly makes sense, and I hope to be working on a product like that soon.
As a side note, I’ve been a pretty active affiliate of yours, and I appreciate your high quality product because it’s made me money too (and I feel good about promoting it). I may not be one of your heavy affiliates (I’ve probably only sold 25-30 copies), but if you Google “niche profit course review” (without the quotes), I’m the #1 search result.
Hey Eric,
Yah you’re one of those affiliates that I definitely appreciate. Side note: check your email inbox I sent you a follow up.
Yah – non IM/MMO info products is what I’m going to do a lot more of this year but I’m still unsure as to how much I want to disclose about them on this blog. Obviously any MMO style products that I develop will be mentioned here because it fits the audience but I also don’t want to bring in thousands of competitors when I tell them about a little info product niche I’m using to make a few extra grand per month lol.
Thanks for the valuable tips, it is very helpful for me.
I’ve always stuck with e-Junkie as I find their service excellent. In my niche not a lot of people are selling info products so they’d be signing up fresh either to e-junkie or clickbank so it doesn’t really matter. I’ve got a launch on Monday of a very niche info product “the iPhone cyclist” how someone can use their iPhone for cycling. Doesn’t get more unique than that but 12,000 people per month visit my site looking for that sort of info so even if I convert a tiny amount I think I can do alright!
For now I’ll be launching the product as a blog post (I feel it adds to the credibility if someone clicks around and discovers an entire well written authority blog) rather than a separate landing page that you have no idea who is behind the product.
Hey Andreas,
Yah I think e-Junkie is alright and I suppose I did have a few products for sale with them a while back I just never did a ton of volume with them. I’d suggest you do a combination of both a blog post and a completely separate page to sell the product. You want something that affiliates can send traffic to and most affiliates (well at least the smart ones) won’t want to send traffic to a blog because there are too many exit points for the reader to leave through. That’s why sales pages / squeeze pages were invented. If you just send someone to a targeted blog post it can work but a dedicated sales page is ideal. Besides, on the sales page you can mention your blog anyway.
Chris
Hey Chris – you are right – I actually did follow your advice and setup a separate page with a video and a buy now button. I found Optimize Press to be fairly easy to use and speeds up the process of sales page building.
Hello Chris,
Do you use any software like POP,Net Exactor,Go Scraper,or Ap Scraper to generate leads or use either? Will your system show you step by step on how to do things? I dont have a niche so I figure that selling products would be a great start what do you think? I am someone with limited funds and wanted to start making money yesterday where should I start?
Hey Sabrina, I’ve never heard of those lead generation methods. Hit me up via email if you have more specific questions you’d like to ask but don’t want to just toss out into the blog comments ๐
Hi Chris, you have done an amazing feat, I must say. When I read your previous post I got really jealous of your accomplishment and I said to myself, “if others can, why can’t I?”. ๐
Hi Chris,
One thing I wanted to point out, this post is not appearing on home page of your website. To find it, I have to go to your RSS feeds. You may know this already, but it’s just FYI. Thanks.
Are you sure about that? I’m not sure why that would be the case unless it was a caching issue?
Yeah, just check makemoneyontheinternet.com’s home page. The latest post on there is “20 Tips I Used to Make $90,336.65” on March 10, 2011.