Furthermore, you will find the topics of these information products varied across major markets that include health & wellness, personal development, business, relationships, hobbies each producing thousands of sub-niches with thousands of products within each of the sub-niches. 

In general, these products sell for anywhere between $27 up to $10,000+ depending on the format (in this case the range would represent an ebook through group coaching formats as an example).  For these products the creator keeps 75% + of that revenue in most cases whereas traditional book sales are skewed even further in the opposite direction.

So how can you be among the top infoproduct publishers on the market today?

1. Start With Your Strengths and Passions.  Successful product creation and marketing requires dedication, self-discipline and consistent action – all made much more likely if you are passionate about your market and topic.  There is not a market I have come across where you can't take your experience or passion and turn that into something valuable for other people to buy. 

2. Become A Market Watcher/Listener/Detective.  Learn to watch what, how and why people are buying information.  Study top ebook, book and seminar directories to know what is HOT.  Reverse engineer leading books to know what is the desire behind the purchases that have led to a top selling information product.  Study magazines, their headlines and content – what desire are they tapping into?  You will quickly figure out what dream, solution or answers people are spending money to get so you can tap into that money flow yourself with your own infoproducts

3. Information product publishing is a business.  You can't just look at this as a way to have some fun writing or to "try" and make a few extra bucks or as a get-rich-quick business opportunity, instead information publishing is a matter of targeting specific markets with value-add products and services growing over time into your own infoproduct enterprise – so treat it as such

4. Learn the power of leverage.  The sooner you can fully grasp the advantage of working once (creating your product) and then earning profit from that work forever…you will be so motivated to build your online information marketing business fast.  with as 2-hours a day for 4-6 weeks you can have yourself an ebook or information product course that brings in a full-time income this year.  Then, do it again, bring in other experts and help publish their work to your audience…and so on…you get the picture right?

Never before has the opportunity for packaging information as a business been so incredibly open and large.  The very nature of how people buy information is in radical transformation – many people will not set foot in a bookstore this year but will buy more information online. 

By acting now, you can put yourself at the front of this information buying frenzy, take advantage of leveraged income and be in a very different financial position just months from now.  Head over to InfoMarketer'sZone for a Fast Start InfoProfits Course and you can make getting started even simpler as we work with you each step of the way.

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We talked about:

• What motivated me to start my online business – I bet many of you will relate
• How things got rolling and how you can speed up that process today
• Why infoproducts are a critcal part of any online business
• How blogs fit in – what they should be used for and what NOT to use them for
• The mindset that is critical to online business success…with examples
• What is the "fail fast" system and how it has served us well
• The best and worst parts of building an large online business
• My top tip for anyone starting out – I wish someone had of shared this with me when I was first starting out
• How to get to the bottom of what is MOST important with your internet business – and stay focused
• Much more…

The interview runs about 44-minutes, but we stick to useful, practical and hard-hitting tips…it will be well worth your time. 

Listen here:

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The options are pretty overwhelming aren't they?  Do you work on marketing/generating traffic, creating a website, blogging, writing press releases, running teleseminars, launching an affiliate program, SEO, paid advertising…what should be your priorities next?

Having launched more than 12 information products and helped hundreds of others do the same through InfoMarketer'sZone, we now have a very established, highly effective system down for creating and then releasing information products to maximize profit. 

Once you have decided on your infoproduct topic and are well underway with its development — you want to focus on 3 extremely important areas as your next steps:

 1. Product Testing, Testimonials and Partners – Get your product into the hands of 10-15 potential JV partners (people with lists, websites, discussion forums…etc  ) as well as a half-dozen to a dozen beta customers that can try your product and give you feedback…You want to a) Get some early feedback on your product b) Build some testimonials and c) build an initial launch partner list that can help you hit the market when it is ready to go

2. Create, Test and Improve Your Sales Page – your sales page is everything when it comes to converting visitors into buyers, you need to get a draft of that finished and begin testing some early traffic – you can use an early or partial release to do interim testing so it is ready to go when the entire package is ready

3. Work on your sales funnel.  I bet you have gone to a website before where you read some content they have posted and then couldn't ignore a request to opt-in with your email address to see a video, get a report, receive the latest updates, access a private membership protected site, etc… Upon opting in to get this freebie, you now enter that marketer's sales funnel where, if done effectively, they have a 10X better chance of converting you to a buying customer than if you had just landed on their sales page cold.  This time, YOU want to be the marketer and YOU want the added conversions that an effective sales funnel will provide…

Where are you with your information product?  Still in the planning stages?  Are you writing or recording it right now?  Do you have a product on the market that is not performing well?  Let us know by leaving a comment.

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Take a look and let us know what you think:

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So it is no surprise to find that this is where information product professionals struggle the most. 

Not just new infoproduct publishers either, I saw a Million+ infoproduct guru miss the mark on a product late last year…so it happens to anyone who is not careful in advance of targeting their niche market. 

For example, you want to target the weight loss niche, so is the best idea…

a) A general weight loss guide?
b) A focus on exercise or nutrition?
c) A specific diet or program that someone must follow?
d) A guide to diet supplements and nutritionals?
e) Alternative weight loss techniques such as detox? 
f) A sub-category of weight loss for new Mom's, working professionals, road warriors who live out of a suitcase?

The same set of questions comes up no matter what your niche market is…parenting, self improvement, alternative health, pets, business, a hobby, etc…

Since this question is CRITICAL to your success, there has to be a way to figure out which sub-topic will be best within your niche market…and yes, there is a system we provide full training around inside InfoMarketer'sZone based on our own experiences including hundreds of coaching clients. 

1. Locate active discussion forums on the net around your niche market and look for the top threads.  Many forums today give statistics on number of times that thread was read, as well as the number of messages within the thread.  This allows you to quickly identify the threads with the most interest and narrow down top questions, interests, frustrations and thoughts that often guide you to specific topics within the niche.

2. Find the top selling books on Amazon, they not only list them by popularity but also give you a sales rank that lets you in on their buying activity.  Next, dig into their table of contents (most offer this right on Amazon itself) to get a sense for what they include, but also chapters or content that is either NOT included or where you could include more…I love finding gaps for future infoproducts this way. 

3. Search other affiliate directories, Commission Junction, Linkshare, Clickbank, etc…to find the top sellers around your niche

4. Search the web for YOUR TOPIC + seminars, YOUR TOPIC + DVD, YOUR TOPIC + Course, etc… to find and examine higher-end products.  While you don't always know how each of these are selling, you can get a pretty good feel for trends, especially if you see that a range of other authority sites in your niche market are promoting certain affiliate products. 

Beyond that, you can do some quick things to test interest in topics by taking 4-5 potential sub-niches or topic ideas and create a content page or offer mini course and drive traffic – see where the traffic goes. 

We did this with an alternative health topic lately where we were not quite sure of the angle, so we tested 3 different mini-reports and found one outperformed all of the others by more that 5X. 

I've heard many people suggest that "testing" an idea or concept this way is ok for major projects, but is it really necessary for a $27 ebook?

The fact is that every single top selling information product I am aware of went through (either by design or mostly by accident) a testing phase, where the original idea was changed outright or altered slightly to capture more market attention. 

Each day I get contacted by people who have spent weeks, months or even years developing their dream information product (reports, ebooks and courses) and nearly without fail the #1 issue is how their product is positioned in their respective market.  This issue can ALWAYS be fixed within days or a couple of weeks with a simple testing phase.

So it comes down to whether you would like ot rush a product to market and "guess" if it is a good match (where your odds are less than winning the lottery in my experience) or spend a few extra days and let the market tell you what they will buy

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Yet – there are thousands and thousands of people out there doing just that…and yes, for most people it is much MORE than just a living.

Often these people are hard to find because they work diligently and quietly away on their information publishing businesses growing their businesses to new heights.

Think about it, when you are selling thousands of ebooks every month, you are piloting a very powerful business, outsourcing several tasks, supporting your customers, testing and tweaking your copy, adding new products and services and growing your business to the next level – a $10M business.

Here is a terrific interview with one such ebook author, Mike Geary who wrote "Truth About Abs" from some previous experience he had as a fitness coach. 

With no previous writing or business experience, he figured out how to turn a demand for knowledge into a multi-million dollar information publishing empire — still today, his Truth About Abs ebook sits near the top of Clickbank's top selling list:

Watch this great video:

What stood out for me from this interview – and backing these up with our own information product businesses:

1. Don't be discouraged if it doesn't happen overnight.  Now Mike took a few years to get his system refined, that's how it was back then because there were very few precendents for how to quickly build a high-profit business.  That has changed today, now you have many case studies (like this one and the trainings we walk you through inside InfoMarketer'sZone) to cut that curve down to weeks/months. 

2. Listen to how Mike came up with the idea for Truth About Abs…he mentions that he noticed the #1 question people asked was about Abs – they wanted desparately to know how to pump up their abs…find a high demand problem to solve and you are 90% of the way to a successful ebook

3. He talks about marketing techniques – proactively marketing and then hitting a point (after allot of hard work) where the juggernaut takes on a life of its own.  This happens in all of our businesses, where we work a system for a few months and then suddenly it is a like a glider that hits a certain wind current that takes it up seemingly without effort

4. One of the things Mike does NOT mention in this interview, but that HAS been incredibly important to his success is affiliates.  Having a top selling product that converts well can then be leveraged through a channel of online authorities which will take it to 10-20 times bigger than you could on your own.  Truth About Abs is among the most popular affiliate product on Clickbank which means passive sales for Mike and his business.

Perhaps the most important message though is that YOU can be the next Mike Geary…take your idea, match it to market demand, work the system and you will have your own full-time information marketing business to be proud of.

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The fact is we have several sites bringing in income from ebooks, here is one that I hope helps people understand what it takes to make money with your own ebooks

Here's how one of my sites earns $100-$150/day consistently. 

1. I identified this niche (sub-niche within personal development and self-improvement niche.  Thre are three main methods I use to find these niches a) I look at busy discussion forums within my market of interest and study the topics that get the most attention, activity and reads…they tend to point to the HOT topics b) I then look for signs of existing infoproducts selling in this sub-niche…I like to find at least one or two that are selling well and c)uncover the main keywords that people use to search for solving the problem or geting the results that make up the sub-niche.  Using these 3 methods you are guaranteed to find a high-potential niche you can turn into your first ebook topic

2. Built a platform using a blog – Your platform is simply a way to reach your audience and could mean one or more of a blog, content website, series of Youtube videos, social networking presence, etc…

My preference is a blog to which I direct traffic from videos and social networking sites if I have time.  It is important that you get your blog or content site rolling to get indexed and ranked in Google and get some traffic flowing…often a few weeks of dedicated posting and some proper boomarking and back-link work can get you to this point

3. Put together your 1st Edition eBook. When I launched my ebook in this niche it was 62-pages in length, of whiche I had written 30-pages or so myself over a 1-week period, the remaining pages came from a combination of outsourcing one chapter (cost me $75 – we share how we did this inside InfoMarketr'sZone), and interview transcript from an expert interview that took me one hour to put together. 

4. Grow your list. On your blog you should focus on converting your readers to subscribers (email subscribers) by putting together some freebies tat will be of value to your readers.  These freebies could be reports, articles, a video, an interview, a teleseminar, access to a private page, etc… This way you pick off the more active and more desperate (ie. most likely buyers) from your overall readership

Converting blog readers into subscribers or customers – believe it or not, this is an art in itself.  There are tons of blogs out there that have lots of traffic, readers, but that can't convert those readers into subscribers for the life of them.  Most have a weak form off to the right ( that most people ignore), do not have compelling offer and do not mention their opt-in offer in their blog posts – if you do these 3 things you can convert more readers into active subscribers and buyers.

5. Sell on the thank you…we've done this with our own products or even with affiliate products (before our own products are ready) in the past.  On the thank you page after someone subscribes to your list you give them a SPECIAL one-time offer of getting your ebook for 30% less (we priced it at $47, so they paid $33 on that day only…early 30% of subscribers bought right there!)

6. Your autoresponder sequence…We then run them through a daily autoresponder sequence for 14-days, (using our preferred autoresponder )  the first 3-days they get 25% off, the remainder of the sequence they get 20% off.  After that I continue to publish weekly updates, articles, tips and newsletters to the list and sometimes put in 20% off offers, but a fair number still will buy in the future at regular price.  Finally, I do also mix 2-3 offers of 3rd party affiliate products to my list each month, I try and always negotiate a joint promotion with the owners of those affiliate products so that they send me even more traffic to keep my pipeline fresh and growing. 

So, using this approach I have consistent income generation on this ebook, have a rapidly growing list of both buyers and subscribers and grow my Clickbank proudct popularity due to the consistency of sales…works extremely well.

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He has tracked down an ideal niche, done his initial keyword research and is well into his second week of the checklist, working the system that will have him seeing his first sales coming through by the end of April. 

But he had a great question for me that applies to all of us, here it is…

"Jeff, I am devouring your system, have made great progress and know that I will finally succeed with this system of building my own info product business, but there is still one thing I need help with.  Like most enthusiastic, creative guys I get involved in certain parts of my business (writing, researching, working out a marketing plan) and will easily lose 10-12 hours when I should be balancing my time across other activities.  How do I get better control of my time  so I can see the results I want to see?" 

Ok, so here this member thought he was the ONLY one battling hte demon of time management.  Yet, the truth is we ALL battle this demon to one extent or another right?

Especially for us types who embrace life, engage in all it has to offer, dream big and take action – there are never enough hours in the day.

Now,  I do get people telling me over and over that I seem to get more done in a day than they get done in a week, but just between you and I – my efficiency only increased after years of struggling with time managemnet and focus issues. 

The good news is that there are some things I have found incredibly valuable for helping achieve concrete business RESULTS rather than just spending time on your business…I'm guessing these will be valuable to you as well.

1. Choose one business model and work it until it is earning you money.  With online marketing you can make money

• selling your own infoproducts
• selling tangible products through e-commerce sites
• setting up content sites where advertising is the main source of revenue (ex Adsense or banner ads),
• sell your own services
• market affiliate products
• act as a front-end to CPA programs
• flipping websites

You are guranteed to fail if you focus on any more than 1 of these in the beginning…yet that is what most people do is they become distracted by different opportunities, tools, programs or training that span multiple business models. 

A major part of being effective in your business is focus, and to focus you must narrow your initial business building down to 1 business model so you can follow the clear steps to getting that business model earning you profit. 

So, let's say you choose selling your own info products. 

In that case, the 6-Week Information Product Profit Blueprint gives you a day-by-day, week-by-week breakdown of exactly what tasks are required to take you from idea through profit in 6-weeks…that degree of focus is extremely powerful, gets results and offers little risk of slipping into time wasting habits…

2. Know YOUR Best Time Of The Day.  We all have optimal times of the day when we are at our best.  For me, 8 AM-11 AM is my best, most productive, most positive and most energetic time of the day – so I make SURE that I reserve this time for the most important tasks on my business. 

Those hours later in the day when you are less productive are the hours you can afford to check email, finish paperwork, respond to customers, etc…

You will be amazed at what this step alone can mean in terms of getting things done.  People tend to leave the important tasks until late in the day when they are tired, perhaps frustrated, have less patience and lack creativity. 

3. Detailed Plan Of Important Tasks.  I'm not a stickler for mapping out every minute of every day, but I have found that knowing what the most important parts of getting your business model making money and making sure you are tracking results against them each day is the ONLY way to make progress in a meaningful way on your business.

For example, when I create a new infoproduct and bring it to market I know that the 3 most important tasks for me in the first few weeks are:

• Understanding my market, their desires and frustrations and the competition
• Beginning to create traffic and a relationship with my market
• Getting my info product outlined in a way I know it will get done fast

If these 3 things don't happen, then my product will not come out on time.

Get these 3 things done and no matter what else I do, I am in great shape for launching my profit generating product in 6-weeks or less. 

4. Shrug off Setbacks.  Life has an ebb and flow to it that ensures you will have days that seem to see you take 1-step forward and then 2-steps back.  At the end of a day like that, you must be able to shake it off and know that tomorrow you will make more progress. 

I'm not going to get into scientific or philosophical discussions here, only to say that building any successful business is more like a rollercoaster than a conveyer belt…don't get too high or don't get too low will help you continue making steady progress, the best use of your time

5. Think Iterations.  When Microsoft develops software, they don't try and deliver everything in one release perfectly…instead they deliver phase 1 and then improve, then phase 2 and improve, then phase 3 and improve, etc…

When you create your own internet business it helps to take the same view.  Good enough is good enough, then you learn, improve as the cycle continues.

Try to be too perfect and you will never get your business launched, or try and stop improving and you will quickly lose momentum.

I have found that releasing a 40-page ebook, collecting feedback and then following that with another module, report, training program or ebook based on feedback is much better than taking months longer to release a 200-page ebook (which nobody will read anyway!)

Obviously, to succeed with your own online business you need to have excitement and a big WHY (personal purpose) that drives you throughout the process, but using the time management techniques above will make sure you get the most out of the 1-3 hours you may have to spend on building your internet business into a profit center.

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But is that really the right business model for turning information and training into high value for your customer and profit for your info product business?

As part of a broad business plan, the question I ask people who come to us looking for help grow their online information marketing business is "What is your complete monetization plan?"

In other words, is that ALL you are going to sell to your customer is a $10 ebook or is part of a more elaborate sales funnel that drives additional, higher profit, back-end sales?

The truth is that very few (if anyone) makes a living selling a $10 ebook, if there is no additional plan for monetizing your internet traffic and low-end customers, then you may build a $500/month info product business, but you certainly will not build a $5,000-$10,000/month information marketing business…if that is your goal.

Why A $10 Ebook Can Backfire On You

1. The value makes it look cheap which disuades people from buying (even if the material is good).  Let's say you have researched natural methods of lowering cholesteral and put that into a 50-page ebook…now if you REALLY had some interesting and valuable content to share with your market – will your prospect believe you have value at a price of $10?  Especially in today's market where 99% of low-priced informational ebooks are either unprofessional, spammy or useless, your prospect most likely already has dismissed your offer based on seeing such a low price. 

2. The price is too low to attract partners, even if you give them 80% of the profits, the commission is not great so you won't get many people promoting for you and thus you lose the leverage affiliates and market authority holders can give you…UNLESS it is tied to an upsell or back-end where they will get paid as well

3. When people look to sell stuff cheap it tells me they don't know how to add real value to a marketplace…now this may be an exception, but in the hundreds of people we have coached, that's my overall observation.

What I would recommend is that you come up with a higher-end package of information (in the $67-$97 range is good) which can be the material from your ebook bundled with an audio series or video series, day-by-day checklist, additional written content (Ex. for cholesteral, perhaps a recipe book and exercise guide), interview or two with experts, etc… will all let you get to a higher price point that will be more attractive to partners and overall, will have more margin and make you look more trustworthy and more important in your market. 

In that sense, I would look at your ebook as being a "piece" of your ultimate product offering. 

Then, you work on an up-front sales funnel that provides a focused campaign to draw traffic and convert them into warm leads and ultimately – customers.

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