- Information products
- Software products
They both are easy to sell
on the net as your customer is "pre-qualified" (we will talk about this later)
and they both have high mark-up so it does not take a lot of sales to pay for
any advertising cost or overhead… which means it is easier to turn a profit (a
large profit!).
Let's talk about Information
products first. We will talk mostly about information products in this section
as they are the easiest to develop. Where with software usually means you have
to "joint venture" or become a reseller for a programmer/software company as most
people do not have the required programming skills to make software themselves.
It is in your best interest
to market information products like books, manuals, special reports, audio videotapes
and software. They are the easiest things to sell and generate quick profits.
They have obscene markup potential and are easy to deliver (it can even
be done electronically via email so there is no product or fulfillment cost).
For example, Car
Secrets Revealed costs me a whopping $1.55 per book from the printer and I
sell it for $27.00. What other product can you get this kind of profit margin
with? Software and audio/video information is similar. A CD-ROM or floppy disk
costs less than a $1.00 to produce, but you can sell the software for hundreds
of dollars. Audio and videotapes sell for up to $50 and can cost less than $3.00
to produce.
Customers are not paying
for "value" of the material in the book/videotape (or whatever), they are paying
for the value of the information you provide.
Information products are
also very easy to produce when compared with virtually anything else, and there
are essentially no regulations that apply to them. If you were to produce a weight
loss pill you would need to go through the drug administration, safety and labeling
regulations. If you were to produce an electrical product, you would need to get
it approved by the Standards Associations before you could release it to the market.
However, if you were to sell a product such as a weight loss manual or a book
on how to build your own radio receiver, you wouldn't have to do anything but
write and print it. You are protected under the first amendment of the Constitution.
The last reason why an
information product is the hottest item to sell is because our society is so "information
hungry". This is especially true on the Internet where the entire medium is based
on the concept of "information", hence the term "The Information Super Highway".
It is easy to charge larger sums of money for knowledge that will make life easier
or more comfortable. It can be as simple as how to make your garden flourish or
as complex as how to make a fortune in the stock market. What makes the Internet
perfect for this is that the people who use it are "information junkies", and
they are usually searching the net for information... a perfect client
for you!
You will also find that
when you produce an information product, you will start to receive offers to write
articles for magazines, be invited to interviews (TV and radio), to speak at different
functions, etc. You will be quickly regarded as an "expert" in the field if your
information is valuable and accurate.
Note: I commonly write
for automotive magazines because of the name I have made from my book. Magazines
pay upwards of $400/page for this kind of editorial. If you just write a three
page article every couple of months, it is an easy extra $10,000 in income per
year. And better yet, I just take a couple of pages out of my book and alter them
into article format. It takes me less than 30 minutes to make a three page article
and I get $1200 from each magazine that runs it.
Now if you are saying "I
don't know how to write" or "I don't want to write a book, manual, or information
product". No problems, later I will talk about how to get a hot information product
and get other people to write it for you for free.
Pick a market that can
afford what you are selling. Many people come up with a great product, but they
market to a clientele that cannot afford what they are selling. Take a moment
and think about it. Don't make this mistake. Not only do they have to be able
to afford it, but they must have a passion for the subject (a hobby or interest
they love), or a problem that they badly need solved. And, of course, they need
to have a credit card.
I recommend that your first
product be a book or manual about 100 pages in length. This is very easy to produce,
and publishing a book can be done very inexpensively. You can publish special
reports or booklets in small quantities like 10 or more. And, if you are going
to publish a book like you would see in a bookstore, it can be done for under
$3,000. A book can cost you as little as $1.00 a copy to produce if you invest
wisely.
If you produce an information
product:
- Offer it as a WORD or
TXT document on diskette, or "downloadable" over the net. You can protect these
documents using software that will only allow the document to be run on one computer
so that people cannot distribute the information (or steal the information and
re-sell it under their own name). You now have no cost to the product so the selling
price is all profit and the fulfillment procedure is fully automated. We
talked about how to automate this in the
September issue of the newsletter. I have many friends that make in excess
of $150,000 selling electronically deliverable information products online.
- Offer it in print format.
You can have this done at any local copy shop, or if you plan to sell a lot of
copies, have it printed and bound professionally at a printer.
- Don't try to produce an
audiotape, videotape or CD-ROM until you have experience in print media.
When you are creating an
information product, the name of the book/special report is a critical key
to your success. Let me use Ted Nicholas as an example. He wrote a book called
The Entrepreneur's Manual. It sold only twelve copies. The author renamed
the book Why SOB's Succeed in Business and Nice Guys Fail and marketed
it again. It sold a whopping 600,000 copies. The title was a lot more interesting
and controversial... making for great press releases and topics for news and TV,
and his sales skyrocketed. With this new title he could market it in an entirely
different way and get lots of free press.
On that note, I should
mention that some of the most successful books have never made it to the bestsellers
list. These lists only reflect how many books were sold in bookstores. Car
Secrets Revealed (the car book I wrote in 1994 for those that have not heard
of it) has been among the top ten automotive bestsellers in the United
States for over 2 years now, but it has never appeared on a bestseller
list. This is because the lists are compiled from information supplied by a few
major bookstores. All the copies of Car Secrets Revealed were sold online
or through the mail, so the retailers don't even know about it, but did you know
that 50% of all books are sold through the mail? That means that half
of all the books sold in this country aren't even considered when compiling bestseller
lists!
Many people assume that
90% of the work you will have to do is in the production of the product, but this
is far from the truth. You will spend about 10% of your time creating the product
and 90% promoting and selling it.
Tip: Widen the scope
of your book or manual. The title should not be "How I Got Rich Selling Real Estate
in Orange County", but " How to Make a Fortune Through Real Estate with Little
or No Capital Investment".
Test your titles - they
are key to your success. Place classified ads in magazines (or online) targeted
to what you are selling testing new titles to see which one pulls the best (use
the title in your classified ad headline). This is critical. For example, for
Car Secrets we tried an ad that read:
Car buying, repairing and
maintenance tips - call for free information on how to save thousands when buying
a new car. (604) 730-2833
We also tried an ad that
read:
Car Secrets Revealed - learn
the secrets of how to save thousands when buying a new car. Call (604) 730-2833
for free details.
Or you could say:
New book completed by professional
car salesman - "How to buy a car $50 under dealer cost". For free information,
call (604) 730-2833.
These are different examples
we used to test titles. Make sure when you test titles that you use the exact
same ad design and are just replacing the title of the book. You need a base-line
to work from to see which truly pulls better.
You probably have not published
your book yet, so you want to offer something to get them to buy once you have
completed your printing. You might say, "As a pre-publication offer, I would be
happy to autograph your copy of my book and give you a $5.00 discount from the
advertised retail price. It will be off the press in 60 days. Would you like to
order it now?"
If you need a informational
product, there are four ways of creating a great informational product
literally overnight. They are super creative and will blow you away. But
I will not reveal them here… it is something I reveal in my course "The Insider
Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet".
Go to http://www.marketingtips.com/tipsltr.html
for more information on how to pick up a copy of the course for yourself.
The four techniques reveal
exactly how to pick a hot-selling topic and have one of the hottest selling
information product in less than 4 weeks. Two of those techniques will allow you
to come up with your own informational product literally overnight! Which means
that if you don't have a current product, you could be up and rolling by next
week with your own hot informational product that has incredible profit margin.
But you say, "I can't write
a book!". Well, I have good news! You don't have to! In the course I will show
you how you can get others to write it for you for free. You don't even have to
invest any money to develop informational products.
In the course, I also
reveal three ideas for informational products that I have wanted to develop
and market, but have not been able to start due to my overloaded work schedule.
These ideas will give you a good place to start.
Software is also a hot
product to sell online. There are a couple of reasons for this. First is that
everyone online has a computer so you have pre-qualified them (their computer
runs on software). All you have to do now is find a niche market that needs a
problem solved and find a software product that solves that problem.
There are hundreds of examples
of this, but let me use an example that happened to me directly.
In my business I noticed
that there was a need for a program that would automate Internet business without
having to get all the CGI, Perl, and Visual Basic scripts custom made by a programmer.
I did know of a programmer that was skilled enough to develop what I wanted. And
on that note, I was concerned that if I had to build this software from the ground
up, I could be looking at $50,000 in development costs (software development is
not cheap!)
I needed a software package
to:
- Automatically check your
email for you daily.
- Automatically subscribed
and un-subscribed people to your newsletter.
- Send out any autoresponders
from ads you have run.
- Automatically put any
orders that come in into a database format.
- Send out your personalized
bulk email to your past clients, to follow up with them (and get backend sales).
- Allow us to post to multiple
newsgroups without getting canceled by the "cancel-bots".
- And much more… I don't
want to waste space by listing all of it!
The most important thing
is that I wanted it to run off our home PC (not the ISP's server) so I had full
control of the information (just like most home/small businesses want).
I went on a search for
a product and found one after a few days. It was called Mailloop, but it
was priced quite high at $699 (not something that most people with a small or
home based business could afford). It didn't have everything I felt was necessary
so I got a hold of the programmer and after a little convincing, he was willing
to accept my input and ideas. With my recommendations he re-did a few portions
of the program and added some features I thought were fantastic (and extremely
valuable to small/home business owners that wanted to automate their Internet
business).
Also with a good stroke
of luck and a little convincing, they also reduced the price to under $400, which
was about the same price as what you could get other "bulk" email programs, which
were on the market at that time (like Net Contact, Extractor Pro,
etc). The advantage was that Mailloop "blew all of these products out of
the water". These other programs were just bulk email programs, and Mailloop
could do everything they could, but also included so many other features
that helped people automated their entire Internet business - all for the same
price! For example, it included a full automated scheduler, newsletter server,
unlimited autoresponders, newsgroup poster... and the list just goes on. In other
words, Mailloop now really had value! Lots of value!
To make a very long story
short, I entered into a joint venture where I would become a reseller for them.
I didn't want to be too pushy and ask for exclusive distribution rights (and I
was not sure if I would be able to sell enough copies to justify it).
Now, you may already know
my opinion of Mailloop. I absolutely love it and think that anyone that
is doing business online has to have a copy… not only will it will save them
thousands of dollars in time, but it will also make them tens of thousands of
dollars (heck, we use it everyday and it is solely responsible for making us over
$75,000 a year alone).
That is one of the keys
to the success of Mailloop - I did not sell Mailloop to make a profit,
I sold Mailloop because I used the product and I truly believed that there
was nothing out there that even compared to it. I just truly "loved the product".
That enthusiasm came out in all my salesletters and webpages about Mailloop…
which translated into a large volume of sales. Check out what Mailloop
does and what I have to say about it by going to http://www.marketingtips.com/mailloop.html.
Important Note: You
can't just sell a product or service because it makes you money. You have to truly
believe in it. If you don't, chances are that the lack of enthusiasm with show
in your salesletters and webpages (and you will fail). I would never sell anything
to my client base that I didn't personally use and that I wouldn't stand behind
and defend 100%. There are lots of reasons for that attitude, but let me just
say that this attitude will make you very wealthy over time.
By the way, how do you
think you got the notification of this newsletter with it addressed to your first
name (Mailloop did it all with the push of a button!).
Well, within 3 months after
we started to sell Mailloop, we were selling more in copies one month
than the programmer had sold all year!
With these numbers, we
decided to buy the company out. So after 2 months of negotiations (back in early
1998), we now have the world-wide exclusive distribution rights to Mailloop.
In other words, any copy of Mailloop that is sold anywhere in the world
or through any reseller has to go through our office.
I am telling you this story
to make a point. I had a niche market with a problem to solve. I joint ventured
with a software company to fill this need… and the results were so impressive
that I just did not make a very good profit from it, it was so profitable that
I bought out the company!
Now, you don't have to
go to this extent (of buying the company out) to joint venture with a software
company. It can be a simple as finding a piece of software on the net that is
absolutely fantastic and offer to market it for them for a percentage of the profits
(in other words, becoming a reseller for them). For example, you could search
the net for software that you think is great but demonstrates poor marketing.
There is a great deal of brilliant software on the net, but the owners often lack
marketing know-how.
We talk about this quite
extensively in the course (http://www.marketingtips.com/mailloop.html)
and how to get exclusive distribution rights to the software without spending
any money or having the owner of the software risk anything (a complete win-win
situation!). In the course, I even give you copies of the exact Joint Venture
Contract we use to protect ourselves when we do joint ventures (to make sure we
are not liable for their mistakes and that we are guaranteed payment). Just photocopy
them as use them for your own joint ventures.
Or the other angle is to
find a need in a niche market and then find a piece of software that you truly
believe in that will solve that problem… and then as long as you have a good
salesletter, good sales process, and good promotion, you are guaranteed success.
See how easy that was with
a little bit of creativity?
