Blogackers

Promoting an info product is hard work, but that is offset by the ultimate rewards (usually, far greater than AdSense) and other benefits, such as the recognition and authority status you get from writing a well-read book in your niche.

Here are the five strategies I’ll be discussing in today’s lesson:

• Blogging
• Affiliates
• Networking with experts
• Giving away free stuff
• PPC Advertising

You might be familiar with some or all of these strategies. That’s good, because this will give you a chance to see how to apply them directly to your info product business.

Start Blogging

When it comes to building a buzz around your product prior to launch, blogging is king. It doesn’t have to be a big splash in the pond when you start; get off the ground slow and build momentum as you become more comfortable with blogging.

Remember that building a readership takes time – don’t be frustrated if you don’t see instant results. Instead, enjoy the small victories and keep working at it.

Talk about yourself, what you like reading, and especially, talk about topics related to your niche. Blogging is an excellent way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche, so make sure that you provide a lot of useful information on your blog. You do not have to give away all your secrets (save them for the e-book), but blogging about your niche will give you a lot of credibility and help build a readership that will be easy to sell to (and recruit as affiliates).

Affiliates

This is a very important part of creating online wealth that most people miss out on. The idea here is to convert your buyers (or at least a section of your customers) into your personal army of promoters for your info product (this works with any product or service).

Make is as easy as possible – easier than pie – for your affiliates to profit from promoting your e-book.

Put yourself in the affiliate’s shoes for a moment and think about any obstacles that might stop him from promoting your e-book.

• Are you offering sales material to use or does he have to write it himself?

  Don’t bank on other people doing your work for you. Make sure that you prepare all the requisite material (sales pitch, email templates, etc) that your affiliates might need to get the job done. Present the opportunity on a silver platter – the easier you make it for them to make money for themselves, the more effort they will put in for promoting your book.

• How much of a profit does he make off every sale?

  Don’t be cheap when it comes to offering commissions. Typically joint ventures offer 50% – that’s fine for starters, but what if you offered higher commissions (say 60 or even 70%) for your top affiliates? And don’t be afriad to offer 100% commission to these people. Reason-being… You should have a killer backend product, which you’ll see customers after they buy. Plus, you’ll be building your customer list with VERY quality customers, simply because they’re coming from top experts in the industry.

Give your affiliates an incentive to promote your product over others – after all, if it weren’t for them, you wouldn’t be reaching those customers in the first place.

Network with Experts

Seek out the authorities in your niche – the big experts, popular publications (or their editors) and the major websites. Get their attention by sending them preview copies of your e-book and ask them to give their honest comments (request, not demand). Once again, the reply you will get will come down to how good your info-product is.

If you can get positive feedback from the experts in your niche, it instantly gives you two benefits:

• You now have social proof – people who are respected in your niche for their knowledge are pointing to you as a reliable source.
• You have large markets to pitch your product to – most experts will be happy to promote your e-book to their list (or give it a mention) if you offer them a big share of the profits.

Give Away Freebies

People LOVE free stuff – reports, chapters, tools – you name it, marketers have use the “free” hook to establish a foothold in all markets. However, if you’re a bit skeptical about giving away your hard work for free, consider this:

The fastest way to reach as many potential customers as possible to build a “buzz” around your e-book is to get people to talk about your work in forums and on their own websites and blogs. In other words, get people to reach out to communities and sections of your target market that you would never be able to penetrate by yourself.

Now in order to do that, you have to ensure two things:

One, your work should be worth talking about (read the previous lesson on creating value for more on this topic) and two, make it extremely easy for people talk about you.

In conjunction with blogging, provide free chapters from your e-book and/or special reports on your topic on your website/blog for your readers. With Keyword Elite, I put up videos of the software in action in order to let readers know exactly what the tool was about.

Did it work? I’ll let you be the judge (hint: just check out the blog and the comments).

PPC Advertising

Free publicity is always the best publicity, but what if you could buy traffic and still make a profit?

By advertising through AdWords (or Yahoo), you can easily drive traffic to your sales page for 10 to 15 cents a click. After that, it comes down to the quality of your sales pitch which will determine your conversion rate (which in turn will determine whether you make a profit or a loss from PPC advertising).

You can also use PPC advertising to test how well your sales letter converts – if it bombs and you get no sales from your first try, don’t panic. Use the tips I gave at the end of the last lesson and work on improving your copy.

PPC advertising is profitable when you are earning more from the traffic than you’re spending to acquire it. In numbers, this means that if your e-book is selling for $27 and you are spending $0.15 a click, a conversion rate of 1% (1 out of 100 visitors buy your book) will mean that you are earning $27 for every $15 spent – a profit of $12 per sale.

These aren’t amazing numbers, but if your e-book is of a high value/cost and you can improve your conversion rate, there’s no limit to the profits you can make.

An additional benefit of PPC advertising is that you don’t have to wait for anyone to promote your product. This method can bring you instant traffic, and in turn, instant profits.

What’s Next

When it comes to building an online business, info products are one of the most lucrative sources of income. Treat every e-book as a new stream of revenue – just as you would be setting up websites in profitable niches left and right, you can easily create info products for those same niches using the strategies given to you in these four lessons.

However, when you are expanding your reach and creating info products every month, you absolutely need to know these two tactics – they’re not some magical secrets, but in fact common sense advice that only successful people follow and the not-so-successful ignore. Coincidence?

Automation

From brainstorming to managing your affiliates, most of what comes in between can (and should) be automated. Here are a few tips:

• Use automated keyword research tools (like Keyword Elite) to save yourself time on researching your niche.
• Outsource those tasks that tend to take up too much of your time – if you’re not a graphics designer, pay someone to design your blog/site and do your e-book cover graphics.
• Hire an editor to proof-read your e-book. You could go all the way and have someone ghost-write the book for you – this is especially helpful if you want to expand into a niche which you are not an expert.
• Use affiliate management scripts to automate the process.
• Automate your sales process, down to the first few follow-up emails.

Create More Value

In the last lesson I talked to you about increasing the value of your info product. There is one more thing that you can do to accomplish that – change the format.

Call it psychological, but an e-book does not generate the same perception of value as a physical product does. You could take the same information from one e-book, have it printed and then sell it for twice the price. In most cases people will easily pay two or three times the price of the original product just because you are shipping something tangible to them.

Printing your book is one thing, but you can also add audio and video to the mix. For example, John Carlton provides a set of 4 audio CDs that “walk” you through his book on copywriting. Most of the time you don’t need such help, but the personal touch of the audio CDs (plus the promise of “extra help” that you might miss out on) is enough to justify the hike in price.

Similarly, if your topic is something that could use video demonstrations, make sure to create those videos and put them into the package as well.

There is a whole world of possibilities open to you if you are willing to make the extra effort and create physical products.

Ask Me Questions.

That does it for this mini-series of lessons on launching your own info product business. I hope that you liked it, and as always if you have any questions on this topic, write to me at infoproduct@seoelite.com.

All the best,

Brad Callen
Professional SEO
http://www.seoelite.com