Information Marketing - How to Start a Six-Figure Information Marketing Business in 14 Days

How to Start a Six-Figure Information Marketing Business on the Internet – as a Profitable Adjunct to Your Present Business or as a Lucrative Stand-Alone Business -- in as Little as 14 Days
The Prescription for Generating Serious Income on the Web – Even During a Recession or an Economic Downturn

by Maria Veloso, Internet Marketing Strategist and Director of Web Copywriting University

Everyone knows that in recent months, the housing market has plummeted, foreclosures are at an all-time high, the U.S. dollar has weakened considerably, and the price of gas, grain, gold and other commodities have skyrocketed. Financial markets are teetering on the brink of disaster, and the International Monetary Fund is calling our economic condition “the largest financial crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression.”

Depending on which source you believe, the U.S. is slipping into recession, or right smack in the middle of one already – and people are fearful of the future these days.

If you’re a business owner or are self-employed, you’ve probably experienced a slowdown in your business right along with most other businesses across the board. And maybe you’ve worried whether your business will survive, or whether you’re going to earn enough money to support your financial needs. If you’re an employed individual, you’ve undoubtedly realized that your paycheck does NOT buy as much as it used to, due to escalating prices -- and your job might even be at risk due to corporate downsizing or business failures.

During economic times like these, most people tend to think they have no other recourse than to tighten their belts, ride out the storm, and resign themselves to the reality that things are going to get much worse before they get better.

Actually, there is an often overlooked method of creating virtually passive income on the Internet that has the potential of …

multiplying the sales and profits of your present business
becoming a profitable stand-alone business for you; and
surpassing your current earnings or salary.

What is this overlooked method? It’s called information marketing on the Web.

Historically speaking, the marketing of information that fills people’s needs has always fared well in good times or bad -- even during the Great Depression. Information marketing on the Web entails simply creating information products based on the hottest topics for your target audience, and selling them effectively and easily on the Web – even if you’ve never sold anything online before. Information products run the gamut from short reports, e-books, research information – and go all the way to audio files/MP3s, videos, teleseminars, CD-ROMs, software and home study courses. This article will focus only on downloadable products that are easy and inexpensive for anyone to produce and deliver, yet have unlimited earning potential.

A Therapist with No Writing Experience Makes Over $500K a Year!

To illustrate how information marketing on the Web works, let me give you a real-life example of my client, who has managed to earn over $500,000 a year marketing information on the Web. I will call him Matthew to protect his privacy.

Here's his story:

Matthew is a therapist by profession, and has a busy practice providing relationship counseling to both married and unmarried couples. Even though Matthew never had any writing experience, he recently decided to write a short and simple e-book teaching single women how to be a woman that men adore and never want to leave. In January 2006, he hired me to write the website copy and marketing communications for the e-book. Thereafter, he made the e-book available for sale on the Web in downloadable PDF format, at a price point of $39.95.

At the end of December that year, Matthew sent me an ecstatic e-mail reporting that he had made $129,000 in profits in 2006 from selling the e-book. Profits of $129,000 are quite substantial, considering that they represent passive extra income for Matthew, whose main livelihood still came from his therapy practice. Furthermore, the e-book didn’t take him much time to write, and it wasn’t even professionally edited.

Buoyed by the profits he made in 2006, Matthew wrote a second short e-book teaching women how to get their ex-boyfriend (or ex-husband) back. In January 2007, he again hired me to write the website copy and marketing communications for the e-book, and made the e-book available for sale on the Web in PDF format, at a price point of $39.95. That second e-book generated TWICE as many sales as John’s first e-book. Matthew made about $258,000 in 2007 in addition to over $100,000 profits from the first e-book that year.

In May 2007, he wrote his third short e-book teaching single women how to find the man of their dreams. That e-book sold more than the first 2 e-books combined! All told, Matthew is now making more than $500,000 in passive income per year from his 3 e-books. And information marketing is not even his main livelihood! It’s simply an adjunct to his therapy practice.

Anyone Can Make 6-Figure Profits with Information Marketing

Marketing information on the Web has the extraordinary potential of generating untold fortunes for everyday people who have information to share with the general public. Matthew is not alone as far as making 6-figure profits via information marketing is concerned. My files are bulging with plenty of case studies, including a client of mine, who makes $4,028 net profits per day selling information online, and another client who made $1 million in sales in 2-1/2 days.

You might be thinking, ‘But what should I write about? I don’t have any special information that people would want to buy.” Or you might be saying, “Information marketing isn’t for me because I'm not a writer.”

That’s the beauty of information marketing. You don’t even have to be a writer in order to create reports, e-books or other information products that could become a perpetual income stream for you. There are several places on the Web, where you can find writers who will write a report for you on the subject of your choosing, for as little as $15 -- or even write the material for an entire e-book for as little as $100. You simply create (or have someone create) the report, e-book or information product ONCE – and you sell it FOREVER. And you never have to worry about the cost of printing, stocking or shipping of your information products because they are in electronic formats, and delivery is done electronically via downloads.

How to Determine the Topic of Your Information Product

Whether you’re a business owner or are employed by a company, you probably possess specialized knowledge that other people don’t know but want to learn. For example, if you run a public relations firm, you could create a report or e-book with one of the following titles:

How to Ethically Influence the Media and Get the Free Publicity You Want for Your Business: A Publicist’s Secrets

The Blueprint for Creating News Releases that Jump Off the Page and Grab the Attention of the Media

Ordinary People Can Now Get Tremendous Media Attention When They Couldn’t Before

If you’re a financial planner…

How to Find Safe and Profitable Investment Vehicles During an Economic Recession

If you’re a realtor…

How to Profit from the Crash of the Housing Market

If you’re a life coach…

How to Get "Unstuck" and Bring Your Success to the Next Level: Inspiring Stories of Rags-to-Riches Millionaires Who Got Out of the Rut and Finally Lived the Life of Their Dreams

Or

How to Make People Like You Instantly: Neuro-Linguistic Programming Secrets for Establishing Instant Rapport with People

If you’re a photographer…

How to Sell Your Photography for Big Bucks

If you’re still not convinced you can create an information product that can make you a 6-figure income, consider these additional success stories:

1) Johanne Cesar, a mother of 3 boys, who’s been working in the daycare field for almost 10 years, wrote an e-book about potty training your kids. She makes over $100K/year selling the e-book online.

2) Paul Reddick, who wrote an e-book that teaches kids how to pitch a baseball -- sold $7,500 worth of e-books in 30 hours, and went on to start a subscription-based baseball site with 381 members paying $30/month (Revenues = $11,430 per month).

3) Rebecca Fine created an online business based on an out-of-print book titled The Science of Getting Rich (by Wallace Wattles, first published in 1906). Because the book is now in the public domain, she made it into an e-book, and proceeded to distribute it for free on the Web. The e-book became the prime promotional vehicle for promoting Rebecca’s audiobooks and other information products. The e-book gave birth to Rebecca’s 6-figure a year information marketing business.

5) Nathan Morris, a 20-year-old full-time student wrote an e-book about how to put the engine of a Honda Accord into a Honda Civic ("The Ultimate H22 Swap Guide: 92-95 Civic Edition"), and sold over 2,000 copies and made over $100,000 on his first year in business.

6) Ty Cohen makes a great living selling e-books targeted to musicians, bands, singers, or anyone who sells a music CD. His titles include:
Easy Radio Play: The Guide to Getting Your Songs Played on the Radio!
Your Music on TV: The Guide to Getting Your Songs Used in Movies,
          TV and Commercials
The Myspace Magic Manuscript: The Complete How-To Course on
          Using MySpace to Build a Huge Online Fan Base, Sell Incredible
          Amounts of Your Music and Establish Yourself or Company
          Worldwide

7) One lady wrote a small 30+ page e-book about how to cure the disorder called trichotillomania (habitual hair-pulling). On the surface, this doesn’t appear to have a large enough audience, but in reality, approximately 2% of the U.S. population (adults, adolescents and children) suffers from trichotillomania. That’s a target audience of 6 million people! She went on to sell 599 copies at $39.95 apiece within the first 3 months (that's almost $24,000). The clincher is that her e-book consists of information that anyone could find for free at various .org websites, and she was not even an expert on the subject.

It has probably become apparent to you that even if you think you do NOT possess specialized knowledge that is marketable, you can still create an information product by choosing any topic that has commercial potential, and then either using the Internet to compile research that will make up your information product -- or hiring someone to write your information product for you inexpensively.

So how do you get started in information marketing? It’s really simple. There are only 4 essential elements for successul information marketing:

1) An Information Product That Has a Defined Market -- Pick a saleable topic for your information product. Make sure to give your product a title that is irresistible to your target audience – a title that could potentially make your potential customer want to buy it on the basis of the title alone. “How to” types of information products have always sold well – both online and offline – because people always want to learn things that are related to their interests or their business. Other perennially bestselling topics are as follows: Self-help, relationship improvement, achieving more profits and efficiency in business, making money, sex, health and fitness, and improving skills.

2) Website Logistics and E-Commerce Details – If you already have an existing website on which your information product can reside, and your website is already e-commerce enabled, you can skip this step. If you don’t have a website yet, you need to do the following:

     a) Pick and register a domain name, preferably one that conveys the benefit
           that your information product provides. There are many domain registrars
           on the Web. At GoDaddy.com, it costs only $9.99/year to register a domain.

     b) Build your website.  Your website doesn’t have to be fancy, or have all the
           bells and whistles. It can be very simple – with or without a header. You
           can hire a web designer for as little as $60 to $110 to create a no-frills
           website of up to 5 webpages. Or if you’re a do-it-yourself kind of person
           and want to create your own websites -- even if you have no technical
           experience or knowledge of html -- you can invest in a software program
           called XSitePro.

     c) Sign up for a web hosting service (i.e., a service that publishes your website
           online). There are thousands of good web hosts available if you just
           Google the search term “web hosting.” I use Addr.com to host all my
           e-commerce websites.

     d) Apply for a merchant account (which enables you to accept credit cards)
           and an e-commerce shopping cart (i.e., a service that will process your
           website orders). The one-stop shop I use is 1shoppingcart.com.

3) Traffic Conversion – Make sure your website contains compelling web copy – that is, words that make your prospects pull out their credit cards and buy what you’re selling. In Internet marketing terms, this is part of the umbrella called traffic conversion – i.e., converting website traffic into sales, or converting prospects into customers. I teach a web copywriting formula involving 5 simple questions which, when answered, make the web copy practically write itself. [For an in-depth discussion, see Web Copy that Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time.]

4) Traffic Generation – Drive traffic (visitors) to your website – but only after you’ve made sure that your website has the ability to convert those visitors into customers (see #3 above). Traffic generation can be done in a variety of ways, including search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing, pay-per-click ads (Google AdWords), etc. In the case of the client I mentioned above (Matthew), his top 2 traffic-generating methods are search engine optimization and offering his e-books to a network of 100,000+ professional affiliate marketers whose business it is to sell other people’s downloadable products (such as Matthew’s 3 e-books) for them.

The entire process of creating an information product, putting up a website with compelling web copy, and driving traffic to that website can take as little as 14 days, and have start-up costs as low as $118 (if you do the writing of the information product yourself), or as low as $218 if you hire someone to do the writing for you. Depending on the speed that you're able to create your information product, you can start receiving online orders in two weeks' time and be well on your way to building a six-figure information marketing business.

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Maria Veloso is an Internet marketing strategist, the author of Web Copy that Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time, and Director of Web Copywriting University, which specializes in teaching Internet entrepreneurs how to write web copy that converts website visitors into customers, and shows writers how to transition into the lucrative world of web copywriting. The University's landmark Web Copywriting Mastery Course (a Home Study CD course) delivers surefire webcopywriting strategies and writing principles that are scientifically proven to dramatically boost website sales.