7 Essentials for Information Product Marketing

In my last post, I talked about the five basic Internet marketing business models. One of the most profitable models is Info Products Marketing.

Let’s look at the seven essential things you must have to be a successful information products marketer.

1. Your own domain
It is possible to sell your information product without a website, however, you will find it almost impossible to make a significant amount of sales without one.

Choosing a domain name that closely relates to your product name is always a good idea. For example, you’ll find my info product, “The Easy Guide to Unlimited Traffic” at www.ezguidetounlimitedtraffic.com. The product and the domain names were carefully selected after doing a keyword research for popular terms related to website traffic.

There may be occasions where a domain name may not be available. Let’s say you are selling/promoting an affiliate info product and the domain name related to the product name is already taken. One way for you to still get a good domain name is to add “the” or “my” to the beginning of the name and see if you can buy that name. Ex. www.myaffiliateproductname.com or www.theaffiliateproductname.com.

2. Sales letter or mini-site

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of long, one page websites selling information products. Yes, after sometime, they all begin to look the same but they do work!

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel here. Stick to a sales letter, a method that has been tried and tested to be very successful in selling information products. Focus on making your headline and the offer stand out from the rest.

To be successful, you need a sales letter on your webpage and a link to your payment processor…and that’s it! Don’t link to other websites or show paid advertising on your product’s website. A sales letter will catch the attention of the visitors and convince them why they need to purchase your product.

It’s okay to add a sign up form at the bottom or upon exit to capture leads because very seldom will visitors buy on their very first visit.

Read my post 5 Keys to High Converting Mini-Sites to learn more about creating a winning sales letter.

3. Application programs

Information products are usually delivered in PDF format. This is a format that’s supported by all computer platforms and the free Adobe Reader is readily available if not already installed on the reader’s computer.

PDFs also allow you to retain control over your documents as they are not easily editable, especially if you’ve password protected them.

If you are using MS Word to edit/create your products then you will need to buy the full Adobe Acrobat package in order to make PDFs out of your Word files.

Another option is to open Word files in Open Office. It will allow you to create PDFs from there. You can download the free software from here.

4. Graphics

Any good salesperson will tell you “it’s the sizzle that sells the steak.” You’ll need an attractive cover for your eBook. Most sales letters also use a header or banner and icons for “buy now” and “money back guarantee.”

It’s okay to do without a banner if you are trying to grab attention with a subhead. Here’s an example of one of my sales letters without a banner. The 3D covers that you normally see for eBooks are created using an action script in Photoshop. This requires special skills and expensive software. You may want to seriously consider outsourcing this part (see below.)

5. Payment processor

To sell your information products online, you’ll need some kind of a payment processor. Two of the most popular ones are PayPal and ClickBank.

Before you start driving traffic to your sales letter, make sure you have tested your payment processor by making a trial purchase. This way you can be sure that your visitors are able to buy without any hassles.

6. Marketing strategy

Successful info product marketers know that once they’ve created the product and built their website, they have to drive traffic to the sales page. If you start out with a complete strategy of marketing your website, you’ll be able to put it into place as soon as your website is ready to go. Article marketing campaigns, joint ventures and pay per click advertising can all be part of your strategy.

For website traffic, look at my eBook “The Easy Guide to Unlimited Traffic” and for help with content marketing, see “Content Marketing Roadmap.”

7. Affiliates

Not every product you create will lend itself to affiliates marketing it. Those that are deemed to have a high potential to convert well and earn them good commissions will be favored over others.

Whenever possible, you should certainly move toward creating information products that will attract affiliates.

With affiliate marketing, you can have other well-known marketers driving traffic to your website and creating sales for you.

One of the best resources that I know of learning the art of affiliate marketing is SalesArmySecrets.com.

By combining these 7 essentials with your winning information product, you’ll have a winning formula for earning good money from selling info products.

If all this sounds overwhelming to you, I recommend you consider a company like AMA Interactive (my web design company) to take care of everything for you. That way you can concentrate on product creation and marketing and leave the technical details to them.

How are you selling your info products? Share your thoughts by posting a comment.