by Comm, Joel
You might think that there’s no other way. For years, we’ve been hearing that it’s impossible to get people to pay for content online. Everyone has become so used to being able to read the news for free, browse magazines for free, even watch movies and listen to music for free that trying to persuade Internet users to part with cash is like trying to get teenagers to clean their rooms: It’s something you know you should do, but why waste your time when you know it’s never going to happen?
The reality is very different. In fact, when the incentives are in place and the product is right, not only is it possible to sell information online, but you can actually get closer to the real value of that information.
That’s something that’s very difficult to do offline.
Head to a movie theater, for example, and you can expect to pay about $10 for a ticket. The price might vary slightly, depending on the location, the plushness of the theater, and whether the movie is in its first run, but no theater is going to expect you to cough up $50 or $60 for a ticket. The ticket price a theater can charge is fixed within a fairly narrow band.
Whether you’re seeing an 80-minute comedy that leaves you cold or sitting spellbound through a three-hour sci-fi epic, the price is roughly the same. And that’s true even though you might come out of the epic aware that you would have been willing to pay three or four times more for that experience.
In order to squeeze more money out of the movie-going public and reduce the gap between the price of the ticket and the value of the experience to the moviegoer, movie companies have had to get creative. They’ve had to offer features with clear additional value, such as Technicolor, surround sound, or IMAX. They release DVDs packed with special features and offer merchandise to children to squeeze every penny they can out of the value the movie has to the audience. Just calling it an “epic” or adding half an hour to the film won’t do the trick.
In the publishing world, the limitations for sellers—and the opportunities for buyers—are even clearer. One of the best-selling books in 2009 was Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich. Describing itself as a six-week financial boot camp for 20- to 35-year-olds, the book explains how to automate savings and investments, negotiate raises, manage student loans, and generally be smart with money. If it does what it says it does on the cover—and there’s no reason to believe it doesn’t—then over the lifetime of the reader, the knowledge in that book should be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ramit Sethi should be able to sell it for thousands of dollars a copy and still call it a bargain. You can buy it on Amazon for less than 10 bucks, making it perhaps the best investment this side of Wall Street.
The book sells for that price because it’s a paperback, and that’s what paperbacks sell for, especially after Amazon has done its price slashing. Buyers don’t look at the value the book contains for them but at the price of the next book along the shelf. When the competition is that fierce—and price expectations so low—publishers have little choice but to pitch their books in the range that the book-buying public expects.
Move away from long-established and tightly priced industries like movies and publishing, though, and sellers start to enjoy more freedom. In addition to selling a New York Times best-selling book, Ramit Sethi also runs virtual boot camps that build on his book’s content by providing Q&As, webinars with other financial experts, and information about “entrepreneurship and psychology” These are not very different from the content of his book, but because they’re not in book form, Sethi can charge a price closer to their real value. The boot camps cost $199 and sell out quickly.
The Internet is such a new marketplace that information products sold online can enjoy plenty of pricing freedom. Copywriter David Garfinkel, for example, sells his copywriting kit online for $997. Buyers get more than a book, of course. They receive a stack of DVDs showing a complete seminar that students have paid thousands of dollars to attend, together with transcripts and audio versions.
It’s all valuable information, but it’s presented in a way that allows Garfinkel to cram in more details than he could in a 200-to 300-page book—and also allows him to charge a price closer to the amount that buyers can expect in returns on their investment. While $997 might look like a lot of money for a pile of DVDs, buyers realize that one sales letter they write using the information they paid just under a thousand dollars to learn could easily offer them 50 or 100 times that amount in return.
The format the information comes in no longer matters. Only the value of the information matters. Create information products, and you’ll be able to realize the true value of your expertise. That can mean hundreds and even thousands of dollars for every sale.
In this chapter, I explain how to create information products. I explain how to come up with killer ideas, create the product, write the copy that turns browsers into buyers, and recruit affiliates. I even discuss the most important practical steps, such as creating shopping carts, fulfilling orders, and of course, giving your product a rocket-powered launch.
Creating Killer Ideas for Your Information Products
I started this book by talking about creating a content site. I think that’s always the best place for any Internet business to begin, because it’s the easiest. You don’t need any special skills to create a web site, fill it with content, and surround that content with ads.
Once you hear that KaChing sound for the first time, you’ll immediately receive a massive injection of motivation to keep going and to make that KaChing ring louder.
But there’s another reason I think that it’s a good idea to start with a free, ad-supported web site. As you’re writing content, reading comments, and talking with your readers on Twitter and Facebook, you’ll also be getting an idea of who they are... and what they need.
That’s incredibly valuable information.
Put up a blog post that no one reads and you’ll have wasted an hour, maybe two. But you’ll also have helped your site’s search engine ranking and learned something about what your audience doesn’t want to see. You’ll have risked little and won a little. That’s the worst-case scenario, and it’s really not terrible.
But creating information products does require a larger investment. As you’ll see, there are ways to reduce the risk without significantly affecting the returns, but the risk that you’ll lose time or even a little money creating an information product that doesn’t sell is always higher than the loss you might endure by creating a dud blog post. Three factors will decide whether your information product makes a giant KaChing or a dull silence: the idea, the implementation, and the launch.
The idea sounds like the hardest part of the product. It looks like it’s the most important and the toughest to get right. You need to do lots of research, test the ground, carry out surveys, and build focus groups. Get it wrong and you’ll never see a dime for your efforts, your product will fail, and you’ll have to stay at your job for the rest of your life.
Actually, none of that is true, and while you might want to do a bit of research before you get to work, you won’t have to do too much market testing before the release. You’re creating an information product, not a new flavor of Coke. There might be some risks associated with information products, but the costs are low ... and the brainstorming is very simple.
The first rule in choosing a topic is to follow your gut.
If you’ve created an online business in a field that you enjoy, that you understand, and that you’ve already spent time in, you should have a feel for the market. Your customers will be people like you, and you’ll have a sense for what you—and others with your interest—would be willing to pay to learn.
That doesn’t mean you should rush out and create the first information product you think of. If you’ve thought of it, there’s a good chance that someone else will have thought of it, too. You’ll certainly want to make sure that the product you’re thinking of creating isn’t already available and that there is room for your own take on the subject.
Looking at those other titles will also give you an idea of what’s selling and what the market is used to seeing. All of that is important.
That’s straightforward enough, but though your sense for your subject can point you in a general direction, it’s not enough by itself to plot your course. You will also have to do at least some research.
And that leads to the second rule of information product brainstorming : Listen to your readers.
As a web site publisher, your readers are both a vital part of the market and a market that talks to you. The comments they leave at the end of your blog posts and the actions they take on your site give you tons of valuable information about what sort of information they might (and might not) be willing to buy.
The comments themselves are obvious, but they’re also unreliable. It’s possible that some users will say specifically that they’d be prepared to pay for a book that would tell them how to build their own patio or how to cook dinner parties in a snap, but you can’t rely on those kinds of posts to tell you what information product to create. What you can do is look at the number of comments your posts receive to see which topics push people’s buttons the most. Although there’s a difference between prompting people to write a comment and driving them to spend money, it is likely that controversial topics will help you to move more goods. The comment count will help you to identify the subjects most likely to generate interest among your users.
Comments are the most obvious sources of information about your user preferences, but they’re not the only intelligence that you can use to make smart decisions. Your web site stats will also tell you which pages are the most popular and how long users spend on them. That’s a measure of interest. If a blog post topic has generated lots of views and persuaded your readers to stick around and read through to the bottom of the page, that’s a good sign that people are gripped by the subject. There’s a reasonable chance that they’ll find it interesting enough to pay to continue reading.
As you’re wondering what sort of topic you should use for an information product, take a few minutes to look at your site stats. List the 10 pages that generate the most views, the 10 pages that generate the most comments, and the 10 pages that generate the longest views. You should find that there’s plenty of overlap, giving you a good idea of what attracts your readers the most.
Those figures will tell you how much interest your readers have in the topic before they reach your page. They won’t tell you how much interest remains after they’ve read your page. While it’s unlikely that a single blog post will be enough to completely satisfy people who want to know about a topic, it’s certainly possible that a good post will leave them feeling that they know enough not to need to read more. (That’s not a reason to write poor posts, though. If one post can satisfy readers, then the topic is too narrow for an information product.)
However, you do have a measure that tells you how much interest remains after someone has read your post. Your ad stats don’t just reveal how well your ad units have been optimized, they also show you that having read your post and looked at your page, your readers still want to learn more. They’ve clicked the ad to continue their education. That tells you there’s a demand that still hasn’t been met.
When you’ve listed the posts and topics that have attracted the most views for the longest amounts of time, add the pages with the highest click-through rates.
All of these figures will give you a sense of the demand for your expertise. But they won’t give you an answer to the question, “What should I create an information product about?” They’ll give you areas to think about. They’ll inspire you. But you still have a couple more things to throw into the pot.
Your information product should be on a topic you know well and can talk about intelligently. There’s no point in choosing a subject that you think your audience would pay for if you don’t actually know more about it than they do.
And it has to deliver results.
That’s the really crucial bit. When you’re asking people to pay you money for information, they’re only going to reach into their pockets if they believe that money is going to come back to them. That doesn’t have to be in cash form—although you can certainly find plenty of information products on the Web that promise to help people earn giant stacks of cash—it can also be money saved.
Create an information product that explains how to build a deck, for example, and you’ll be able to tell people that they’re saving the labor costs involved in hiring someone to do the work for them. As long as you’re charging less than the amount that a buyer would have had to pay, you’ll be offering a bargain. Your buyers need to feel that they’re swapping the cover price for a later return of money or some other benefit.
I wish I could tell you that there’s a fail-safe formula for coming up with ideas for information products. I wish I could walk you through the process of reading your server stats and ad stats until the opportunities leap out and grab you. And I wish I could claim that if you do all of these things, check the market, and outline the value your product brings that you’re guaranteed to make a profit.
But I can’t.
When you’re creating information products, there are no guarantees. There are gambles of various odds and risks with different levels of reward. But there are also ways of reducing the risk, and there are so many opportunities available that the biggest risk you can take when building an online business is not creating an information product at all.
Creating the Product
What kind of product do you want to create? A book? An e-book? A set of DVDs? Or how about a subscription-based virtual classroom that, over the course of several months, teaches your customers everything they need to know to complete their goals?
There’s no one way to create an information product. Instead, there are a number of different ways of transforming the information you have into a format that can be sold online. For the buyer, the format itself doesn’t matter. As long as the information is able to flow efficiently from you to them, they’ll be getting their money’s worth. But what the different formats can do is affect how that information is transferred, how much information is transferred—and how much you have to invest in creating the product.
E IS FOR EASY... AND E-BOOK
The easiest approach is to write an e-book. This is how I started creating information products and the result just blew me away (Figure 4.1).
After I’d seen what AdSense could do, I got in touch with a few friends and told them what I’d discovered about optimizing ad units. A day after trying out some simple strategies for himself, Chris Pirillo, creator of blog network Lockergnome.com, got back to me with the single word: “Dude!” Dave Taylor (AskDaveTaylor.com) and tech guru Bob Rankin (TheInternetTourbus.com) were also enthusiastic, and soon I was telling everyone I met that they needed to be shaking up their ads, blending them into the page, and testing different formats.
Figure 4.1 The first edition of my AdSense Secrets e-book was about 60 pages long ... and I sold thousands of copies at $77 each.
At that point, someone suggested I put the results of my experiment in an e-book and share it online.
I didn’t know anything about information products then. I’d never created one, and much of the content on my web site was being provided by volunteers and professional writers. I was contributing only occasionally, so the idea of sitting down and writing an entire book didn’t appeal to me a great deal.
But I wanted people to know this stuff. I’d wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of money by not optimizing my ads, so the sooner people understood what AdSense could do, the sooner they could earn real cash, too. Of course, I wasn’t completely altruistic, either. The more people who used AdSense, the more advertisers would like it, the more ads there’d be online, and the more money there’d be available for everyone. That’s one of the great things about AdSense: The larger the competition, the greater the opportunity.
I was also going to charge
for it. If people were going to take my research and make money, then I was thrilled for them, but I couldn’t see why they should object to paying me for helping them make that money.
So I did it. I took the same approach to the book that I take with anything that I put up on my sites: I forgot about being literary and trying to talk like a newspaper, and wrote the way I speak. It seemed the easiest way to do it, and I couldn’t really see myself doing it any other way. I pretended that I was on the phone with one of my friends explaining the results of my AdSense testing—something I’d done many times.
What Google Never Told You about Making Money with AdSense came out in February 2005. It was about 60 pages long—short for a book, but plenty long for an e-book. Most important, it contained everything I had then learned about AdSense, so I wasn’t too concerned about the length. I knew that if readers implemented the strategies in the book, they’d make money. Those strategies had made money for me, and they’d made money for friends who had used them. I didn’t think that buyers would care that they had to read only 60 pages rather than 300 before they could improve their income.