How To Sell Information Online

Wondering how to sell information online? So much information online is completely free. So how can you get paid selling information? There’s a few ways you can get paid selling information. Here’s a quick overview:

  • Write and sell an ebook from your website
  • Create content on Substack and charge for views with a subsciption
  • Build a blog and monetise with advertising (e.g. Google Adsense), or affiliate marketing
  • Build an email list and promote affiliate products through it
  • Create a digital product and have other people promote it for you through Clickbank for example.
  • Use Teachable – share what you know and build an online course to sell
how to sell information online

How To Sell Information Online – An Ebook

An ebook is one of the simplest ways in which anyone can sell information. Create your book and upload it to your website. Then create a sales button using Paypal and a sales page on your website. You can then have your ebook page automatically show up when someone completes checkout on Paypal.

To set up the actual sales process when selling an ebook is relatively simple and straight forward. You can check out the process in more detail in this article: selling ebooks from your own website.

You can also upload it to Amazon using Kindle Self Publishing, which can give you more reach. Once you’re all set up, the main problem when selling an ebook is attracting traffic to your website. This is one of the main issues whatever strategy you are using; be it affiliate marketing, selling your own course, building your own email list or attracting customers to your Substack subscription blog.

How To Sell Information Online – Traffic

Traffic is the key, whatever method of selling information online you are going to choose. There’s multiple platforms which will help you set up a “payment gateway” for your content. That’s the easy part. But still, you’re going to need traffic when your “digital shop” is up and running.

If no-one can find your digital store, nobody is going to buy your information. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s a vast competition in the online space. To get a slice of traffic, you’re going to need to get your own content in front of people/run ads.

how to sell information online

If you’re selling an ebook, for only a small amount (e.g. $7) it’s going to be difficult making a profit when you’re only getting $7 per customer, especially if you’re using paid advertising. You have to make a sale for every $7 you spend, just to break even!

To get people to find your ebook for free, you’ll need to create content to attract them (for example though blogging). But if you’re creating similar written content for free, who in their right mind is going to pay $7 for your ebook!? So what’s the answer?

– Affiliate Marketing

The answer lies in selling other people’s products with a model known as affiliate marketing. With an ebook, you can maybe charge a few dollars but not much more. So it’s going to be tough selling it, especially if you’re attempting to use paid advertising.

Spend more than the cost of the ebook without making a sale, and you’re running at a loss. In addition, many affiliates are giving away ebooks like they’re going out of fashion. You can grab mine here! Why pay when you can get an ebook for free somewhere else?

affiliate marketing - selling information online

However, ebooks are great lead magnets. A lead magnet is a term for something valuable which can be given away to generate an email list and build your email list.

Building An Email List

An email list is one of the best tools you can get to help you sell information online. By building an email list of subscribers, and delivering value driven messages to your list, you can build trust and develop relationships. Many affiliates will even build their email lists into the hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

You can then promote products to your list, which are worth far more than your ebook would fetch.

aweber

Ideally find products which are aligned with your ebook. That way, your subscribers are more likely to be interested in it. Information products typically pay far more than physical products to affiliate marketers. For example, a physical product can pay between 1% and 10% commission (an item from Amazon’s affiliate program, for example). But an information product (or digital product) can pay a lot more – typically 30%-40% commission.

If you choose high value and subscription based information products to sell, you can earn ongoing commissions from each customer. They can also purchase products from a range and allow you to earn from multiple sources. See also benefits of an affiliate business system.

Best Info Products To Sell Online

The best info products to sell online are arguably those which pay the most. They are typically those which offer the greatest value to their customers. What problem would you pay the most to have solved for you by a product/service?

Another income? To be able to quit your job? To be financially/geographically free? Income and lifestyle are the problems which people will pay the most to change. So if you can offer a solution to these kinds of problems, people will likely pay more for them.

For example, people will pay a lot more for a business mentorship program than they would to learn how to play the guitar. The value they get from building a successful online business is far greater (in monetary terms) that the skill of learning the guitar.

So although a learning guitar online course would still sell to the right audience, you’re limited as to what you can charge for it. Learn more here.

Selling Information Products Online

Selling information products online is one of the best ways to earn without your own products/service to sell. You don’t need your own products as you can use a business model known as affiliate marketing, which lets third parties refer customers to products and services online.

There’s thousands of digital affiliate products which you can choose from. A site called Clickbank.com is a good place to start if you are thinking of selling them. You can also find start an online business from scratch here.

start online business from scratch

Selling Information Products Online: Why Information Products?

So what’s so great about information products? As an affiliate you don’t need to sell information products to earn an income online. You can sell any kind of products. Physical products can also be sold for a commission. Amazon has an partner program which pays affiliates for referring sales on the site. The main problem with Amazon is that Amazon’s affiliate commission rates are tiny. You typically earn only a small percentage – between 3% and 10% in most cases.

amazon commission

So for a sale of a $100 product from Amazon, you may actually only earn as little as $3!

But information products can be sold digitally which means there’s no need to physically post them. You can buy information products directly from your laptop. This means they can easily be sold internationally to anyone online. Because there’s fewer costs involved in information products, this saving is passed on to the advertisers – the affiliate!

As such affiliates for digital products (information products) can earn larger commissions on sales. Digital products typically carry a commission rate from 30-40%. So for a similar sale of a $100 product, you would earn between $30-$40.

digital vs physical affiliate commissions

Selling Information Products Online: Downsides

However, there are potentially some downsides to selling information products online. Potential customers don’t know about your products or, more specifically, what they can do for them. A physical product is much more tangible than a digital one. So it may take a little more than a website to sell a digital product. The plus side is that this can be done through email marketing, which allows you to build more of a relationship with potential customers than you could possibly do from a website alone.

aweber - selling information products via email marketing

Email marketing is one method in which affiliates can sell their products online. By collecting subscribers onto an email list, marketers can automate delivery of multiple email messages, over a longer period of time. On a website a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. But once on an email list, this period can be dramatically extended. You can also showcase your products more effectively and demonstrate their usefulness through email messages.

Best Selling Information Products

The best selling information products are the ones which can help customers the most with their biggest problems. If you can solve a problem such as learning a new language with an information product, you can sell it for a few dollars. Here’s an example of a Spanish course you can find on Clickbank.com:

selling information products

This particular course offers online live classes, so it looks like a good one. Here’s the price break down for the courses:

selling information products

The best selling information products are those which offer the most amount of value to the people who want them. You can also choose to sell high ticket products and subscription affiliate products which pay larger than average commissions and recurring commissions respectively.

Here’s an example of a high ticket offering which helps people get started build online businesses from scratch:

selling information products
Learn more about these programs here.

With business consulting and mentoring programs you can earn much larger commissions because people are willing to pay much more for solving their income problems. Whereas with a language program like the one above, although there’s a huge value given, it’s not worth so much to the marketplace.

marketing info products

Methods Of Selling

There’s several methods of selling information products online. The most commonly used ones are:

  • Blogging – this website for example uses blogging to attract an audience
  • Video blogging – same as blogging but in video format using sites such as YouTube and TikTok
  • Email marketing – is a very effective form of marketing to a growing audience. Your email list can be built using content marketing or paid advertising
  • PPC – pay per click advertising is a popular method used by affiliates. Pay for each advertising click you get on an advert targeted towards a specific audience.
  • Social media marketing methods – social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc can be use with paid and unpaid methods. See also unpaid social media marketing.

Your marketing method is an important factor in your success in selling information products online. Most marketers will use a website of some sort to showcase their products and choose a given method of generating traffic to that website. As already mentioned, email marketing is a good way to communicate the value of your chosen information products. To encourage website visitors to join your email list, you can offer information for free which relates to the product of interest.

How Long Does It Take?

You can build an info selling business quite quickly online because of the speed at which you can build an email list with paid marketing. But if you chose a different, cheaper route such as blogging it will take much longer. You also need to find and sell your products to the people who would be most likely to buy them.

This requires understanding your target audience (or customer avatar). Your customer avatar is the ideal customer who would be most likely to make a purchase. Once you understand who they are, where they hang out online and other such demographics about them, it’s much easier to find them through your marketing. Without knowing who exactly you are trying to reach with your marketing strategy/tactic, it’s much more difficult to place your products in front of buying customers.

selling information products online
Get started with your online business here.

How long it takes to build a regular income from selling information products will vary according to your aptitudes, marketing strategy and available time for your business. You can access an online training and education resource to get started here.