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