What Are Information Products: How to Create Them and Sell Them Online

The term information product is typically associated with educational e-books (of either Kindle, simple PDF, or e-pub variety), audio recordings, or digital video recordings, and, in most cases, a combination of all of the above. Essentially, and info product is some sort of intellectual property content, stored in a digital format suitable for selling on the Internet.

Why to Create Information Products?

If you’re a solo professional, run a small business, or a consulting practice, you’re an expert in your field and you have knowledge you could put into an information product. In your own business you can make only so much per hour, and there are only so many hours you’re willing to commit to working in your business. If you really want to start making money “while you sleep” you should seriously consider creating information products and selling them online.

How to Create Information Products

There are a few simple ways of how to make products to sell on line.

1. Adobe PDF e-books: The easiest to create, from a technical point of view, is an e-book in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. Today, most word processing applications, such as MS Word, have the ability to save your written document in PDF format. This can be anything from a 1-page checklist, 20-page special report or a 100-page booklet, or longer.
2. Audio Recordings:
   • Every computer sold these days has the ability to record audio. So, once you’ve written your e-book, you can simply read it into the computer and your have another version of your info product!
   • Another source of audio recordings can be a tele-seminar you can host. Typically you host a free tele-seminar as a lead-generation tool, but you can also sell tickets to the tele-seminar to double your efforts: you make money selling the tickets to the live event (which you then record), and then you have the recording to sell to anyone who either couldn’t make it to the live event, or it wasn’t practical for them to attend the live event because of a time-zone difference, e.g. if you’re based in Canada, and some of your audience is in Australia. You can invite industry-recognized experts and interview them, either as a two-way conversation with no audience or a live tele-seminar.
3. Video Recordings:
   • Using a web cam you can record a video of yourself talking about a subject of your expertise. If you can also mix in slides from a PowerPoint presentation, but to do this you will have to have some video-editing software, such as iMovie, available for the Mac. To take video to the next level, you can hire a videographer to record a live seminar or workshop that you host. Make sure you make enough money selling the tickets, so that your video recording and editing costs don’t eat too much of your profits. To keep your costs low, consider hiring a student from a local visual arts college. You really don’t need broadcast-quality video for your information product, because it will most likely be watched on a computer screen.
   • Another option for creating video is screen capture video. Using programs such as Camtasia (available for both Mac and PC), or a less capable but still OK for most uses Voila!

The easiest way I found of creating info products is having a tele-seminar. You invite one or two fellow experts on a subject and you interview them. Most conference call service providers will allow you to record the whole thing, and then you can download it to your computer as an mp3 file, and, presto!, you have your 1st info-product.

To take it to the next level, you can hire a transcriptionist to transcribe the spoken words into a text document, which you can further enhance by editing, adding your affiliate links to services/products mentioned in the interview. There, you have your second info-product.

How to Sell Your Information Products Online

Next, what you need to do is have a shopping cart plugin installed on your WordPress blog. If you don’t have a WordPress-based web site try this shopping cart software. Using your own shopping cart gives you the most flexibility, but requires some technical knowledge.

For payment processing I recommend PayPal. It’s been around a long time, is part of the big eBay group, and works world-wide. Good thing about PayPal is that it doesn’t cost anything unless you make a sale: there are no monthly fees or setup costs. All they take is a small percentage per each transaction, e.g $2.50-$3.20 per $100 sale, depending on your monthly volume.

Once you have your product created and loaded up to your site, it’s time to promote it. Write blog posts about it on your own site; looks for guest blogging opportunities; post to social media sites such as Linkedin, facebook, etc.

One of the best ways to make more sales is to recruit other people to sell it for you: your affiliate network. To create an affiliate program on your WordPress-based blog site I recommend this easy WP affiliate plugin. There are others, but this one is really affordable, and works well. If your web site is not running on WordPress try this affiliate software.