I’ve recently been talking to a local businessman who is interested in transforming his existing business into a ‘internet marketing’ business. He has developed some great experience in retail circles over his career and he wants to ‘productise’ his knowledge and sell it via the web.
He asked me for my thoughts on how he might achieve this and I provided him with the following 7 step plan to make money selling his information products online:
1) FIND A NICHE – Find a market niche with minimal online competition – a niche that you can dominate in the ‘real’ world and online (ie. the search engines); see Chan and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy and Seth Godin’s Purple Cow for great advice on this.
2) PRODUCE BRILLIANT PRODUCTS – Create a suite of brilliant products – the best products are electronic products (eg. white papers, PDF e-books, audio books, online video) that can be fulfilled automatically without human intervention (ie. you make money while you sleep). They should be custom-designed and intellectually-substantial (ie. the information cannot be found easily elsewhere). They should be the sort of products that people tell their professional colleagues about and share with others (viral effect).
3) GET AN OPTIMISED WEBSITE SALES PLATFORM – Create a professionally-designed, content-rich, search engine-optimised website platform through which to sell the products. The website should be used to carry complementary (and complimentary) content (eg. blog posts) and a hub for ‘pushing’ content out via various channels – email subscriptions, RSS, Twitter, LinkedIn. Wordpress is a highly customisable and user-friendly platform that can be used for this purpose.
4) GIVE AWAY CONTENT FOR FREE – Produce free extracts/pared-down versions of your product suite and make them available for download from the website. Encourage people to redistribute the free versions to their colleagues. Capture the contact details and email addresses of those people who download the free versions – these details should be fed into an email marketing campaign. Obviously, free versions should not provide the ‘crux’ of the content – the free versions are designed to be a teaser that prompts the reader to purchase the full version. The free versions must contain clear pathways for obtaining the ‘full’ version.
5) KEEP PRODUCING COMPLEMENTARY CONTENT – For credibility and search engine ‘link bait’, it is necessary to produce regular free content (blog posts, articles, tweets, forms, ‘how-to’ guides, top tens, step-by-steps, hints and tips, comment on trends) that complement and ‘point’ to the saleable products.
6) GET INBOUND LINKS – Comment on other peoples’ blog posts, discussion forums; obtain links from other credible, complementary websites; get links from major directories, search engines; send out web media releases; get linked from industry associations and other credible bodies; get links from government and educational institution websites. This is a very important part of a search engine optimisation campaign as Google and others give great credence to inbound links.
7) KEEP DOING OFFLINE WORK – Maintain the rage ‘offline’ – do public speaking, media commentary, attend conferences, networking, etc.; establish yourself as an expert in the field – not just a salesperson who is looking to make a quick buck; use these fora to promote your online business; all collateral should point prospective customers to your online presence.
