Info Product Ideas & Internet Marketing Advice

Okay so here is another info product idea for you today. And I just came up with this by reading the wired magazine.

They talk about how in these days online psychics are in high demand, probably because of the financial crisis and the state of the economy.

Usually one of the most commonly asked questions that people are looking for answers for from online psychics is whether their spouses cheating, but these days it’s about job security and money matters. They also ask whether they will lose their house.

And think about how much money people spend on these online psychics. The phone consultation is usually $2-$3 a minute.

But what’s really funny to me, is that online psychics charge anywhere from 100 to 1000 US dollars per hour. And even though people are concerned about their financial safety, they are willing to spend that kind of money on online psychics.

Obviously you should believe in that stuff if you want to create a product for this market. I don’t, so I’m not a good candidate to create an ebook, or an audio course that targets that market.

Anything about psychic tarot can be a really profitable info product.

For example, you could write a book like “Confessions Of A Medium Clairvoyant”, or “How You Can Become A Real Psychic In Just Three Weeks”.

Or you could create a membership site like “Train Your Psychic Abilities”, and every month you share new techniques and methods how people can improve their intuition and stuff like that.

“Numerology Reading For Beginners”, or something about astrology can also be a gold mine.

Now you can tell that I don’t know anything about this market. And never consulted with a psychic, and quite frankly, I don’t plan on ever doing so. But even with that limited knowledge and experience I could come up with a lot of information product ideas that I’m pretty confident could make you a lot of money if you’re knowledgeable about this, or you just hire someone who is knowledgeable about this and get it done for you.

You see, every time when people get afraid they are looking for something that can give them the feeling of security. Something to hold onto. They worry in the mind, and carry around all these fearful questions. That is why they turn to superstition. They really want to hear good news they can believe in.

Photography is a huge market. There are so many people were passionate about taking pictures. Many of the best sellers on Amazon are about digital photography. And let’s face it - Digital photography is basically replacing the old way of taking pictures.

There are people who love traveling around and taking pictures. And you can create a guide for them that shows them the best spots in certain areas. For example you can create the Southern California Outdoor Photography Guide. There you not just tell them what places to visit and take pictures, but you get them the exact spots and the best times.

If there are certain happenings that are taking place but make for great pictures tell them about that too. Maybe there’s a certain kind of animal that you can only see in the early morning hours right at the foot of the mountain. All the flowers that only have this incredibly beautiful look when they open up early in the morning. Maybe there is a certain kind of festival or gathering every Saturday at 6 p.m. where people get together, dressed up with crazy clothes, paint their faces and dance around a bonfire.

This is a pretty easy to create info product about your own neighborhood. Who really just have too take a notepad and brainstorm. Write down all the ideas that you have places that could make for great pictures. And don’t limit yourself here. Don’t just think of beautiful landscapes with romantic sunsets. Think of stuff that is a little odd too. Photographers love to be the people that discovered something that they can show their friends or display on their website. Something that other people look at and say: oh wow that is so cool!

You should price that product pretty low in my opinion. Just make it an e-book for below $20. Once you have their name and e-mail address you can still survey them and ask them what else are they interested in. Whatever they answer, this is going to be your next info product.

In fact anything that can show them how to make money with their photography they will want to eat it out of your hand. Because they love doing photography. And they are very serious about it. They read books about how to do it, different techniques and methods and what lenses are best for what kind of light. If you can show them how they can actually make money from that activity, instead of just spending money on their hobby that’s like you’re opening the gates of heaven to them.

There’s actually a lot of people who make money from stock photography. They just take good pictures and put them up on the stock photo sites, and every time somebody wants to use the picture they have to pay a license fee. Write a guide about that and sell it. Make it an audiobook, or even better make it a video course and put it on DVDs and at some printed reports and you have a home study course that you can sell for $197. You can just do screen recordings that leads them through the stock photo sites and shows them tricks that help to get more visitors and buyers for their stock photography. You can show them how to sign up and how to create a website so that they actually build their own business from that. You can really use your creativity here. There are a lot of possibilities once you have a list of people were passionate about photography.

Hope you enjoy this, hope you learn something and if you have comments or questions just write a comment below.

Today’s infoproduct idea is about one of my favourite topics… FOOD!

Now, you might say: “Oh, gosh, yet ANOTHER cookbook?”

Well, that’s where you gotta be creative and do a little market research. But healthy, light cooking is in high demand. If you want to create a good product for this gigantic market, you have to understand their desires and wants. For example: being able to eat delicious food while staying (or becoming) skinny.

Now, there are ways to prepare food so that it’s healthy, and there are ways to prepare the same food in a way that it becomes a burden on your body.

And you can create an information product about that basic idea.

Tell them: it doesn’t matter WHAT you want to eat, but what matters is HOW you prepare what eat. You can eat (almost) anything, if you prepare it the right way.

(Noticed I slid in that little almost? Well, it’s true. Frankly, I think there is no way I would believe that eating ice-cream is healthy. But, if it says “almost anything”, that’s fine. I believe that. But I’m disgressing a bit into sneaky copywriting tactics here… BEING HONEST! Being honest is one of the best ways to build trust, which enhances the likelyhood of your prospects to make a buying decision a lot. But being honest also means you have to provide a quality product.)

There are a lot of different cooking methods - specially if you look at other cultures than our own. If you can assemble these cooking methods into one book, and give detailed descriptions of what the benefits of the different cooking methods are, for which ingredients they should be used, etc. That’s a pretty cool product.

And of course, you can always turn the whole thing into an audio book - or if you have the budget even a DVD set, where the different cooking methods are demonstrated.

Then you can market that product to people who are interested in cooking & health.

And on top of that, you could sell the resale rights to internet marketers who are active in that field. Or to website owners who run sites on cooking and health. If they have adsense on their website, you could place adsense ads there to send them over to your salespage. Or you could start an affiliate program and offer them a comission on every sale.

There are A LOT of possibilities on what to make out of that idea. And you really don’t have to be an expert to pull this off. All you have to do is make a decision: I want to do this. And then you do the research, collect the information and create a product from that. There’s more nitty-gritty work involved in getting this done, and if you have a specific question, just post it here in the comment section. But the point of this site is not to give you a complete a-z-blueprint, but to give you some tangible ideas on what you can create an information product about.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you are already aware that one of the best ways to create infoproducts is doing an interview.

But I get the same questions again and again: How do I find an expert to interview? How do I know which are the best questions to ask? How do I make this a really great interview?

Now in this post I just want to address the last question - how to make a great interview.

And I’m not even going to go into much detail here - instead, I’m gonna send you over to Sean D’Souza’s blog to check out “How to tell a Crappy Interview from a Great One” Part 1 and Part 2.

Now why would a graphic designers be interested in yoga?  And why yoga specially for graphic designers?  It’s really simple.  Graphic designers sit a lot in front the computer.  They look at the screen all day long, and work with a mouse all day long.

So they probably have a lot of tension in their neck, and maybe they also have problems with their wrist and index finger.

If you do a little bit of research, what precisely the problems all of these people are you can, with a unique solution that is custom tailored exactly to their needs.  Just find a good you’re a teacher who is willing to give you one or two hours of his time, and question him what would be good exercises for persons with these problems.  Record this interview.  After that edited a bit, spice it up a bit with some medical knowledge and anatomical and physiological data.  Talk to some graphic designers.  This way you will get a lot of material that you can use for your info product.

And then you can basically do the same thing for people who also work on the computer.  Webmasters, typists, transcriptionists, data entry people, programmers, accountants, etc. etc..

The reason why you want to make it specifically for a group like graphic designers, or transcriptionists, is because of marketing reasons.  If you offer a solution specifically custom tailored for them they are much more likely to take you up on that offer.

You’ll also be able to understand a lot better what their emotional hot buttons are, that you have to push in order to sell the product to them.  And it will be a lot easier to reach them, because you can do highly targeted advertisements for them.

And then it’s really up to you.  You can do yoga for hikers.  You’ll go for golfers.  You’ll go for truck drivers.

Of course you want to do you market research first.  Maybe you will find, that golfers are much more likely to buy a yoga course than a truck driver.

But once you’ve created that first “yoga for…” info product it will be pretty easy to create another version for another target audience.

This is a popular concept in direct-marketing that has worked excellently for the people in marketing.  They take the general course on marketing and custom tailored for specific groups, like hair salons, real estate agents, dentists, retail clothing stores, and so on…

You could start out with your yoga for graphic designers product and just make that a simple report. A PDF document, written text.

Then you could create an audio version of May be booked and offer it as an upsell.  As a back end product you could even offer a DVD with that you about techniques demonstrated by a professional yoga teacher.  Or you could create a membership site where they get some easy to do yoga techniques and other health advise, for example, better vision.  I guess that would be something pretty appealing to graphic designers.  Or weight-loss — everybody wants to be in shape these days, so probably graphic designers too.

But again you get the point.  You start out with this one highly specialized product, your marketing niche.  And then you can either go deeper, and offer a back end.  Or you serialize and move on to another market and just tailor your product to that market’s needs.

For more information product ideas just sign up for the free info product idea newsletter.  Many professional marketers read it regularly and use it as a source of inspiration to create new products.  And many have made lots of money from info product ideas.

I stole this from Eben Pagan’s talk at Frank Kerns Mass Control event in April 2008.

1. Is your prospect experiencing pain + urgency (or a strong desire)?
Your prospects needs to feel an irrational desire, a really strong emotion. Because otherwise they won’t feel like buying and you’d have to try to talk them into buying. You’ll need to be a master persuader just to get them to take action, and that’s just to hard to do and way to costly.

2. Is your prospect proactively searching solutions?
That’s why search engine optimization is so great - because the people are looking for a solution or information.

3. Does your prospect have few or no perceived options?
If your prospect feels like she has lots of possible other solutions, why should they buy from you? Then it’s just a question of price.

When you can came up with a product that fulfills on all these criteria - bingo. And there are opportunities like this in EVERY MARKET at EVERY TIME. Don’t think that it’s “too late to get in”.

Most people don’t know how to ask questions most of the time. I noticed this while attending a workshop on communication. There was a world-renowned expert, one of the best in his field, and he was doing a Q&A session with his audience. And the questions just sucked (90% of them).

A typical situation is this:

“I have a question. You see, my grand-father was a farmer who grew carrots, and he had this funny way of talking, I never figured out why that was, but… [bla bla bla] - That’s why I wonder, what can I do when a colleage doesn’t listen to me?”

Instead of just asking a question, they give it a whole prelude. Apparently so that the person being questioned “understands where the question is coming from”. But the thing is, you gotta be able to ask a question so that it can be understood.

That’s a big problem with many experts too.

They are really knowledgeable about their field of expertise, but they are not knowledgeable about what itches the people who need their expertise.

That’s why they talk about totally irrelevant stuff. Of course it’s not irrelevant to them, but it doesn’t matter to the person asking.

If you understand how to ask proper questions, you can get pure nuggets of gold from people who know their stuff. But if you don’t understand how to ask proper questions, it’s all fluff and fillers, and a waste of time.

In the field of neuro linguistic programming, there is the “Meta Model”. The Meta Model is basically a linguistic tool that helps you to ask questions to EXTRACT RELEVANT INFORMATION. Because that’s what questions are meant to do, most of the time.

(There are also other purposes of asking questions, but we’re not gonna go into that here.)

But most of the time, they don’t extract relevant information. They’re just an exchange of ramblings.

LifeHack just recently did a blog post on 80 How-To Sites Worth Bookmarking.

Explore them a bit and you will find that they are excellent ideas to create information products from.

Look at what kinds of how-tos are most popular - which ones get the most views, which ones generate the most buzz and comments, which ones are the most linked to?

Are there questions that are popping up for these videos? There are what I call goldmine-gaps. If you fill them, you might have created your own goldmine right then and there.

Check it out.

Mind Maps are really easy to create these days.

You just need a little piece of software, like MindJet MindManager, and whop - throw up a Mind Map.

Takes about 3 hours to really learn how to use it.

Then, about another 3 hours later you can have created your first really extensive mind map, with lots of details.

Great way to organize lots of information, assemble it in one place, put it all together in a way that makes sense.

It’s a piece of cake to make an information product from a mind map. Start out with turning it into a report or ebook.

If you want, then create an audio series from that.

And if you want to step it up a notch, make it video.

The great thing is, once you have it as Mind Map you already got all the information you need. And you even got the structure. Then it’s just sticking to it, doing it step by step.

Most people never get anything done because their too chaotic. And it doesn’t work for them to structure things sequentially in a textfile in the first step.

That’s where mindmaps are so great. Because they build the bridge between that information chaos and some kind of structure.

I know what I’m talking about, because I’m one of those people with a jumping mind.

And the only way to keep me at one task is an iron chain (well, I use discipline now, but it took me a while to get there).

If you’re like me: MIND MAP!

And then in fact INCLUDE the mind map in your product, because guess what… many of your clients are just like you! They like visual information. They like to get an overview like that. This ADDS value to your offer!