The first thing you do, of course, is decide on a niche. Then you buy the domain, get the website set up, write a lot of content, create or purchase a small infoproduct to give people a reason to sign up for your list, get traffic and subscribers and establish yourself as an authority in the niche.
Once you start seeing that people like your content and your traffic has increased you start creating your own infoproducts. These can be ebooks, reports, videos, podcasts, ecourses, etc.
Over time you need to have a free report that you give people to capture their email address. These are people who agree to receive communication from you. But it doesn’t stop there; you need to create more products. You want products with different price ranges that have varying degrees of information inside. Maybe a free report, a $10 report, a $17 report and add more expensive products as you build up your list and your website.
This requires a lot of content. Where do you come up with all that content? You can write it yourself, and many people do. After awhile, however, you need other ways of getting more content. That’s when you start to outsource. You can outsource product creation, blog posts, articles for article directories. All the content you need can be written by someone else.
Tip: The big marketing gurus do this all the time.
But where do you find this content? You can hire ghostwriters, which can be expensive. You can check out places like Elance and other freelance writer for hire sites and pay for single articles or bundles of articles.
The most cost effective way to get the content you need is to purchase PLR content. PLR is simply private label rights. These articles come in bundles on the same topic. They are sold to numerous buyers, but the majority of people who purchase them forget about them or never get around to using it.
What about duplicate content?
The key to PLR is to write your own introduction and then change certain words or phrases throughout the material so it sounds like you wrote it.
It’s much easier and faster to do this than it is to write an article from scratch.
PLR has had a bad reputation because a lot of junk has been circulating over the past several years that is atrocious, to say the least. But you can find quality PLR articles if you do a little research.
I run a PLR site and sell quality content. Yes, that’s a little self promotion there. The point is, you can hire me to write one article for you and it will cost you at least double what you can pay for a pack of articles that you can put your name on and call it your own.
Tip: The big marketing gurus do this all the time. I know, I’ve already said that, it bears repeating. They don’t always tell you these things. They lead you to believe they do all of their own writing. This is simply not true. They may have before they started making money, but many of them invested in written material to get their information products created.
The key to information marketing is to have several products. It’s rare that a person keeps making a good income from one product. Unless it’s a top notch product that goes viral, you need several different products that cover different areas of your niche.
This is where a marketing funnel comes in. It’s basically an “imaginary” funnel you get subscribers into and use an upsell until they purchase your most expensive product. If your lower priced products are good, they will continue to buy more expensive products from you.
Many people will sign up for your free offer and never do anything else. Others will keep buying from you because they are truly interested in what you’re selling. You need to have more products for those who are seeking more (in-depth) information and will pay for it. These people become life-long customers because they trust you and gain value from your products.
The simple definition to information marketing is to build a list by giving away free stuff, promote your higher paid products to your list and keep adding value so your buyers continue to follow you and make purchases from you.
If you’re very knowledgeable in a particular area or niche and can continue to come up with information that people are hungry for, this is a very good business model for you.
