Why information marketing?
Hello,
To start this week I need to apologize for the gap between the last issue and this one. Quite surprisingly for me I managed to contract a dose of flu that knocked me off my feet for about a week.
I say quite surprisingly because I don’t normally get colds or flu. I try to keep myself very positive in everything that I do, see myself as healthy and tend to stay healthy. This time something obviously went wrong.
Since the last issue Neil Shearing has launched his latest product ’10 Day Cash Secret’ and since I’m into niche marketing myself I’ve decided to evaluate it. I’ll let you know how I get on in a future issue.
It’s amazing how something like a dose of flu can really screw up your week. Now that I’m back on my feet again I’m running around to get back to where I wanted to be in the first place.
It also brings home how important our health is and how we need to look after it. I think it’s very important to take as much regular exercise as possible and to get away whenever possible to re-charge our batteries.
Although I walk for 30 minutes to an hour each day I’ve not taken a real holiday for getting on for a year so maybe my body is telling me it’s time to book some time off.
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Thought for the Day
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”.
In my view there are 2 key elements that decide whether you achieve your objectives or not. One of them is Focus and the other is Action
I’ve proved to myself in my business that had I focused on one thing at a time rather than trying to work on many projects at the same time I would have made much quicker progress and achieved a lot more.
It’s too easy to think that this extra little activity won’t have any real impact on whatever else I’m doing. I can run this alongside my main goal without much effort. This is the sort of thinking that winners don’t entertain.
The only way to achieve what you want and more is to work on one thing through to its conclusion, get it running on autopilot so that it takes little effort to keep it going and only then move on to something else.
Focus is the one area that more and more people are falling down on these days because of the growing amount of opportunities coming our way on a daily basis. Many of these opportunities are capable of making us a fortune, if we just stick to any one of them and see it through to a conclusion.
Having decided which opportunity is for you then it’s time to take action. It’s time to do whatever you have to do to make it a success or decide that it isn’t for you and move on. But only move on when you have got it to the point of running on autopilot or you’ve proved that it doesn’t have the potential to produce the results you expected or were promised.
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Why Information Marketing?
Well there are a number of reasons but the key reason is it provides the potential for residual income. If you think about it the plan that we are all sold when we are at school, the one where you get good grades at college or University, get a good job and work at it until retirement, is all based on exchanging time for money.
You give the boss some of your time (usually a lot of your time!) and he or she gives you some money in exchange for it. If you are unable to continue giving your time for whatever reason, they stop giving you their money.
Even if you see through that plan and decide to work for yourself, if you are in any type of service business you only get paid when you provide the service. Let’s suppose you run a carpet cleaning business you get paid when you clean a carpet, just once. You clean the carpet, get paid end of story. Until there is another carpet to clean you get no money.
The same thing applies to all service businesses. It doesn’t matter whether you are a web designer, accountant or even a coach/mentor. You tend to exchange time for money, either directly by the hour or by the price of the job which still equates to so much time when you analyze it.
The problem with this type of earnings model is that there are only so many hours in the day to exchange. Once you’ve exchanged all of the hours you can your earnings potential is capped.
With the information business you can create a piece of work once and sell it over and over again. You are not restricted by the time/money trap. With the Internet it gets even better because you are able to supply your information digitally and do not even have to be around to supply it yourself.
If you create the information products yourself you also eliminate any competition. You decide who can sell it and who can’t. If anyone copies your work you are protected by law and can sue them. You also have the option to create your own affiliate program and build an army of affiliates selling your product. This is the real key to the information business.
You can start with little or no up-front capital and if you are struggling to get started with your own product you can start by selling someone else’s product for a commission and don’t even need to have any of the products in your possession.
You can sell digital products through Clickbank or physical products through Kunaki.com or Commission Junction (cj.com).
Creating your own product
The key to creating your own product is in identifying a hungry market first. The biggest mistake that people make in all areas of business is to start with the product first. Having created the product they then have to try and sell it to someone, someone who may not actually want what you have.
All product creation starts with research. You need to brainstorm ideas, markets, to find one that is desperate for a solution to their problems. Once you find a good sized market of buyers that are rabid for a solution that they are prepared to pay for you have the basis of a successful product.
Research ideas
The first step in the product creation process is to research ideas. What hobbies do you or your friends and family have? Are you an expert on a particular subject?
If you are an expert at something that has an active buying community you could do very well with it. Having a good level of knowledge on a subject will make it easier for you to write articles, press releases and content on the subject.
This will put you light years ahead of the competition if they know a lot less than you do. You can find niche ideas everywhere you look. What magazines sell well, what topics have popular newsgroups? Do a Google search for subject forum or subject discussion group.
I find it useful to carry a small shopping notebook with me at all times and jot down ideas as they come to mind. You will always say you are going to remember that one when you get home but you don’t, at least I don’t and I’m not on my own.
Develop a habit of being on the lookout wherever you are. Ideas can come to mind all of the time. Once you get into the habit of doing this you will see niche ideas everywhere.
Spend some time browsing around Clickbank.com/marketplace to find products in every niche you can think of. When looking at products in Clickbank the gravity score is what’s important. This tells you haow influential their product is in the overall market.
Another good place to look is eBay. eBay is the biggest online marketplace. Look at the top selling products on there. This could give you an idea for a product for you to sell on a niche site. The places to look are ‘Popular Now’ and eBay Pulse (pulse.ebay.com).
Yet another place to look is PayPal shops. If you look at https://www.paypal.com/shops PayPal will show you how popular the businesses are in each category and they will also let you know how many PayPal transactions the company has. While the company will almost certainly accept other methods of payment this will give you an idea of how popular the product line is.
Look for classified ads in places like Exchange and Mart. Ads that run week after week are paying and indicate a profitable niche. I think you get the idea by now. Look everywhere for potential niches. At this stage you are just making a list of possible niches. Make your list as long as possible initially and keep it growing for the future.
Next time I’ll cover the next stage of our research, identifying the potential of our niches.
I cover the whole process of creating niche income in my book “The Easy Internet Start-up Guide”. Find out more at http://www.getstartedonlinenow.com
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Your Mental Muscle Workout
What’s holding you back?
Maybe you are just getting started online or maybe you’ve been online for some time. If you aren’t where you want to be with your life, your business or your income then chances are that something somewhere is holding you back.
I used to think that I had a pretty good handle on goal setting, where I wanted to go and that I would get there but couldn’t understand why some people get there faster than others and why so many people never get there at all.
I think one of the difficulties is that we often read a book or listen to an audio recording on a topic, say goal setting, and we will read or listen to it once and think we have understood the topic. However, what usually happens is that as we work our way through our mind picks up on some trigger somewhere and off we go on a tangent into thoughts of our own.
Then after a while we return, meanwhile the recording has continued or your eyes have continued to scan the lines, and we have missed the content of quite a section of the piece. We follow along with the content again for a while and then off we go again on another trip.
It’s for this reason that I feel it’s important to work through something that we want to learn everything we can from more than once, preferably many more times. Whenever I’ve done this I have always gained so much more the second, third, fourth time and more than that in many cases.
I’ve found in my own case that it is very difficult to look objectively at my own behaviour and identify if I am falling foul of some of the situations that I’m reading about. I tend to think that once I’ve read about it I am then aware of it from then on and will make the necessary adjustments in my life.
Fortunately I keep reading and analysing and have been able to identify that all is not what it often seems to be. I’ll give you an example.
I read many years ago about our self-image, the fact that we have many mini self-images about every area of our life that combine to form an overall self-image. One of these mini self-images is concerned with the level of income we see ourselves as earning.
As with all of our concepts about ourselves, we build up our concept about our earnings bracket from our parents, people we grow up with, the economic climate during our formative years etc.
Eventually we arrive at an income level that we feel comfortable with and most people rarely move far away from this figure. I mentioned last time that it is known that many commission sales people who reach their earnings concept figure before the end of year go completely off the boil until the start of the next year.
This situation is a lot more common, I believe, than we think. We attract into our lives the people and circumstances that harmonise with our dominant thoughts and this applies to our earnings level, our level of debt and every other aspect of our financial life (along with the rest of our life in general).
I’m more convinced than ever, the more I study this subject, that we can attract whatever level of income we desire simply by raising our ceiling, visualizing a new level of income and through the power of attraction based on our dominant thoughts bring that level of income into our reality.
The problem is that when we first try to do this our old self-image tries to knock us back, saying that this isn’t really you and you should get back to where you belong. It takes some persistence at first but the more you do it, the better you become.
Take a close look at what your self-images are. Where do you really see yourself on the earnings scale? Do you honestly see yourself earning two or three times what you are now or does it need some work
Until next time….
Trevor
