Producing Information Products is a Great Way to Earn Money Online

Clearly, the wave of the future is com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion in a usable way to sat­isfy needs.  What I dis­cover in my nav­i­gat­ing my way on the Inter­net is that the infor­ma­tion I need is “out there” some­where, but where to find it?  And even if I find it, is the infor­ma­tion in a form/format that I can use “quickly and easily”?

Usu­ally, I have to piece together sev­eral bits of infor­ma­tion spread out across mul­ti­ple web sites.  Google’s strength is help­ing you get a quick answer to ques­tion that can be answered in a short amount of time, like “Where is Lake Ontario?” or “Hold old is George W. Bush?”

Google is also good at point­ing you in the right direc­tion to web sites per­tain­ing to what you are search­ing for.  The prob­lem is: once you get to these sites in Google search results, its hard to get the con­text of the answer you are search­ing for because often the site does not directly answer your ques­tion.  Or the site does not fully answer your ques­tion in detail.

This is where infor­ma­tion prod­ucts can fit in nicely.  I think a lot of peo­ple are look­ing for spe­cial reports and e-books that sum­ma­rize a sub­ject in a com­pre­hen­sive, orga­nized way and they are will­ing to pay a lit­tle or a lot for it depend­ing on how avail­able the infor­ma­tion is elsewhere.

Even if the infor­ma­tion is avail­able else­where, if you present the infor­ma­tion in an orga­nized way you will be able to charge for it.  The nice thing about infor­ma­tion prod­ucts is that it is easy to make a profit on them since it costs lit­tle to pro­duce and sell them.

The cost of writ­ing and pro­duc­ing an infor­ma­tion prod­uct is prac­ti­cally free, espe­cially if you own a mod­ern PC or Mac.  MS Word is capa­ble of export­ing to a PDF file — the most com­mon for­mat of an e-book.  Both mod­ern PCs and Macs are capa­ble “out of the box” of pro­duc­ing video and audio content.

Dis­trib­ut­ing and sell­ing your infor­ma­tion prod­ucts is also sur­pris­ingly inex­pen­sive; espe­cially given the ser­vices the dis­trib­u­tors pro­vide.  These ser­vice may include:

• Secure File Stor­age of your infor­ma­tion products
• Auto­mated File Delivery
• Dig­i­tal Auc­tions on eBay, Yahoo!,and Amazon
• Prod­uct Import via Spreadsheet
• Detailed Track­ing and Sales Statistics
• Google AdWords Con­ver­sion Tracking
• Affil­i­ate Builder Sys­tem (Affil­i­ate System)
• Pay­Pal Micro­pay­ment Support
• Google Check­out pay­ment system

Here is a price com­par­i­son of dis­trib­ut­ing and sell­ing e-books via three lead­ing providers:

Payloadz.com — their fee is 0.1% to 5% of your sales per month, depend­ing on how much you sell.  The more you sell, the less of a per­cent­age it is.

Clickbank.com — one time setup fee of $49.95 plus 7.5% of each sale.  Addi­tional fees are incurred for set­ting up an affil­i­ate pro­gram to sell your infor­ma­tion product.

e-Junkie.com — their fee is not based on trans­ac­tion, but on how much stor­age your product(s) use.   It works out to be cheaper than the above two, espe­cially if you have many infor­ma­tion prod­ucts to sell.

So, you can see the infra­struc­ture for sell­ing your infor­ma­tion prod­uct is avail­able and not cost pro­hib­i­tive.  You do not have much to lose by try­ing out your infor­ma­tion prod­uct since upfront and monthly costs are minimal.

I rec­om­mend check­ing out these books for more infor­ma­tion about cre­at­ing e-books for profit:

• Your Portable Empire: How to Make Money Any­where While Doing What You Love
• How to Write and Pub­lish Your Own eBook in as Lit­tle as 7 Days