Information marketing has become somewhat of a buzzy term in recent years. And, if you spend any time investigating ways to earn money online, you’ve probably come across the equally buzzworthy term infopreneur.
But, what, exactly is information marketing and how do you become an infopreneur?
Good question!
Simply put, information marketing is creating and selling information products. When you do this for a living, you get to call yourself an infopreneur. Infopreneurs make money by packaging their knowledge into products they can sell.
Some of the most common infopreneur products include:
- Ebooks
- Workbooks
- Ecourses
What’s great about selling information products is you can do the work once and make sales over and over again, often on autopilot (hooray for passive income!). This lets you create more products which will help increase your income — because the more you have for sale the more opportunity you have to earn.
And, it’s really a great time to be an infopreneur.
Consider this, in the United States alone, ebook sales go well into the billions each year — by 2018, it’s expected to be a nearly 9 billion industry according to Statistia.
Even if you get a teeny, tiny sliver of that gigantic pie, you’d make a good living just writing and selling ebooks. And, thanks to self-publishing platforms like Kindle Direct Publishing and services that let you sell on your own site like Shopify, Woocommerce, or Gumroad, you can easily get your digital products up for sale and in front of a worldwide audience.
But, before we get into all of that, let’s talk more about becoming an infopreneur and why it’s a great way to make money online.
The most successful infopreneurs often follow a simple formula: They analyze what they know and use that knowledge to solve a problem within a targeted niche.
What Do You Know?
I’m going to bet you have a good bit of knowledge about a lot of different things. And all of this information you possess has the potential to turn into an information product.
If at this point you’re starting to feel self-doubt creep in — that’s okay. In fact, it’s perfectly normal. Many would-be infopreneurs give up before they actually get going because they falsely believe they have to be an expert to be successful or hold some kind of credentials to be taken seriously.
Let me reassure you, this just isn’t the case.
Most infopreneurs have real world experience. That is, they’ve been there, done that and now they’re showing others how they can do it, too.
What really matters is how you will take what you know or have accomplished and use it to solve a problem within a niche.
Finding a Niche
Here at Work from Home Happiness, you’ll notice a recurring theme in many blog posts and articles — the power of picking a niche. Whether you want to become a writer, proofreader, virtual assistant or, in this case, an infopreneur, my number one piece of advice is this:
Pick. A. Niche.
Information Marketing:Pick a Specific Audience
The power of a niche is undeniable. For one, it gives you direction. When you know what it is you’re tackling, it’s that much easier to get started and follow through.
Second, a niche allows you to easily find out where your customers are. And when you know who your customers are and where they hang out, you can effectively market to them which translates to more sales. Cha-ching.
And, last but certainly not least, picking a niche will cement you as an expert in your particular field, even if you’re not one (yet). Before you know it, people organically gravitate to you when they need help solving a niche-related problem.
Ideally, your niche is something you have experience in. This allows you to write naturally and knowledgeably about the subject and deliver solid, actionable advice that gives your audience a lot of value. Your audience will reward you with positive reviews and this will naturally generate buzz around your information products.
But, your niche should also be profitable. One way to easily determine if a niche is profitable is to make sure there’s a common problem or pain-point people within this niche experience. If so, you know you’ve got a solid idea because you can take your experience and use it to help people in your niche solve this problem.
Always remember, when it comes to information marketing, people will buy things if it will help them solve their problem. Period.
The best thing you can do as an infopreneur is identify a common problem and create an information product that solves it.
Identifying Problemsthat You Can Solve
Pretend you had poor credit that was preventing you from getting a mortgage. So, you did a whole bunch of research to learn how you could raise your credit score, remove errors from your credit report, and improve your rating so you could qualify for a home loan. And in a year’s time, were able to raise your score over 100 points to qualify for a home loan.
You think, hmm, since I have the real world experience, I’d like my niche tobe personal finance. But, what problems are people experiencing in this niche?
- Do they want to know how to save money?
- Are they interested in credit-improving techniques?
- Is eliminating credit card debt important to them?
These are all valid questions and possible pain points. But, if you want to be a successful infopreneur, you need to know that your product will address a real problem before you start creating it. If it’s not a common problem or pain-point within your niche, nobody will buy what you’re selling. And, to put it frankly, it sucks to create something only to find nobody is interested in buying it (been there, done that).
So, now it’s time to research your projected niche to figure out what people are struggling with so you can use your knowledge to help them solve that problem!
Where do most people head online when they need to solve a problem? Google, right? They navigate over to Google, type in their problem or question and browse through the search results.
So, it’s definitely a good idea to use Google to your advantage to see whether or not you’ve got the potential to earn money in your niche.
Now, remember, picking a niche is one thing, but picking a narrow niche is another. You couldn’t simply write an ebook, create a course or workbook about personal finance.
Why not?
Because it’s just too broad. It’d be impossible to cover every aspect of personal finance to please all audiences. And, if you tried, you’d probably abandon the project early on after you realized what a massive undertaking it really is.
So, while your general niche may be personal finance — we need to narrow it down more, a lot more. Google can help with that too.
Keyword Planner Tool
I love freebies, especially helpful freebies. And the Google Keyword Planner Tool is one of the most useful free resources when you’re looking for a profitable niche.
If you don’t already have one, you need to create a Google account to access the Keyword Planner. Navigate over to adwords.google.com to get started.
Your page should look something like this:
See the big button that says, “Create Your First Campaign?” Don’t click it. If you do, you’ll be stuck in a sequence that will eventually require you to put in your credit card information. Instead, head on over to the Tools link where you’ll be able to access the Keyword Planner tool.
To make it easier to understand, I’ve created a 12-minute quickstart tutorial on how you might want to use the Keyword Planner Tool to help you nail down a niche. (This is my first screencast ever, so please be nice 😉 Give it a watch if you’re not familiar with Keyword Planner. If you are, no problem, skip on over to the next section to learn about other places to help you check whether or not you’ve got a profitable niche on your hands.
Is This a Potentially Profitable Audience?
In the video above, we learned that people want to check their credit scores for free, learn how to fix bad credit, and understand their options to secure a home loan when they have bad credit.
So, is this a profitable niche? Should our pretend information product cover these topics?
Here’s three questions we need to ask first:
- Did we discover a pain-point or a problem within our niche?
- Are people looking for solutions to these problems?
- Can we use our existing knowledge to offer a solution to this problem?
Yes. Yes. And yes. Of course, this is a made up example to illustrate how to go through the process of nailing down a niche — but these are the steps you should take to help you create a narrow and profitable audience, one that has a problem you can easily solve with your knowledge.
Further Validation
If you wanted to validate this idea even further, I suggest visiting places where people actively discuss problems related to your niche. Reading real user questions, comments and answers can give you another level of understanding than the Keyword Planner Tool can provide.
Some great places to check include:
- Quora
- Niche Forums
- Niche blogs
- Facebook Groups
All of these online sites have tons of user-generated content. Looking through this information can take time, but it’s well worth it. It will help you validate your profitable niche idea and likely give you topics to cover in your information product that you hadn’t yet considered.
Another place I like to check is Amazon. Let’s say you decided to write an ebook about repairing your credit. Head on over to Amazon and type credit repair in the search box. If you find plenty of titles listed and see that people are actually buying these books, that’s a good sign!
The fact that other people are having success selling info products in this niche means you can find success, too.
We can see that not only are people creating and successfully selling ebooks in the credit repair niche, but that it’s such a popular subject that it has its own dedicated category in the Kindle Store.
Don’t Neglect Your Research
I’m not gonna sugarcoat it, taking the leap into information marketing requires a lot of work. But, when done right, the return on investment can be huge! After all, there aren’t a whole lot of chances to create something that only requires a time investment upfront but can lead to financial independence down the line. That’s why it’s important to do your research and know you’ve landed on a profitable niche before you put any time into creating a product.
The point of this post is to get you to put your information marketing hat on and start coming up with potentially profitable niches that you can turn into actual products. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) create your first information product overnight, but you should start laying the groundwork — today! I know getting started is the hardest part, but picking and validating your niche should help you confidently go into the creation process knowing you’ve got a great idea.
And, remember, don’t get caught up in shiny object syndrome! Earning real money online requires real work. Commit to information marketing and you can make something out of it. We’ve all been guilty of starting something with great enthusiasm only to abandon it midway before moving on to the next project that will ultimately get abandoned, too.
picking a profitable niche can take a lot of work, but it’s worth it! When done right, you can set yourself up for success and end up with an information product that sells.
Remember:
- Pick something you’re knowledgeable about
- Identify a pain point or problem the audience faces
- Figure out how you can solve that problem
- Validate whether or not people are actually searching for it (Google, Quora, Reddit and forums are your friends!)
As always, if you need any help, I hope you ask. You can leave questions in the comments or reach me directly: ashlee@workfromhomehappiness.com
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