Create Passive Income Stream By Selling Your Own Info Product
Written by ady on February 13, 2009 – 5:11 am -The logical step after trying your hand at affiliate marketing is to create your own info product and the easiest way to do that is to write an ebook. What I like about selling your own info product is that it really is a ’set and forget’ passive income where as affiliate programs change, get dropped, close down or sometimes you just get kicked out of the program for cookie stuffing or some other black hat marketing method 
For whatever reason, you could end up with a page getting plenty of traffic but no product to sell. You can always find another related affiliate product of course but that means re-writing your reviews etc. and besides, that’s fine when you know its happened but not so good when say, you don’t know the affiliate program is no longer being run but you are still sending them your traffic and all for free.
All in all the benefits of selling your own info product are pretty obvious to anyone serious about creating a passive income online which is why you should be constantly on the look out for a niche with shit products. That’s how I find my targets anyway. I’ll be trying to find a decent affiliate program for a niche I am entering with a pack of PLRPro articles and find that the top 3 sales pages at Clickbank all look like they were done by some young kid who’s used more fonts than a ransom note!
I’ll dig deeper and check that the traffic is there and more importantly, that buying customers are in the niche and there really is potential for a passive income stream and if it pans out I’ll do the research and write an ebook. This takes 2 or 3 days from start to finish including research. A 25 page report will sell for $19.70 but a 50 page ebook will sell for up to $47 (but as low as $37 depending on the subject).
I then send $80 via PayPal to my favorite graphic designer, a very talented guy called Semmy (www.myminisitegraphic.com). I tell him the title of my new ebook, my catchy tag line and who my target audience is and within 12 hours Semmy works his magic and sends me a draught which I have yet to ask him to change.
For my $80 I get a killer mini site, several ebook covers such as hard back, soft back, stood up, laid down etc. A square banner and a standard sized banner for promoting, a buy it now button and everything else I need to have a very professional looking site up.
Next bit is the most important if its to work as a passive income - The sales copy. This is where most fall down when they are trying to sell their own info product. It’s easy to think that because YOU know it’s a really good product that answers the exact questions being asked in this niche that others are bound to understand this is just what they need. They won’t of course unless you sell it to them with great sales copy.
Also, passive income stream means doing as little as possible for your money so you need to get across in your sales copy EXACTLY what they are buying. That is the problem which your ebook resolves. Otherwise you are going to be spending your time answering emails and that’s not what you are trying to achieve.
I’ll spend at least 3 and sometimes 4 days writing the sales copy when I’m creating my own mini site. I’ll take a look at winners in other more competitive markets via Clickbank and incorporate their copy layout into mine. I’ll write it and then sleep on it before rewriting it several times again through the day and then sleep on it again.
After a final day of tweaking I’ll get the missus to proof read it twice before publishing it (just one spelling error can lose you a sale).
Once it’s up I’ll start to build backlinks to it nice and slow. Crappy social bookmarks to get the ball rolling with 3 or 4 good links through the first week and I’ll also throw up a Squidoo lens ready to use for promotion.
While the link building is under way and I’m waiting for it to kick in I’ll create my 10 page report to give away for sign ups and also write 10 emails and load up the autoresponder.
Next its back to Clickbank. Remember those 3 shit products in the niche I’m about to own? I check what they are paying affiliates so I can better it and then I search for sites promoting those ebooks and contact them to introduce my new superior info product and to explain why mine is a far better ebook to promote.
Once they visit my site and see Semmy’s professional graphics and my better commission rate, I have myself an affiliate team.
The very first passive income I set up was an ebook I wrote that’s been on the UK market for over 5 years now. It still averages 3 or 4 sales a week which makes me just over $100. Not much until you work out that’s an extra 5K a year and a total so far of at least 25K (its actually much more than that as it sold really well for the first year of launch).
Not bad for 50 to 80 hours initial work and a few hours a year maintenance, updating etc.
I have several of these passive income streams set up and running. Selling your own info product is something you should always have at the back of your mind whilst doing your niche research whether you are investigating it as a possible affiliate market or just for Adsense, keep an eye out for a potential gap that needs to be filled or a problem that needsto be solved.
Tags: passive income, passive income stream, selling ebooks, write an ebook
Posted in Internet Marketing Tips |
