| FEATURE GUEST
ARTICLE
What are the Two Easiest and
Hottest Products Online?
by Corey Rudl,
President, Marketingtips.com
It is easy to summarize these 2 products, although there is a lot of
diversity to each:
Information products
Software products
They both are easy to sell on the net as your customer is "pre-qualified" (we
will talk about this later) and they both have high mark-up so it does not take a lot of
sales to pay for any advertising cost or overhead… which means it is easier to turn a
profit (a large profit!).
Let's talk about Information products first. We will talk mostly about information
products in this section as they are the easiest to develop. Where with software usually
means you have to "joint venture" or become a reseller for a programmer/software
company as most people do not have the required programming skills to make software
themselves.
It is in your best interest to market information products like books, manuals, special
reports, audio videotapes and software. They are the easiest things to sell and generate
quick profits. They have obscene markup potential and are easy to deliver (it can even be
done electronically via email so there is no product or fulfillment cost).
For example, Car Secrets Revealed costs me a whopping $1.55 per book from the printer and
I sell it for $27.00. What other product can you get this kind of profit margin with?
Software and audio/video information is similar. A CD-ROM or floppy disk costs less than a
$1.00 to produce, but you can sell the software for hundreds of dollars. Audio and
videotapes sell for up to $50 and can cost less than $3.00 to produce.
Customers are not paying for "value" of the material in the book/videotape (or
whatever), they are paying for the value of the information you provide.
Information products are also very easy to produce when compared with virtually anything
else, and there are essentially no regulations that apply to them. If you were to produce
a weight loss pill you would need to go through the drug administration, safety and
labeling regulations. If you were to produce an electrical product, you would need to get
it approved by the Standards Associations before you could release it to the market.
However, if you were to sell a product such as a weight loss manual or a book on how to
build your own radio receiver, you wouldn't have to do anything but write and print it.
You are protected under the first amendment of the Constitution.
The last reason why an information product is the hottest item to sell is because our
society is so "information hungry". This is especially true on the Internet
where the entire medium is based on the concept of "information", hence the term
"The Information Super Highway". It is easy to charge larger sums of money for
knowledge that will make life easier or more comfortable. It can be as simple as how to
make your garden flourish or as complex as how to make a fortune in the stock market. What
makes the Internet perfect for this is that the people who use it are "information
junkies", and they are usually searching the net for information... a perfect client
for you!
You will also find that when you produce an information product, you will start to receive
offers to write articles for magazines, be invited to interviews (TV and radio), to speak
at different functions, etc. You will be quickly regarded as an "expert" in the
field if your information is valuable and accurate.
Note: I commonly write for automotive magazines because of the name I have made from my
book. Magazines pay upwards of $400/page for this kind of editorial. If you just write a
three page article every couple of months, it is an easy extra $10,000 in income per year.
And better yet, I just take a couple of pages out of my book and alter them into article
format. It takes me less than 30 minutes to make a three page article and I get $1200 from
each magazine that runs it.
Now if you are saying "I don't know how to write" or "I don't want to write
a book, manual, or information product". No problems, later I will talk about how to
get a hot information product and get other people to write it for you for free.
Pick a market that can afford what you are selling. Many people come up with a great
product, but they market to a clientele that cannot afford what they are selling. Take a
moment and think about it. Don't make this mistake. Not only do they have to be able to
afford it, but they must have a passion for the subject (a hobby or interest they love),
or a problem that they badly need solved. And, of course, they need to have a credit card.
I recommend that your first product be a book or manual about 100 pages in length. This is
very easy to produce, and publishing a book can be done very inexpensively. You can
publish special reports or booklets in small quantities like 10 or more. And, if you are
going to publish a book like you would see in a bookstore, it can be done for under
$3,000. A book can cost you as little as $1.00 a copy to produce if you invest wisely.
If you produce an information product:
Offer it as a WORD or TXT document on diskette, or "downloadable" over the net.
You can protect these documents using software that will only allow the document to be run
on one computer so that people cannot distribute the information (or steal the information
and re-sell it under their own name). You now have no cost to the product so the selling
price is all profit and the fulfillment procedure is fully automated. We talked about how
to automate this in the September issue of the newsletter. I have many friends that make
in excess of $150,000 selling electronically deliverable information products online.
Offer it in print format. You can have this done at any local copy shop, or if you plan to
sell a lot of copies, have it printed and bound professionally at a printer.
Don't try to produce an audiotape, videotape or CD-ROM until you have experience in print
media.
When you are creating an information product, the name of the book/special report is a
critical key to your success. Let me use Ted Nicholas as an example. He wrote a book
called The Entrepreneur's Manual. It sold only twelve copies. The author renamed the book
Why SOB's Succeed in Business and Nice Guys Fail and marketed it again. It sold a whopping
600,000 copies. The title was a lot more interesting and controversial... making for great
press releases and topics for news and TV, and his sales skyrocketed. With this new title
he could market it in an entirely different way and get lots of free press.
On that note, I should mention that some of the most successful books have never made it
to the bestsellers list. These lists only reflect how many books were sold in bookstores.
Car Secrets Revealed (the car book I wrote in 1994 for those that have not heard of it)
has been among the top ten automotive bestsellers in the United States for over 2 years
now, but it has never appeared on a bestseller list. This is because the lists are
compiled from information supplied by a few major bookstores. All the copies of Car
Secrets Revealed were sold online or through the mail, so the retailers don't even know
about it, but did you know that 50% of all books are sold through the mail? That means
that half of all the books sold in this country aren't even considered when compiling
bestseller lists!
Many people assume that 90% of the work you will have to do is in the production of the
product, but this is far from the truth. You will spend about 10% of your time creating
the product and 90% promoting and selling it.
Tip: Widen the scope of your book or manual. The title should not be "How I Got Rich
Selling Real Estate in Orange County", but " How to Make a Fortune Through Real
Estate with Little or No Capital Investment".
Test your titles - they are key to your success. Place classified ads in magazines (or
online) targeted to what you are selling testing new titles to see which one pulls the
best (use the title in your classified ad headline). This is critical. For example, for
Car Secrets we tried an ad that read:
Car buying, repairing and maintenance tips - call for free information on how to save
thousands when buying a new car. (604) 730-2833
We also tried an ad that read:
Car Secrets Revealed - learn the secrets of how to save thousands when buying a new car.
Call (604) 730-2833 for free details.
Or you could say:
New book completed by professional car salesman - "How to buy a car $50 under dealer
cost". For free information, call (604) 730-2833.
These are different examples we used to test titles. Make sure when you test titles that
you use the exact same ad design and are just replacing the title of the book. You need a
base-line to work from to see which truly pulls better.
You probably have not published your book yet, so you want to offer something to get them
to buy once you have completed your printing. You might say, "As a pre-publication
offer, I would be happy to autograph your copy of my book and give you a $5.00 discount
from the advertised retail price. It will be off the press in 60 days. Would you like to
order it now?"
If you need a informational product, there are four ways of creating a great informational
product literally overnight. They are super creative and will blow you away. But I will
not reveal them here… it is something I reveal in my course "The Insider Secrets
to Marketing Your Business on the Internet".
Go to http://www.marketingtips.com/tipsltr.html for more information on how to pick up a
copy of the course for yourself.
The four techniques reveal exactly how to pick a hot-selling topic and have one of the
hottest selling information product in less than 4 weeks. Two of those techniques will
allow you to come up with your own informational product literally overnight! Which means
that if you don't have a current product, you could be up and rolling by next week with
your own hot informational product that has incredible profit margin.
But you say, "I can't write a book!". Well, I have good news! You don't have to!
In the course I will show you how you can get others to write it for you for free. You
don't even have to invest any money to develop informational products.
In the course, I also reveal three ideas for informational products that I have wanted to
develop and market, but have not been able to start due to my overloaded work schedule.
These ideas will give you a good place to start.
Software is also a hot product to sell online. There are a couple of reasons for this.
First is that everyone online has a computer so you have pre-qualified them (their
computer runs on software). All you have to do now is find a niche market that needs a
problem solved and find a software product that solves that problem.
There are hundreds of examples of this, but let me use an example that happened to me
directly.
In my business I noticed that there was a need for a program that would automate Internet
business without having to get all CGI, Pearl, and Visual Basis scripts custom made by a
programmer. I did know of a programmer that was skilled enough to develop what I wanted.
And on that note, I was concerned that if I had to build this software from the ground up,
I could be looking at $50,000 in development costs (software development is not cheap!)
I needed a software package to:
- Automatically check your email for you daily.
- Automatically subscribed and un-subscribed people to your newsletter.
- Send out any autoresponders from ads you have run.
- Automatically put any orders that come in into a database format.
- Send our your personalized bulk email to your past clients, to follow up with them (and
get backend sales).
- Allow us to post to multiple newsgroups without getting canceled by the
"cancel-bots".
- And much more… I don't want to waste space by listing all of it!
The most important thing is that I wanted it to run off our home PC (not the ISP's server)
so I had full control of the information (just like most home/small businesses want).
I went on a search for a product and found one after a few days. It was called Mailloop,
but it was priced quite high at $699 (not something that most people with a small or home
based business could afford). It didn't have everything I felt was necessary so I got a
hold of the programmer and after a little convincing, he was willing to accept my input
and ideas. With my recommendations he re-did a few portions of the program and added some
features I thought were fantastic (and extremely valuable to small/home business owners
that wanted to automate their Internet business).
Also with a good stroke of luck and a little convincing, they also reduced the price to
under $400, which was about the same price as what you could get other "bulk"
email programs, which were on the market at that time (like Net Contact, Extractor Pro,
etc). The advantage was that Mailloop "blew all of these products out of the
water". These other programs were just bulk email programs, and Mailloop could do
everything they could, but also included so many other features that helped people
automated their entire Internet business - all for the same price! For example, it
included a full automated scheduler, newsletter server, unlimited autoresponders,
newsgroup poster... and the list just goes on. In other words, Mailloop now really had
value! Lots of value!
To make a very long story short, I entered into a joint venture where I would become a
reseller for them. I didn't want to be too pushy and ask for exclusive distribution rights
(and I was not sure if I would be able to sell enough copies to justify it).
Now, you may already know my opinion of Mailloop. I absolutely love it and think that
anyone that is doing business online has to have a copy… not only will it will save
them thousands of dollars in time, but it will also make them tens of thousands of dollars
(heck, we use it everyday and it is solely responsible for making us over $75,000 a year
alone).
That is one of the keys to the success of Mailloop - I did not sell Mailloop to make a
profit, I sold Mailloop because I used the product and I truly believed that there was
nothing out there that even compared to it. I just truly "loved the product".
That enthusiasm came out in all my salesletters and webpages about Mailloop… which
translated into a large volume of sales. Check out what Mailloop does and what I have to
say about it by going to http://www.marketingtips.com/mailloop.html.
Important Note: You can't just sell a product or service because it makes you money. You
have to truly believe in it. If you don't, chances are that the lack of enthusiasm with
show in your salesletters and webpages (and you will fail). I would never sell anything to
my client base that I didn't personally use and that I wouldn't stand behind and defend
100%. There are lots of reasons for that attitude, but let me just say that this attitude
will make you very wealthy over time.
By the way, how do you think you got the notification of this newsletter with it addressed
to your first name (Mailloop did it all with the push of a button!).
Well, within 3 months after we started to sell Mailloop, we were selling more in copies
one month than the programmer had sold all year!
With these numbers, we decided to buy the company out. So after 2 months of negotiations
(back in early 1998), we now have the world-wide exclusive distribution rights to
Mailloop. In other words, any copy of Mailloop that is sold anywhere in the world or
through any reseller has to go through our office.
I am telling you this story to make a point. I had a niche market with a problem to solve.
I joint ventured with a software company to fill this need… and the results were so
impressive that I just did not make a very good profit from it, it was so profitable that
I bought out the company!
Now, you don't have to go to this extent (of buying the company out) to joint venture with
a software company. It can be a simple as finding a piece of software on the net that is
absolutely fantastic and offer to market it for them for a percentage of the profits (in
other words, becoming a reseller for them). For example, you could search the net for
software that you think is great but demonstrates poor marketing. There is a great deal of
brilliant software on the net, but the owners often lack marketing know-how.
We talk about this quite extensively in the course (http://www.marketingtips.com/mailloop.html)
and how to get exclusive distribution rights to the software without spending any money or
having the owner of the software risk anything (a complete win-win situation!). In the
course, I even give you copies of the exact Joint Venture Contract we use to protect
ourselves when we do joint ventures (to make sure we are not liable for their mistakes and
that we are guaranteed payment). Just photocopy them as use them for your own joint
ventures.
Or the other angle is to find a need in a niche market and then find a piece of software
that you truly believe in that will solve that problem… and then as long as you have
a good salesletter, good sales process, and good promotion, you are guaranteed success.
See how easy that was with a little bit of creativity?
Click HERE for more TIPS and our Home Study Course
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Corey Rudl gets
over 6 million visitors to his websites yearly, does US$ 5.2 million dollars in sales
online each year (yes, that is US$5,200,000), and personally makes hundreds of thousands
of dollars from his online businesses... all from his one small office. So listen to what
he has to say as he knows what he is talking about when it comes to starting and promoting
a business on the Internet. He reveals all his unconventional tips, trick and techniques
with examples so you can learn most efficient and fastest way to make money on the
Internet. Go to Corey's Web Site now.
Also check out more
about Corey, the IMC, and his recent seminar in Malaysia!
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