How To Find Your Online Niche - Part 2

In part 1 of this series of articles, we looked at researching potential profitable markets.

Part 2 - Can you Make An Information Product In This Niche To Sell?

First, why info products?

Here's a few reasons ;

Information Products can be delivered online - so no delivery costs. This means instant gratification for your customer - as soon as they've paid you, they can access the product - no need to wait a week for the postal system.

Information Products have just about the highest mark up value around. Imagine this; I offer to sell you a sheet of paper for $1,000 - I'm pretty sure I can guess your response. But what if that piece of paper has the winning roll-over jackpot numbers for next Saturday's lottery. Would you pay $1,000 for that? I'm sure you get the idea. Another reason that info products have a high mark up is that their true worth is hard to assess. You most likely wouldn't spend $20 on a china mug, but if you were a keen gardener you might spend $30 on a 70 page e-book telling you how to rid the lawn of weeds.....

Information products are versatile - no need to stop at e-books. If you sell an e-book and it flies, you could make a hard copy transcript, an MP3 recording and a CD version. A physical product has even higher perceived value - so for say a $29.97 e-book you might also have a $49.97 CD version. A CD plus hard copy transcript could sell for $97 - and these can all be done really cheaply now. There are transcription services all over the internet.

There's so much information on the internet you don't even need to be an expert in that field to turn out a valuable e-book that the right people will buy in their droves. So why would people pay to get information that can be had for free? The reason is that people are lazy - nowadays we get so many e-mails I wonder how many of us truly read them all. By getting this info together and selling it you are acting as a filter (there is a lot of dross out there as well as good stuff) plus you are providing a valuable service for your customers.

It's actually better if you don't create the product yourself, even if you are an expert - here's why. It will most likely take you a month minimum to create a full length e-book from scratch, fitting it around the 9-5, editing etc. But you can get it ghost written in say 2 weeks for not very much money. Check out Rent-a-Coder.com or E-lance.com for professional writers who will do this for you. Use that time to prepare your sales letter. I'll expand on this in a coming article.

So think in terms of e-books like "How to stop your Dog barking", "How to free your lawn of weeds", "How to cure your arthritis" and so on. Think in terms of providing solutions to problems. If you concentrate on this rather than "how much money can I make" you won't go far wrong. Get into the mindset of a problem solver, an information publisher and a project manager. If you have this mindset this business can become very hands off and very lucrative at the same time.
Next - how will you reach your market?

By Ged Mccabe