One thing I love about Internet marketing is that there is always
a buzz. There are always new ideas, novel strategies and
interesting new twists to make you think.

Stuff that works today, might not work tomorrow, but the next day
there will be something even better to test.

At least, it used to be like that.

I don’t know if my finger has slipped off the pulse, or if the
pool of creativity is running dry, but for the last few months I
haven’t really come across anything that I could class as a new
idea.

Every new product launch I’ve seen has been a rehash of existing
ideas, with very little that is new and inspiring inside it.

There have been some well written and nicely thought out
strategies, but hardly any have been based on really new
thinking.

Does this mean that Internet marketing has at last grown up?

In some ways it is a good thing. Information overload has long
been a problem and new stuff hitting the streets every day hasn’t
helped ease the confusion. But if I’m right, it is also a pity.
Creativity is the lifeblood of this business.

Without it, we’ll all stagnate.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you’ll email me to tell me that I’ve
simply failed to notice some startling new ideas. Actually, I
hope you do – in this case, I’d love to be proved wrong!

So what is the next must-do strategy? Where are the next untapped
traffic sources? Who is the next ‘uber-guru’?

Or, heaven forfend, have we got to stop chasing rainbows and
start actually using the stuff we’ve already bought?

Now that would be a novel concept.

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Part 30: Five Marketing Questions for Info Product Success

It is often said that the only people who make real money online
are those who create their own products. I don’t happen to
believe that this is necessarily true, but we’ll let that ride
for a moment.

If we do accept that creating your own info products is the way
to riches, why then, are there so many people who have gone to
all the huge effort to make products but still struggle to make
any sales?

The answer is the order in which you do your work.

Years ago there was a successful offline book published (long
before the Internet) called ‘Is There a Book Inside You?’ that
taught the process of turning your own pre-existing passions and
knowledge into a real-life book.

The very idea of ‘writing a book’ seems to be a dream for many
people. We naturally hold authors in high regard, and have a
strange feeling that writing a book puts a person on a different
level.

The book is the end result. Seeing your name on the cover is the
real objective – the concept of actually selling it comes a
distant second.

The vanity publishing industry has grown up to service this
desire to be a published author.

Getting back to the order of work, the old way starts with what
is inside of you – what you know about (or can research), what
you are passionate about and what you will feel proud to put your
name to.

After that comes the process of writing and in third place (if at
all) comes the vague notion of selling it to other people.

For many people that last step is ignored completely – especially
the vanity publishers. To them, having a single copy of their
book on their bookshelf is the end in itself. Selling it to other
people is actually a bit embarrassing!

If all you want is a book on your shelf to make you feel
important in your own eyes and that of your family, fine. This
order of work is no problem. But if sales are on your agenda, if
your real objective is to eventually make money from your work,
then you must order your work completely differently.

The secret is in the word that describes what we are: marketers.

A ‘marketer’ is defined as: One that sells goods or services in
or to a market.

Note that the definition is in two parts:

a. One who sells goods or services
b. In or to a market.

You can’t have one without the other. If you are ‘a’, you must
have ‘b’ – otherwise you are not a marketer, you are a dreamer.

You can write the best book in the world on your chosen subject -
the one that everyone says you have to be passionate about – but
if that subject doesn’t have a pre-existing market, you will be
an author, but not a marketer.

So if you want to be an information product producer who actually
makes sales – and fulfils that promise that info product
producers make the real money online – you must first and
foremost find a market.

And you do that by answering what I call the ‘Five Marketing
Questions’:

1. Are there people out there who want to know what you know?

2. Are there lots of them?

3. Are they hungry for your information or just casually
interested?

4. Will what you have to say satisfy one of the basic human needs
that drive us all: money, health, love, security, self-esteem,
entertainment?

5. Are they already proven to be prepared to spend money on
information products?

These five marketing questions are not optional. To write a
successful information product, it has to tick all those boxes.

The fewer the ticks, the less successful the product will be. It
is as simple as that.

Many, many books (and nowadays ebooks) tick none of the boxes at
all. The author has just gone ahead and written something that he
or she is passionate about in the vague hope that someone will
share that view. But it doesn’t work that way and those many,
many authors end up bitterly complaining that Internet marketing
doesn’t work. All they have to show for their often considerable
efforts is a deep regret over the time they have wasted.

I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t write about things
you are passionate about – only that you need to explore your
subject to find an angle that will make it hypnotically appealing
to as many people as possible.

Before you commit yourself to the hard, and often frustrating
task of writing a book, first ask yourself if there are plenty of
people who might be interested in buying – and why. Ask the five
questions and only start work when you can satisfactorily answer
them all.

Let’s look at a simple example.

If, for instance, your passion is the history of the Roman Empire
in England and you yearn to write a book about your beloved
subject what should you do? Assuming you are not a well-known
academic, it is unlikely that you’ll readily find a paper and ink
publisher, so self-publishing is your only option.

Does your subject tick any of the five marketing questions?

Well, no. Probably none.

But wait a minute – how can you repurpose your subject to satisfy
both your longing to share your knowledge, and stand a better
chance of finding a market and making sales?

How about ‘A Tourist’s Guide to the 25 Most Exciting Ancient
Roman Sites in Southern England’?

Now we have a real possibility. There are lots of tourists and
they are proven to buy guidebooks by the thousand. A good sales
letter can make it appeal to the desire for self-esteem and
entertainment, there is a long history (pardon the pun) of
successful guides to historic sites and tourists are generally
well motivated (hungry) to buy the latest stuff around.

Boxes ticked. And as bonuses, note that the notional title
specifies ‘Southern England’ – leaving the option there for a
sequel or upsell on ‘Northern England’. And how about the next 25
sites? I smell a series!

Rather than seeing the subject as a dry historian, we are now
looking at it like a marketer.

So in summary, selling your own information products is a great
way to make money online (not the only way, but a good one
nonetheless). But it is only a good way if your focus from the
outset is on selling, rather than writing.

My five marketing questions will help you assess your ideas and I
suggest that you vigorously filter all your ideas through them.
Work on your ideas until you have five ticks: anything less and
you’ll be selling yourself short.

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I don’t write many reviews here in the Internet Marketing Kickstart Course, but every once in a while something really special comes along that I feel needs to be brought to a wider audience. This product is one of the rare ones…

Info Product Killer

For the last few days I’ve been completely distracted from my normal Internet marketing routine. Something happened that has made me set almost everything else aside to concentrate on something new.

The real reason for my current state of distraction is a new Internet marketing product I’ve been reviewing called Info Product Killer. It has got me more fired up than almost anything I can remember for a very long time.

As you probably know, I review a lot of products and recommend a few of them in Kickstart. Some I put into action and generally do well as a result. But on Wednesday morning I got hold of this new product called Info Product Killer – a series of pdf files and videos that teaches the exact process the creator used to make over $100,000 last Christmas, and a lot more than that so far in 2008.

What is this thing that has got me so excited?

What’s nice is that it is Internet marketing, but not to the usual Internet marketing crowd. It is about how to sell real products to real people through real vendors. and make a very healthy profit in the process.

The system that Craig, the originator of the Info Product Killer concept, has developed is a very streamlined and efficient mini site idea. Mini sites are nothing new. Phil Wiley wrote about them seven years ago and several people have brought out new versions of the concept over the years.

What Craig has done is to boil the whole thing down into a very effective system that capitalizes on proven on-page SEO techniques.

The number of people buying stuff online is growing all the time – in fact, the current credit crunch may even accelerate the growth as more people look online for bargains.

Craig’s Info Product Killer shows how to build sites that the search engines love to send free traffic to – traffic that is really targeted, and highly likely to convert into sales. And every times a sale results, you get money in the bank.

I don’t say this lightly, but I am really excited about the idea.

So much so that I’ve already bought a bunch of domains (.info ones that only cost a dollar each) and have built my first Info Product Killer website.

Would you like to see it? It isn’t completely finished, but as near as makes no difference. You can take a look at Baby Born With Magic Potty

Don’t laugh at the subject matter – that is one of this years hottest toys!

The site looks pretty good I think and it was based almost entirely on the template that is supplied.

You will need a bit of HTML knowledge to make a fast start with the IPK system, but quite honestly, even if you don’t have that yet, you’ll soon pick it up.

There is nothing that a newbie couldn’t tackle – there are a huge number of videos in the members area of IPK to help beginners get going quickly, and Craig is awesome at customer service (that’s a word I don’t use very often).

The basic principle of Info Product Killer

I’m not giving a away a secret to tell you that the idea behind Info Product Killer is to tap into the millions of people who are searching online to buy specific products – from my Baby Born With Magic Potty site you can see that I’m concentrating on toys this Christmas, but there are any number of other categories that could just as easily be used – gadgets, book, video games are just a few possibilities.

You build a series of websites, according to the precise details that Info Product Killer provides, to attract a share of those hungry and eager searchers. IPK’s secret is the way you are taught to use on-page SEO to make your sites very attractive to the search engines so they naturally send you plenty of free traffic.

That free traffic is then monetized by sending them on to big merchant sites, like Amazon, who pay you a commission on each sale.

Info Product Killer works all year round – at Christmas the earning potential is concentrated into a smaller timeframe, but people are eager to buy bargains at any time of year – and your IPK sites make those bargains easy to find for them.

A fast process

My first site took me about six hours to build. Now I’ve got the idea, the next one I do will take a lot less. I reckon that I should be able to put whole sites together in under two hours each.

I just got off the phone from Craig, and he tells me that he can create entire sites and have them up and earning in under an hour now – and I quite believe him.

The secret to success with this strategy is to keep building more and more sites, and so getting them up quickly and efficiently is paramount.

The current sales focus of Info Product Killer is on making a killing for this Christmas. Now is exactly the right time to get started – if you can get your IPK sites up by the middle of November you should be well placed to make a good return by Christmas.

But if you want to move a little slower, no problem. IPK is actually based on two strategies – one for Christmas and one for the rest of the year. The year round method is, I’m told, even more effective at raking in commissions!

Did I say how excited I am about this? I can’t remember a product that has made me drop almost everything else to put it into action before. It really is that powerful.

Special Kickstart Offer

The sales page (there are some videos to watch there that are worth taking the time to view) is at http://www.urlnex.us/ipk

As I said earlier, I’ve just got off the phone from a very long conversation with Craig – what a nice man he turned out to be – and he has kindly given me a very special coupon code for Kickstart readers to use to get a huge discount.

When prompted, type MAV777 into the appropriate box and you’ll get IPK at a fraction of what it is really worth.

A final note…

Craig is based in the UK. His earnings for last Christmas – $100,000+ in a few weeks – were entirely from UK traffic. His sites were not aimed at the American market at all. If he could make those sorts of earnings from the relatively small UK visitor numbers, imagine what the much bigger US market would produce!

The IPK concepts are 100% international. They will work almost anywhere. He stuck to the UK last Christmas because, quite frankly, he didn’t need to expand his operation.

The US is wide open for this and those who jump on it fast will make a killing.

No matter where in the world you are, IPK will work for you.

http://www.urlnex.us/ipk

But don’t delay because the time to act is now.

Update: Questions and Answers about Info Product Killer (first published in Kickstart Daily Ezine)

Hi,

This is an extra message that is aimed mainly at the many
Kickstart readers who have recently bought the excellent Info
Product Killer strategy.

If you have no interest in this specifically, or in Internet
marketing in general, please ignore this email.

A huge number of Kickstart readers have bought Info Product
Killer over the last few days. It is probably the biggest selling
product that I’ve ever promoted – and rightly so.

You may be one of those who have invested in it – or you may be
still considering it. If so, this email is aimed at you.

I’m really not sending this to try to sell any more copies – this
is to try to answer some of the many questions and comments that
I’ve received up to now. On the principle that if one person
bothers to ask, there are another ten who are wondering the same
thing, I think it will be a useful exercise.

Okay, here goes.

1. Can you use IPK with WordPress?

I see absolutely no reason why not, but equally, as the template
provided is about as optimised as you need it to be, I also see
no particular reason why you’d want to use WordPress.

All my sites are being made with the template (or rather a close
approximation of it; see a later question) and I’ve had no reason
to want to use WordPress.

2. Can you use XSitePro?

I actually think that using XSitePro would be a very good idea. I
don’t think the IPK template can be easily imported into XSitePro
(although I haven’t tried) but creating a site from scratch that
followed the template’s look and feel would be quite simple.

XSitePro would make building these sites very fast, I believe,
and should save you time. It would also handle all uploading to
your hosting account stuff, so would be ideal for people who are
less experienced with FTP.

3. I’m in Australia/Canada/India/[wherever you live] – can I
still use IPK?

The IPK sales page and videos talk a lot about America, and
Craig, IPK’s creator uses his UK sites as examples, so you could
easily think that Info Product Killer is only suitable for those
places.

Nothing could be further from the truth. you an use the IPK
methods from anywhere. All you need is an affiliate account with
Amazon – and that can be the Amazon of your country, or of any
other country.

For example, I am in the UK and my current Amazon account is a UK
one – so all the sites I’m building right now are UK sites. if I
were to open an affiliate account with Amazon US I could build
American sites.

Where you are doesn’t matter – it is where your Amazon account is
that determines where you’ll make money from.

As a matter of fact, opening an Amazon.com account (US) is high
on my priorities because then I’ll be able to target a much
bigger audience.

4. Your example site doesn’t look exactly like the IPK examples.
Are you using the template ‘out of the box’ or have you adapted
it?

Hands up, I’ve made a few small changes. Nothing of any
particular note though. My programmer brain just wanted to make a
few bits of it easier for me to use.

In any case, a few minor changes are probably a good thing if you
know your way around a bit of dead simple HTML. Otherwise, using
the supplied template is perfectly okay and will lead you to less
confusion.

5. This all seems like an awful lot of work. Is it really worth
it?

It is a lot of work. Whoever said that Internet marketing is easy
should be taken outside and severely beaten with a birch twig (or
is that just me?)

Each site you build is likely to take you 90 to 180 minutes when
you get the hang of it, and you will probably need about 15 sites
to get the needed link juice flowing.

As to whether it will make money or not, time will tell. The
figures that Craig shows are very compelling – and having spoken
to him on the phone several times now, I have no reason to doubt
them. If anything, he is making more than his sales page
suggests.

It is early days for me. Only one of the seven sites I’ve built
so far has been indexed and it hasn’t floated very high in the
search engines yet. It is getting a small amount of search engine
traffic though, so the structure of the site seems to work.

From my years of experience of Internet marketing, I can say that
the methods are totally practical and look to me to be logical
and consistent.

I have high hopes, but it’ll be another week or two before I’ll
know for sure.

6. Isn’t it too late for Christmas now?

Not really. The Christmas season is certainly upon us already,
but online sales don’t really explode until mid November. If you
can work your socks off and get your network of sites up in the
next week to 10 days, there is every reason to suppose that
you’ll get a good chunk of the Christmas traffic this year.

And there is always next year!

As a matter of fact, the Christmas strategy is only half of the
IPK product. The other part is all about using a very similar
method, but with a couple of extra twists, to make money from hot
products all year round.

If rushing to get your Christmas sites up is too much work in too
short a time for you, and I respect that time is a finite
commodity for many people, then concentrate on the year-round
strategy, which can be taken at a slower pace.

7. Christmas is all about toys, so aren’t there going to be
thousands of people building IPK networks to compete for the same
niche traffic?

To start with, only a small percentage of the people who buy IPK
now will put the effort in for this Christmas. But even if they
do, the sensible ones will look for other niches that are also
popular at Christmas. It isn’t all about toys.

Here are a few suggestions for non toy networks that should do
very well at Christmas – and all year round:

* Playstation and games
* XBox and games
* WII and games
* Cell phones
* TVs
* Home Cinema
* Digital cameras
* Apple stuff
* SatNav
* Audio Equipment

That’s off the top of my mind and already is far more than one
person could cope with. The opportunities are almost unlimited.

Just think beyond the box that is Christmas.

8. Who is the product creator? You call him Craig, but he signed
himself Aaron on the Warrior Forum.

I asked Craig about this on the phone and he laughed. Apparently
he has been called Aaron for years as a kind of nickname. (He
used to live in a country where they could pronounce Aaron, but
Craig gave them difficulties!) Anyway, on forums he has stuck
with the screen name Aaron.

Nothing suspicious – a lot of people (probably a lot more than
you’d think) use pen names online. In any case, he isn’t hiding
behind anything and is one of the most approachable guys you
could ever hope to deal with.

9. Isn’t this too hard for newbies?

Absolutely not. There are a few steps along the way that will
make you ponder, and some that might actually make you think, but
there is nothing really complex at all.

Any time a part of the strategy has caused anyone any confusion,
Craig has simply created a new video in the member’s area to
clarify things. Pretty much everything that you could ask is
covered now – but if you still have questions or confusions (we
all get confused over this Internet marketing lark sometimes)
just send in a support request and I’m sure you’ll be sorted out
in no time.

10. How much is all this going to cost me?

You will need to buy up to 15 domain names and hosting for them.
That COULD mount up to a pretty penny (about $10 per .com domain
per year) but you can save a lot of money by buying .info
domains, which are currently being sold by GoDaddy for $0.99
each.

See next question.

11. Your example site is on a .info domain. Isn’t that bad for
ranking on the search engines?

In my experience, .info domains are just as likely to get indexed
as .com ones. it is what is on your site that is important. I’m
very comfortable buying .info domains and have done so for all my
IPK sites so far.

12. Now that so many people have bought Info Product Killer,
isn’t it getting hard to find decent domain names?

That fear crossed my mind too, but in practice it doesn’t seem to
be a problem.

I bought 17 great domains for each of the best-selling toys this
Christmas and had absolutely no problem finding ones that I was
very happy with.

13. Getting indexed in the search engines takes weeks, how can
this strategy work in time for Christmas?

Google is really fast at indexing when it wants to be. The trick
is to ‘seed’ your site by linking to it from another site that
already has plenty of bot visits.

My www.babybornmagicpotty.info site had a link to it in Kickstart
- which was then placed on my archive. That archive gets several
bot visits a day and the new site was indexed in Google within an
hour or two of it going live.

Once it is first visited, if you have some unique content for the
spiders to see, they’ll keep right on coming back. According to
my stats, in the few days it has been up, the Google Bot has
visited 25 times, Alexa 20 times and Yahoo 11 times.

If you can beg, borrow or steal a link to your first site to get
it started, you’ll soon have a feeding frenzy.

Just concentrate on the content. The search engines won’t like
you is they find rubbish on your site, so give them something to
chew on.

13. Have you made any money yet?

I thought you’d never ask!

With only one of my network sites indexed and the directory ‘hub’
site still under construction, I didn’t expect any sales at all
for a while. But according to Amazon I have already made one sale
(albeit a very small one that has generated only a couple of
Pounds in commission)!

But it has begun!

I think that covers everything I’ve been asked so far, but if you
have any other questions, please let me know and I’ll do my best
to help.

You can view the Info Product Killer sales page and videos at
http://www.urlnex.us/ipk/

Best wishes,

Martin

Update: My directory site is up and running now: Hot Toys for Christmas 2008

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