Sell Info Products Even If You're Not an Expert

Key Takeaways

[Applause] you can make a full-time income online selling information products and the good news for me is this strategy works even if you're not an expert in the topic so both of us love tennis in fact we've been playing tennis against each other since we were in high school but we're definitely not experts we're not tennis pros and so like many of you guys if you're starting a YouTube channel a podcast or a blog you like the idea of selling an info product where you say but I'm not an expert I can't do it well there are actually two great approaches to doing this the first approach is just take the perspective of a beginner teach what you know well we're not pros we both know how to play and we know a lot more than somebody who's just getting started so teach the beginner create a beginner course ebook whatever it is but just approach it from the perspective of teaching a beginner yeah that actually worked really well for me on my improve photography.com website back in 2009 I was not an expert in photography by any means in fact I'd only got a camera about eight months before but I wrote an e-book about photography now if I would have written expert tips and stuff yeah that wouldn't have worked at all but I'd learned a ton in that eight month period and so I just shared what I did know it was beginner information but I'd learned a lot in the last eight months so I shared what I had learned and so if we were to make a tennis course we wouldn't make a course on how to do advanced serve techniques we don't even know them but we could do a great course on a beginning tennis fundamentals but what if you wanted to do a course that was more advanced how would you approach that if you're not an expert I think a great way to do this is to hire somebody who is an expert I've done this again with improved photography with info products I'll go to a photographer a Photoshop expert or a lighting expert and I'll say hey can I pay you a thousand bucks and I'm just going to come to your office for a day and I'm gonna film you teaching me about this topic and then I'd like to sell it online and they say thousand bucks and you're just gonna fit whatever sure you know if they're not in the Internet in game and they're like oh cool an extra thousand bucks it's not their main business but for you that's awesome you paid a thousand bucks or whatever your deal was and now you have an info course that you could sell to thousands of people so even the advanced courses are not out of your reach even if you're not to that level yet always offer a flat fee for this type of service if a lot of people will try to offer like a cut that's not a good idea the way that you're making money is through the audience you generate you're the one that's actually putting in the real leg right here legwork here they're just giving you their expert advice and paying them a flat fee for that is totally fair one of my main concerns when I was starting making info products was just the production value it seems pretty intimidating to create a you know a video course because it's competing with you know when you're paying for a video people compare that to what they see on TV and so that can be pretty intimidating so you could of course hire somebody to do the video for you and outsource that but they're also much much easier ways I think to get started in info products without the production requirements of a video course exactly income school filmed our first course we filmed this on an iPhone and a webcam we never had complaints about production quality and it was a good course it was successful and then down the road once we had proven the concept and we knew we had a good course we were ready for a 2.0 and at that point sure it's worth putting in the effort and the cost yeah now our YouTube videos well even our YouTube videos but certainly our courses we have a fifteen thousand dollar set up to produce to to film get the audio and to edit those those videos but we didn't start that way and you know an e-book is something you just fire upward and you know I open up word and just start writing and then you could pay somebody on up work $200 and they'll totally format it and make it look awesome or you could create an audio course which i think is a major underserved info product idea yeah people listen to audio courses when they're doing other stuff it's like a podcast and except you get people to buy it from you yeah we created a $15.00 audio course actually about podcasting yeah that is actually done pretty well over time and it was easy to make right so if you have a you know a site about tennis and you're nervous about who can I can I make a do the production value for a video course well what if you just get a microphone and you record a three-hour course on double strategy or whatever it is that you've learned that could that could be awesome and then people are kind of browsing through your website and it's like yeah it's 15 bucks I can listen to this while I'm commuting to work for the next week that could be a great teaching tool that could really help people and it's easy to produce another question we get a lot is when can I start selling an information product and people want hard numbers and it's not necessarily cut and dry but some good numbers that you can go by our thirty thousand page views a month on your website if you're getting that kind of traffic to your website you probably have an audience that's big enough to sell an information product yeah and the reason that we say that that may seem high if you're just starting your website may seem unattainable but that can happen within a year you could be you could be to 30,000 page views we've certainly done it before so it's reachable but the reason we don't want you to do it at ten thousand or five thousand page views is let's say we get 10,000 people to come to our website and then they read whatever article they liked and in those articles we link to our sales page for an info product let's say we have an e-book well what percentage of the people who read that are actually going to go look at your sales page maybe one or two percent of those people are going to click to even look at the sales page then once you're on the sales page it really depends on your offer here but it's rare that we're gonna eclipse 10 percent just from cold traffic somebody's just reading a blog post to get them to suddenly bring out a credit card if you did 10% on that with no warm up is totally cold traffic you have a very high converting sales page more likely is 1 or 2 percent again so we're getting 2% and then 1 or 2% of the 1 or 2% this is a tiny percentage so you just need to shoot a lot of volume at this to make it work but that doesn't mean it's a losing proposition either when you have a website that has a million page views a month I mean if n you stuff those everywhere suddenly it adds up to a lot of sales from your website so it seems really hard but it can work you just need volume if you're going that approach and something to keep in mind the traffic on your website doesn't tend to be super engaged traffic for the most part which is why we also recommend if you're building a website where you plan to eventually have an information product that you try to shoot for more engagement that can mean just the content itself on your website being a little bit more personal and engaging using more you know images of yourself making it real personable helping people feel at home at that website and they'll remember it it also makes sense to have an email list right from the start if you're ever gonna sell an information product try to engage people that way have a really nice follow-up email drip campaign when people sign up just keep them engaged and then the other thing we really like is YouTube so if you can get some sort of subscriber base whether it's your email list YouTube and you can get at least 5,000 people on that list you can actually start to make a good full-time income from your information products those 5,000 people are way more engaged than the 30,000 who viewed your site yeah if I had a website about 10 or a youtube channel with 5,000 subscribers that like you know when I publish a video within a couple days I'm getting you know over a thousand views like this is a pretty engaged group I would feel like I could do a launch worth tens of thousands probably we've definitely done that with a small YouTube channel that did over a hundred thousand bucks on the launch but if I if we had just a website with that I would not feel comfortable doing that so it's just about how engage the audience is and that's where why we're a little bit nervous about saying how many you need to make a launch because it obviously depends on how much they like you how much they know you and how much they'll trust you to to give them a good information absolutely some of the numbers we've talked about could seem intimidating if you're just starting out if you have a brand new YouTube channel with no subscribers imagining 5,000 can seem intimidating but actually it's pretty attainable and it doesn't always have to take that long to get there I would say over the years I've probably earned three times more money maybe more from infoproducts than I have from affiliate marketing we talk about affiliate marketing a lot and it has been fantastic for us but I I think the reason we don't talk about info products more is because it seems intimidating right but really even with a pretty small subscriber base which you could build in six to eight months you can have a successful info product launch absolutely so I had an idea well actually it's my wife's idea but we always start with a website first get the traffic from articles and then we create info products so she has have you met page her friend anyway she has a friend and they they like to own makeup and exercise all that kind of stuff and so they started a YouTube channel and they are hilarious together they feel like they're not doing a good job because it's like it's not very like polished presentation kind of thing uh-huh but they're hilarious like they're just having a good time together and they're presenting interesting information so so Emily was gonna start a website and I thought you know what if you just do this different what if you go backwards on purpose and just start a YouTube channel right away where you can get followers way faster obviously with an in with an info product immediately so I thought we'll start a YouTube channel get your audience immediately and immediately start selling and then the obvious problem with this strategy is you don't own YouTube yeah you never know when they're gonna just shut you off sure our just stop showing your videos as much whatever and so what happens if after you have the audience then you start working to own it yeah you know you work on the website to convert more traffic from your website yeah organic make videos that push people over to the website for a resource get there email address stuff I don't know I've never tried it yeah but I'm kind of curious to see how it goes if he could work really well especially the short term he'd speed it up yeah it will definitely be sighs superfast the questions long-term but I think you could work to convert that audience to more than just YouTube over time yeah if I were relying on this forum like my full-time job I don't know if I'd want to experiment with this strategy but it couldn't be kind of cool we should make a tennis course like that