The Death Of Infromation ProductsIt’s a good question.

There are multiple ways to make money through the internet: Physical Amazon products, software, displaying ads on your site, eBay, local business marketing and live events are just some of them.

But the advice given to most newcomers is to promote information products.

The virtues of this guidance are clear:

  • Billions have been generated from the sale of eBooks, video courses, membership sites and audio products
  • Information products are cheap to produce and cost nothing to sell so the profit margins can be huge

However, we need to ask ourselves why would ANYONE buy a how to eBook on, say, keeping bees when there is so much information freely available nowadays?

Logically, it doesn’t make sense at all. Surely, information products MUST be dying a slow death?!

Well firstly, let’s take a look at this chart:

Are Information Products Dying?

Source: Statista

Now obviously these are in part future forecasts to 2015, include all sorts of eBooks (E.g., novels not just “how to” style products) and are just for the US market.

But it does give a very strong trend so what the *%^$£” is going on?!

The Explanation

In a nutshell, buyers of information products want an easy solution to a specific problem that they have.

They don’t want general information about a topic from the likes of Wikipedia.

Next, there is the issue of trust. If I want to learn bee-keeping I want to get advice from an expert that I know, like and trust not be searching around the web piecing together unattributed snippets of advice from websites that I have never visited before.

Trouble is, paying directly for someone’s time can be very expensive so if I can access this information indirectly through an information product, I will buy it provided it’s presented in an appealing way (this, of course, is where the MARKETING comes in which is what we talk about here on this blog :-))

So if you want to enter the bee-keeping market then an excellent idea is to go and interview some existing bee keepers. I’ve generated thousands online from doing exactly this, in areas which I am not an expert in.

It’s also why Dummies hire experts to write their books. They just make money from the marketing.

Finally, in today’s world we are all increasingly time poor. How many times recently have you thought, “I haven’t got time for that?” Even if you are retired!

So people pay not just for the information but for the packaging of that information. They invest in the convenience so they don’t have to do the research themselves.

This is why the market for information products remains alive and kicking and is set to grow.

After all, as Gordon Gekko said in the classic 1980’s film Wall Street:

“The most valuable commodity I know of is information.”

Do you think info products are dying? I’d really appreciate it if you spread the word with the buttons below if you enjoyed this post and leave a comment with your thoughts too… Cheers, Rob. 🙂