The latest updates on information selling and running an online infoproduct business

You need to write articles to boost your sales of information products. The more articles you write, the more your name will be spread around the Internet. And the more your name (and web site address) gets circulated, the more you will be seen as the expert in your field. If you are not writing articles at least once a week, you will not be promoting your infoproducts at anywhere near the rate of the leaders in your field. Experts are seen as experts because they have lots of articles published. The more you write, the better your perceived expertise. And that will translate into more sales. So get writing!

In the past few days I've been speaking to a couple of people who tell me that selling information is only suitable for a minority. Instead, they explain that they sell products or that they market a service. They claim they are not selling information. But I completely disagree; every business is in the information marketing business. Take, for instance, a supermarket that sells a whole range of foods and household products. If you were running that supermarket would you think you were in the information marketing business? Probably not. But you would be.

What do supermarket shoppers want to know about? Convenience. Speed. Low prices. That's what supermarkets sell in all their advertising. Hence an information product on how to do your shopping more quickly would be highly sought after. We all want to get rid of the chore of shopping. An ebook that told us how to do that would be just what's wanted by many people. There are such books on the market. For instance if you go to http://www.bostonhealthcoach.com/dvd.html you'll find a product on how to shop effectively for healthy foods. Who benefits from the sale of that product? A health food counsellor. Who actually gains more? The retailer who sells the health foods. So why, oh why, aren't they producing ebooks like this? Because they don't see themselves in the information marketing business.

I've just been interviewed by radio presenter David Addis. He's grilled me for 15 minutes on information selling and infoproducts. He managed to squeeze out of me a whole host of hints and tips for anyone wanting to sell information online. You can find out more at: http://www.infoselling.com/interview.htm

MSN Search is due to start it's own Pay Per Click advertising scheme. At the moment the sponsored listings in MSN Search come from Overture/Yahoo Search. However, MSN plans to introduce its own system shortly. You can find out more and register your interest in any updated by going to:

http://advertising.msn.com/searchadv/LeadForm.asp

When you set up your Google AdWords campaigns you need to include keywords that are for broad match, phrase match and exact match. Broad match means, for instance, that if you had online information marketing as your keyword your advert would appear if the person searching used any of those words in any order in their search term. With the keyword in double quotation marks "online information marketing" would mean their search term would have to include the phrase, but could also include other words such as online information marketing in London. The exact match is in square brackets as in [online information marketing]. This would mean that the person searching would have used this exact term and no other words.

If, however, you have plenty of keywords - and you should have plenty - typing in all the quotation marks and brackets is time consuming. You can do a search and replace using a word processor, of course, but that is also time consuming.

Thankfully, there's a handy tool around called GoogEdit (yes there is no L). This turns your keyword list into a list of broad, phrase and exact match terms which you can then load into your Google AdWords campaign.

You can find this program (it's free!) at http://www.googedit.com/

I've changed the settings of this blog so it is possible for you to add comments. Your ideas, thoughts and contributions would be very welcome.

I've spent the past few days putting the finishing touches to organising a meeting which I know you'll want to attend. It's being held in London and is designed to help you cash in on the growing market for information. The knowledge you have in your head could make an information product that other people will pay you for. But you need to know how to market those products to succeed. So, I've organised 'Information Marketing 2005' along with my colleague Rod Sloane. We've also invited some top notch guest speakers who'll give you the lowdown on constructing your products and the legal position of selling things online.

Information Marketing is this years not to miss event. It takes place in October and you can find the full details at: http://www.informationmarketing2005.co.uk