The last few days I’ve been busy writing a short 20 page report, doing exactly what I talked about in my previous post. The product took me about 2 days to write. Then I grabbed a domain name for $20, and I posted a sales letter for it on the Warrior Forum’s Special Offer section, which cost me another $20.

(Click here to see the actual post live. If the link takes you to the Warrior Forum in general, then the post has expired, so click here for a screenshot of the original post).

So far after about 24 hours, I’ve sold 18 copies and generated $116.30. After Paypal’s cut, it probably works out to around $100.

To some of you, that sounds great… to others, it might not sound like a lot. However, there’s a few important things to really notice here.

First, since I bought a domain name ($20) and paid to post on the Warrior’s Special Offer forum ($20), my profit is only $60 (but I’ve paid for the domain name for 2 years now, so that’s only an initial expense).

However, this is just after 24 hours! My post will remain on the forum for about 2 weeks. Plus, for another $20, I’m allowed to “bump” my post  back up to the top of the forum again once it gets to Page 3, which I’ll certainly be doing to give it more exposure… and I’ll keep doing it as long as the report makes a profit!

In other words, in the space of 2 days, I’ve just created a small income stream!

True, I’ve “only” made $60 so far (if you like to look at things from a negative point of view), but the key words are “so far”. Every time I “bump” that post (it costs me $20 to do that), the report will get more exposure, and hopefully generate more sales.

Third - and this is the really important point - there’s a reason I wrote this report.  I’m “testing the waters” as it were, to see if there would be an interest in a “membership site” based on the same topic as the report.

After each sale of this report, I invite the new customer to sign up to be notified of updates to the report, and a few extra tips. So far, about 90% of my new customers have signed up to my notification list.

Now, If I want to see if there’s an interest in a membership site on the same subject, guess who I’ll ask?

That’s right… my new customers!

And if there is an interest… I have a ready-built list of potential customers! If not, then no harm done, I just won’t bother creating the membership site… but I’m still making money on the initial report.

Incidentally, you might be wondering what my new report is about. Well, I call it “Reverse Engineering The Gurus”. I’ve selected one particular expert in his field - in this case men’s dating guru, David DeAngelo - and I’ve taken the reader through his sales and marketing process, to show them how his information publishing business has turned into a $20 million empire in 7 years!

Plus, I give an in-depth analysis of 2 of his sales letters, so the reader can see precisely what he’s doing in those letters. (He’s using some pretty persuasive techniques, I can tell you!)

The report was fairly easy for me to write because I simply took advantage of my 10 years experience in writing sales copy, creating products, marketing and selling.

Then I just put it for sale in front of a mass audience - in this case, the Warrior Forum’s “Special Offer” section.

OK, I’ll admit… I make it sound easier than it is.

It was only easy for me because I’ve done it before - several times. Plus, I had enough knowledge to be able to write effectively on the subject.

What about you? Where can you start?

Well, first of all, if you don’t think you know enough on any subject to be able to write even a short report (mine was only 20 pages, excluding the sales letter analysis), then become an expert on a topic!

Find a problem people are having, do some in-depth research to find the solution - on this blog I’ve already given you some great advice on how to do niche research - then write your report!

And then, put it in front of a relevant mass audience.

Remember what I said in my previous post. Short reports are not necessarily going to make you huge chunks of money by themselves. But they can be great for building up a customer base for a potentially larger product, such as an ebook.

And once you have a customer list - even if it’s from a short report - you can ask them what they’d like to see in a future ebook of yours!

Incidentally, just in the space of writing this post, another 4 sales of the report have rolled in - that’s about another $32. (I’m not telling you this to boast, but rather to inspire you.) This is from a report I wrote just 2 days ago!

I really do want all of you reading this to be making money from the Internet, whether you’re just looking for a bit of extra cash to enjoy life just that little bit more, whether you want to earn the equivalent of a full time income on the Internet, or whether you want to build a virtual empire - it doesn’t matter.

This blog will help you to get there, I promise it. So stick around, and above all make sure you’re subscribed to this blog.

If you have any questions about the report, or just want to discuss the stuff we’ve talked about in this post, please feel free to use the comments section below. If you’ve never created an information product before, I appreciate there’s a lot of technical questions you might want to ask, and I’ll try and give a brief answer to any questions, but I promise I’ll go into the “nuts and bolts” of it all in future posts.

Many people start off making money on the Internet by creating a short (10-20 page) low priced (i.e. $7) report that they can sell.

This can definitely get you started in the right direction. After all, it’s much easier to create a short 10-20 page report than a 100 page book! If you put your mind to it, you can write a short report in as little as 24 or 48 hours!

However, if you’re going to create a short report to sell, I’d suggest you do it with just one main purpose in mind - to generate leads for higher priced products.

Let me explain what I mean by this. When a person buys a $7 report from you, they become your customer. You now have a buyer-seller relationship with them. So add them to a customer email list, and as you sell more copies of your low-priced report, you’re building a list of actual buyers, and not just freebie seekers.

And this is the good bit…

You can then follow up on your customers and sell them higher priced products!

Incidentally, this is also a great way of testing the market for a larger product. Create a short low-priced report, and see how well it sells. If it does well, you can create higher priced products in that niche. The great thing is, you’ll also have a ready-made list of customers to sell to!

However, it can be more difficult to promote a low-priced report and to make a profit on the report itself.

For example, if your report is $7, and the cost to advertise on your favourite pay-per-click search engine is $0.50 a click for relevant keywords, then you’d need to make a sale every 14 visitors just to break even. While that’s not impossible to achieve, your sales copy would have to be pretty exceptional to get those kind of results.

To generate enough sales to make it all worthwhile, you’d need to find a mass audience in your niche. For instance, you could find blogs and newsletters in your niche, and pay the owner for a product review, or to advertise.

Even if you just break even for now, it doesn’t really matter… as long as you’re building your list of customers! Remember that a person who spends $7 with you today may well spend $47 with you next month.

Incidentally, I’ll show you how to actually set up a customer list in another post. In fact, I appreciate there’s quite a few technical bits and pieces you’ll probably want to know, such as how you accept payments for your report in the first place. Keep reading this blog and I’ll make sure I cover those aspects.

However, in the next post I’ll discuss why I believe your real money will be made with higher-priced products, why it’s much easier to sell higher priced products, and how to add value to your product so you can sell it for more. So make sure you’re subscribed to this blog!

So how do you go about actually creating your information product? Well, there’s an easy way, and a somewhat less easy way.

The easy way is simply to pay someone to create the product for you! If you have the money, you can get an average-sized information product created for between $500 and $1,000. And this is probably a good investment if you have the money, so I’ll show you how to do this another time - but basically, you can use a site like Elance.com to get people to bid on your project.

However, if you don’t have the money to invest, you can always create the product yourself - all it will cost you is your time.

First, you’ll need to research each of the problems that your market face. (You discovered what they were in Part 1).

And this is where Google and Yahoo! are your friends. Learn to use Google effectively for research. Remember that not every question is a quick Google search away, so you may need to dig deeper. You could also search on Yahoo! Answers to see if people have previously answered questions on the subject.

It’s also a good idea to take a look at similar products in your niche. Pop down to your local library and see if they have books on the subject you’re writing about. Also, take a look in your local bookstore. If you don’t want to actually buy the books, you could always browse and take mental notes!

If you’re dealing with a more technical subject, find some experts in your niche, and email them. Some may not reply, but those that do will hopefully give you the answers you’re looking for!

Then you just start writing! You could use a free software suite like Open Office to create your information product. Not only can you type it up, but you can also convert it to PDF format, which is probably the best format for digital information products.

Now, if this all seems like too much hard work, then there is an easier way to get started, which I’ll talk about next, so make sure you’re subscribed to this blog.

Incidentally, many people get this order wrong. First, they create the product, then they push it onto the market and hope they buy it. However, there’s always a risk that your market may not want your product.

However, if you find a buying market, ask them what they want, and then create a product based on those things, it’s much harder not to make money!

Now, when you have your “problem list”, there’s two different approaches you could take:

The narrow approach - this is where your information product goes into extensive detail about one particular problem faced by your market. For example, I’m sure there are lots of problems that budding musicians face, but the Pure Pitch product I recently wrote about that sold for $25,000 solely tackled the more specific problem of “pitch recognition” for musicians.

The broad approach: This is where your information product becomes kind of a “reference manual” on a particular subject - such as a How To guide for new musicians, or digital photographers. In it, you tackle all or most of the problems faced by your market.

So which is better? In the case of the Pure Pitch product, I think it sold well because, even though it had a narrow focus (i.e. “pitch recognition”), it had a broad market - basically, all musicians. So there was plenty of scope for advertising it, above and beyond the search engines.

So to answer the question of which is better, I would reverse it and ask, How big is the market?

There’s lots of different ways products can be marketed: search engine optimization (SEO) (where your pages appear on, say Google, for specific keywords), pay-per-click advertising (where you pay per visitor), through affiliates (where you pay others a commission to sell it for you), and advertising on other people’s sites, blogs and in their newsletters. (There are others, but don’t worry about them for now.)

Now, here’s an important understanding…

The narrowness of your niche and market will ultimately determine how much money you’re able to make for that product.

If you have a very narrow niche and market, then there may not be many magazines, blogs and newsletters in which to advertise, and there may not be many people wanting to promote your product as an affiliate. So you might be dependent on pay-per-click advertising on search engines. In this case, you’d need to find out if the cost of advertising specific keywords is cost effective or not. (I’ll write a more detailed post on how to do this another time.)

Personally, I like the idea of being able to sell more and more of my products as I advertise more, and I don’t like being dependent on search engines, which is why I prefer to create products with a broader market in mind.

So how do you go about making an information product? I’ll talk about that next, so make sure you’re subscribed to this blog.

Now let’s get down to action and make some real money, shall we?

(Incidentally, if you’ve still haven’t got any ideas for a niche, don’t worry. Ideas are all around you, it’s just a question of keeping your eyes and ears out for them. As you keep reading this blog, you’ll be surprised how an idea might suddenly pop into your head from nowhere. Just make sure you write it down!)

If you recall from my last post, the #1 reason people buy information products is because it solves a problem or a series of problems they are having, or it appeals to their desires - or both.

So now we need to find out what problems and challenges face our potential customers, so we can sell them the solutions! How do we do that?

The obvious answer would be to ask. Unfortunately, asking directly as a marketer isn’t always the most effective way of finding out, because your potential market may not share this information too easily with you.

I find that the most effective way of doing research on your potential customers is by using the stealth tactic of actually getting “in there” with them, and finding out naturally.

So here’s how I’d do it. Let’s say we wanted to create a product on digital photography. We want to discover all the problems and challenges people face in this particular niche.

I’d start off by finding some of the places where digital photographers hang out - such as online forums, and Yahoo! Groups. To find the Yahoo! Groups is simple enough - just go to groups.yahoo.com and search for groups!

To find the forums, I’d go to my favourite search engine (such as Google.com) and if I were looking for digital photography forums, I’d type “digital photography forum” into the search box - it’s that simple! For most niches you’ll be able to find several forums.

Now, this is where we’re going to be a little bit sneaky - but only for research purposes. I’d join the forum using a nickname or screen name that wouldn’t be associated with my real identity.

My very first post on the forum would be in the “Introduce Yourself” section if they have one, or in the main forum if not. In it, I’d introduce my identity as someone who’s just recently got into digital photography. Something like this…

Hello! My name’s John and I’ve just found this forum. I’ve only started taking an interest in digital photography and, I realized just how much I didn’t know about the subject! So that’s why it’s great to be here, hopefully I can learn a lot, and maybe share experiences. I want to create perfect pictures!

… or something along those lines. Over the next week or two I’d make some additional light hearted posts, building up relationships and the post count. After that, I’d make a post which would be used to draw out the actual information I was after.

Hi again, fellow photographers. I’m just starting to realize that digital photography is a bit harder than I first thought and I wonder if I’m the only one! What problems have you encountered in digital photography? What was your biggest challenges in creating great photos? Maybe we can all help each other out here! - John.

The key part is in bold, and the rest is basically just fluff to make the question appear natural. Hopefully, because you’ve built up a relationship with people on the forum, you should get very honest and natural answers.

Once you’ve got your list of problems and challenges, you don’t have to post on that forum again. You might be uncomfortable with this method of research, but just bear in mind that people come and go on forums all the time, so it’s not like you’re snubbing a dear friend!

So then, we now have a list of the problems and challenges that are faced by people in the digital photography niche. If we can solve these problems for our niche market, then we have a potential money-making product!

The next step is to begin creating the product, which we’ll discuss in the next post on Wednesday 11th June. Please make sure you’re subscribed to this blog (click here to learn how) so you don’t miss out!

People buy information products all the time. Just the other day I brought an ebook called “How To Make Small Talk” because, quite frankly, I needed to brush up on my small talk!

So here are the main reasons people buy information products, and after that I’ll explain how you can utilize this knowledge to make money…

Reason #1: They have a problem they need solving, or a desire to do or be something.

Let’s prove this, shall we?

Clickbank is one of the biggest places where digital products are sold. (We’ll talk a lot more about Clickbank another time.) So head over to the Clickbank Marketplace, and in the “List Of Categories”, let’s look at the top-selling “Health & Fitness” products.

Here were the top 10 selling products in that category, at the time I did this search - see if you can notice what most of them have in common:

Fat Loss 4 Idiots
The Truth About Six Pack Abs
Top Secret Fat Loss Secret
Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle
Vince DelMonte’s No Nonsense Muscle Building
The Power Of Conversational Hypnosis
Turbulence Training Fat Loss System
Natural Cure For Yeast Infection
Chopper Tattoo Gallery
Panic Away - Treat Panic Attacks and Anxiety

Did you notice - most of them claim to solve certain problems and appeal to certain desires. For instance, four of them are about weight loss - lots of people want to lose weight (the problem), and want to have a great body (the desire).

Three of them are about building muscle. Again, these address the problem guys in particular might ask - “How can I build muscle?” And they appeal to the desire to look as good as me.

Two of them claim to help with other physical problems like yeast infection, and panic attacks. The problems here are quite clear: “How can I cure my yeast infection / panic attack?” The desire is to be free from these problems.

However, the question still remains - why would people pay for this kind of information? Isn’t there free stuff on weight loss or building muscle all over the Internet? Yes, but…

Reason #2: They don’t have the time to research.

The most valuable resource we have is time, and rich or poor, we all have exactly the same amount of it - 1,440 minutes each day.

We can’t buy any more time, but we can leverage that time to get the most out of it.

That’s a big reason people buy information products. They don’t have the time to research everything out there, so they use their money as leverage to benefit from other people’s research, by buying information products where what they’re looking for is all compiled and put together for them in one easy-to-consume product.

Reason #3: Some information may be hard to find.

Not everything is as easy to find on the Internet as you might think. For instance, I’ve worked in the direct sales industry, and some of the sales techniques I learned are hardly even mentioned on the Internet.

“Knowledge is power”, as they say. Many people want the “inside track”, and that’s not always available from free articles on the Internet.

Reason #4: Spending money equates to value and commitment.

Why did I spend $27 on a product about making small talk, when I could have done a Google search on the subject and almost certainly found lots of free information?

First, I wanted to get an expert opinion. Any blogger can write a blog article on “small talk”, but I wanted to see what this particular expert had to say. I wanted the best possible expert advice - not some 13 year old blogger’s opinion. (No offense to 13 year old bloggers!)

Second, I knew that by spending $27 I was making a small commitment to myself - a commitment to actually apply the material. I knew that by purchasing it, I’d value the material and be more likely to use it.

Have you ever downloaded a free report, or been given a free gift, and never really used it? If so, you know why… you never really valued it very highly, because it was free.

7 Power Tips For Making Money From Information Products

So then… with these four reasons in mind, here are some golden tips for making money from information products…

Tip #1: Solve a problem. The bigger and more widespread the problem, the bigger the market.

There’s probably a good reason why 3 of the top 10 best-selling products in the Clickbank Marketplace are to do with weight loss - lots of people nowadays are overweight!

Tip #2: Appeal to a desire. What do people really want to do or be?

I’d suggest that “The Power Of Conversational Hypnosis” product (which ranked 6th in Clickbank’s Marketplace under Health & Fitness) appeals to a person’s desire for personal power.

The weight loss and muscle building products appeal to our desire to look and feel great, and to be healthy.

The product I recently wrote about that sold for $25,000 appealed to people’s desire to become a great musician.

Tip #3: Solve an urgent problem. The more urgent the problem, the quicker and more impulsively they will buy.

You may not think “weight loss” is a particularly urgent problem, but someone may have been trying all kinds of weight loss products in the past, and not having any success before coming across yours. To them, the problem is urgent. They want to lose weight and look good now.

Unfortunately, this is why so many people get taken in by “get rich” schemes - they appeal most to those who are desperate for money, and need it now.

If you’re going to sell to a desperate audience, my advice is to please make sure you deliver on your promises to the best of your ability. There’s nothing better for your business then ecstatic customers who improved their life because of your product.

Tip #4: Appeal to “gaps” in their knowledge.

Very few people actually “know it all”, despite what they might think. There’s always something they don’t know.

Tip #5: Reveal “hard to find” information and “insider” secrets.

Looking at the sales letters for most of the products on the Top 10 list I mentioned earlier, there was a pattern - most of them appealed to the fact that the common knowledge “out there” on the subject was full of misconceptions, and that their product contained “secrets”, hidden knowledge that only “insiders” knew, while the masses (i.e. non-customers) remained ignorant.

The bottom line is: It helps if you do actually have some “insider” secrets that you can reveal! This provides people with a reason to buy your information product.

What if you don’t have any insider secrets? Most of the time you can find them if you do enough research into a topic - but that’s the point, remember. People buy products because they don’t want to have to dig to find the information themselves. They would rather pay you, the trusted information publisher, to have done it all for them.

Tip #6: Be an expert

I spent money on the “Small Talk” ebook because the guy was (or claimed to be) an expert on the subject, so I valued his opinion.

Admittedly, it’s hard to become an expert on something overnight. However, that’s where leverage comes in. You can leverage other people’s expertise. For instance, you could interview experts in a particular topic, or quote from them. (Just bear in mind copyright laws. It’s usually fine to quote someone, with attribution, but it’s not OK to copy large chunks of what they say. And it’s definitely not OK to claim it as your own!)

You could also ask an expert to lend their name to your product, perhaps as a co-author or a contributor, in exchange for a certain percentage of the profits. You then become an expert by association.

Tip #7: Sell to people with money.

I’ve used this illustration before, but if your information product is aimed at broke college kids, and it doesn’t sell very well… maybe it’s because you picked a market that doesn’t have much money. Maybe you should target it at the parents instead, or pick a market that does have money.

What do you think? How has this article helped you to see information products in a new light? Let’s use the comments section below to discuss it. And please make sure you’re subscribed to this blog, because over the next few weeks we’re going to talk about how to create your own information products that can make you money online. If you’re not subscribed, you’ll miss out and hate yourself for the rest of your life.

And I wouldn’t want you to do that.

(Don’t worry if you’re still short of ideas, the free resources I’ll show you in this post will help you generate even more ideas.)

Next, we need to see whether a potential niche is likely to be profitable or not.

How are we going to do that? By finding out roughly how many searches are being made in the search engines for a particular niche, in any given day or month.

There are several free resources you can use to do this. The first is Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Suggestion Tool. You simply enter a starting keyword or keywords, and the tool will generate up to 100 related keywords, and most important of all, will give you an estimate of their daily search volume.

Doing a search on “photography” returned over 80,000 searches a day which contained this word… although perhaps not surprisingly, over 20,000 were for “female photography” and another 10,000 for “female breast photography”.

Using this tool we can find more ideas for niches, and also see how popular particular niches are. For example, “digital photography” was searched for about 800 times a day, “stock photography” about 500 times, and “wedding photography” about 500 times

I also noted other potential niches, such as…

black [and] white photography (960 + 922 a day)
glamour photography (931)
wedding photography costa rica (250)

You can also use this tool for find more specific niches within a niche. So we could enter “digital photography” into the search box, and find out what keyword terms people are using.

This time, I got back over 3,000 search terms, which included “digital photography” itself (830), “canon digital photography” (204), “digital photography tips” (200), “digital photography magazine” (106) and “digital photography tutorial” (100).

That there are over 3,000 people a day searching for something about digital photography, and that some of them are looking for tips, tutorials and magazines is a good indicator that there is a potentially profitable niche here.

Tip: You want to find niches that return at least 1,000 searches containing those keywords if you’re considering becoming an information publisher in that niche.

While it’s possible to make money in the smaller niches, larger niches give you much more opportunity to partner up with others to make money.

There are other useful resources you should know about, so let me list them, including Wordtracker’s one that we just used:

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool
Keyword Discovery Free Search Term Suggestion Tool
AdWords Keywords Suggestion Tool
SEO Book Keyword Research Tool

The AdWords tool gives you suggestions for other words related to photography (which can give you get more niche ideas), and also how much it would cost you if you were to advertise on their network for those keywords. (At the time of writing, I’d need to be paying $2.97 a click to get the top ad position on Google for “digital photography”!)

A word of caution: keyword research is just a guide to finding potentially profitable niches. Some niches are hard to find using keyword tools, and besides, just because large numbers of people are using certain keywords, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily willing to spend money.

Are magazines being published in that niche?

Another way to tell if a niche is potentially profitable is to see if magazines are being published in that niche. Since magazines cost money to publish, they’re only going to be published if there are paying readers in the first place.

To find many published magazines, you can go to Magazines.com and search, or look for a specific category related to your niche. For instance, they have a “photography” category, and I could find 14 magazines there, with some niches including “outdoor photography”, “american photography” and “digital photography”.Also check your local news store for magazines, since some may be published in your country or region that aren’t listed online.

It may also be a good idea to read the magazines related to a potential niche, and see what products are advertised there. If you can get hold of a few back issues, look for products that are being advertised repeatedly, as that’s a good indicator that the publishers are making a profit.

In the next post I’m going to show you how you can create an information product. In the meantime, what did you think of this article? Do you know of any other methods of finding out whether a particular niche is profitable? Feel free to leave a comment below.

SitePoint’s Marketplace is a place where people basically buy and sell websites. Every so often I’ll take a look there, to see what’s being sold and how much it’s selling for.

Well, take a look at this listing - I took a screenshot (which you can view by clicking here)

Here’s what’s amazing about it. The guy had created an information product called Pure Pitch, which basically “teaches musicians ‘pitch recognition’ through a series of audio exercises, and includes an illustrated 120-page manual.”

Now here’s where I really want you to pay attention. The site was launched on 1st February 2008. He listed his site for sale on 28th March 2008 in the SitePoint Marketplace - and it sold for $25,000.

Did you hear that?…

A 2 month old site and product sold for $25,000!

Now, I want you to study that auction and really understand how he was able to achieve that kind of valuation - you know why? Because there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same!

Absolutely everything that he did, you can do - and I mean everything. Over the coming weeks I’m going to show you how it’s all done, right here on this blog. The cost to you will be nothing - except your time. (That’s why you absolutely must subscribe, unless you don’t like money.)

Now, first of all he created the product. That was probably the hardest part, but it’s actually a lot easier to create products than you might imagine, and right here on this blog I’ll show you how.

Next, he created the site and sales letter. They also present their own challenges, but nothing that can’t be overcome.

Finally, he created an affiliate programme through Clickbank. Clickbank have a built-in marketplace where an army of affiliates can find products to promote, and it seems that the only promotion he did was on the Clickbank Marketplace, and on eBay.

And for doing these things, he got paid $25,000.

Now, I really believe that the person who sold this was incredibly smart. You can’t normally throw up a site and sell it for $25,000 two months later - but here’s why I think this was so effective:

• He demonstrated profits. He said: “In the last 2 months since its launch Pure Pitch has earned $9,500 net ($5,000 profit). I spend $0 on marketing. It is all done by affiliates.”
• He demonstrated value. He explained that he was asking for $20-$25K, based on an average profit of $2,000 for 12 months. He also made clear that the product had a shelf life of at least 5 years, which could bring in revenue of $120,000 over that period.
• He showed potentials for increased profits. He emphasized that he wasn’t really promoting it, and added: “With just a little promotion this website will definitely grow into a great source of residual income. The great thing about this product is that you can create joint ventures with all music-related websites. There is such huge potential for this product, which is why I wish I could keep it…”
• He gave a genuine reason for sale: “… but my debts need to be paid.”
• He provided “proofs”, in the form of screenshots from inside his Clickbank account and his web statistics account.

There’s also a subtle form of risk reversal involved. Smart marketers are always looking for niches in which to enter, but they want to know that it’s profitable. By creating the product and successfully selling it, he’d effectively reversed the risk for people who were considering entering a niche - here was one that was proven to be profitable.

Now, this was such a slick auction that I suspect the entire product might have been deliberately created just to be sold off in this manner shortly afterwards. Of course, I could be wildly wrong here, but it doesn’t really matter either way.

The point is, do you see the potential here? A niche product was created, put on Clickbank, some sales made, then sold for $25,000 in the space of 2 months! (OK, we don’t know how long it took for him to create the product - that’s the only “unknown” factor).

And that, my friends, is an amazing twist on Information Marketing.

Was it overvalued? Not at all! As the seller stated, there was huge potential for plenty of additional profits through affiliates, joint ventures, advertising, backend sales and so on.

Incidentally, don’t be afraid if any of those terms baffle you… we’re going to explain absolutely everything you need to know right here on this blog. This isn’t just another “make money online” blog, remember?

So how do you go about creating information products in the first place? Stay tuned…

Now I’m going to show you how to take those basic ideas and find yourself a huge amount of potential niche markets that will give you plenty of choice! And it’s all very easy to do.

Let’s look at an example…

Say you wrote down “photography” as one of your interests. We’re now going to use some well-established sites, to find out what people are talking about and buying in the field of photography, with the aim of getting lots of ideas for potentially profitable niches within the area of photography.

(1) Find the top products in X at Amazon.com

Using our example, go to Amazon.com, type in “photography” into their site search box and press “Go”. Since Amazon are likely to list their hottest and best selling products first, you now have a list of stuff that people are actually buying in the photography field.

Go through the top products in “photography”, and make a note of the niches within photography that are represented, along with how often they occur.

For instance, at the time of writing this article I came across the following photography niches represented:

digital photography (11 times)
portrait photography (2)
american photography (2)
digital wedding photography (1)
wedding photography (1)
family portrait photography (1)
nature photography (1)
photography course (1)
conceptual photography (1)
mental photography (1)
landscape photography (1)

So it seems like the “digital photography” niche is well represented with products in the photography section.

The purpose of this is to get more ideas of niches within photography, and also to show you what people are buying. (We want to be in a niche where people actually buy stuff!)

(2) Find discussion groups on X at Yahoo! Groups

Next, we’ll find out what discussion groups exist on the subject of photography, so go to Yahoo! Groups at groups.yahoo.com, type in “photography” into the “Find A Yahoo! Group” search box, and press “Search”.

We’re really just paying attention to the names of the groups to get more ideas for niches. You might also want to keep a note of the number of members of a group, to give you a rough idea of the level of interest in that niche subject.

For example, looking through the first 100 results I came across the following forums that are also ideas for niches within the photography market:

digital photography (2700 members, 5600 members, 1600 members)
infrared photography (1500 members)
selling stock photography* (1700 members)
panoramic photography (1700 members)
stock photography (3500 members)

I’ve put a * next to “selling stock photography” because I particularly like the sound of that one. Anytime you get a product idea in your head, write it down! It doesn’t mean you should act on it there and then (you don’t yet know if there’s a demand for the product), but if you don’t write down ideas as they come to you, you’re likely to forget them - and there’s nothing more frustrating than not being able to remember a great idea you had!

(3) Find out what people are asking at Yahoo! Answers

Next, go to Yahoo! Answers at answers.yahoo.com. This is a great site where people can ask questions and have them answered by several people, many of whom have positioned themselves as “experts” on a subject.

We can use this site to find out what questions and problems people have in the field of “photography”. To find photography related questions, it’s best to drill down using the “Categories” links. Under the “Categories” heading, click on “Arts & Humanities”, then “Visual Arts” and finally “Photography”.

The questions can give you yet more niche ideas. For instance, I came across the following question:

What are some creative ideas for fashion photography? please help

So we could add “fashion photography” to our list of niches. Here’s another one…

How to do a professional summer photo Shoot with for a readhead with blue/green eyes?

So here’s someone who’s looking for answers on “professional photo shooting” - however, I probably wouldn’t narrow down the niche to blue/green eyed redheads!

(4) Find out what subjects are being discussed in X at EzineArticles.com

Finally, head on over to EzineArticles.com. This is a popular site where writers share articles which can be used by others.

You can use this site’s search facility to find articles on “photography”, or drill down to their photography section, which is in the “Arts and Entertainment” category. (I know this because the category was the first listing to come up when I did a search using “photography”.)

Doing this, I noticed that “digital” and “wedding” photography gets talked about a lot, and also found several other niches within the photography field:

PR (public relations) photography
wildlife photography
photography career
documentary style wedding photography
aerial photography

Once you’ve visited all four sites and done your research, you’ll have a decent list of potential niches!

However, before you even consider entering a niche, you need to find out whether it’s profitable or not. I’ll show you how to do that in Part 3 of this series (which will be scheduled for Monday 2nd June), so make sure you’re subscribed to this blog so you don’t miss it.

In the meantime, get brainstorming and searching for niche ideas!

(By the way, I promise that this blog is going to be different from most of the other “make money” blogs out there - not only will I show you specifically how to do something - which most of the others leave out -but if you become a regular reader, we’ll actually make money together! In other words, these aren’t just theories. You’ll see me set up live projects from scratch to prove to you how it’s done. So make sure you’re subscribed!)

So what do I mean by a “niche”? Very simply, a niche is just a smaller subset of a larger market. For example, there’s a big market for “weight loss” products and information - but within this market, there are smaller niches, such as people who are interested in more specialist vegan weight loss plans, or weight loss through hypnosis - these are niches within the larger “weight loss” market. (By the way, I found these two niches using a free tool I’ll show you later on in this series.)

There are two basic ingredients for successfully making money in a niche market.

The first is to pick a niche in which you have (or could easily develop) a passion. While it’s not absolutely essential, it definitely helps to maintain your interest and enthusiasm in the subject. (In this series I’ll show you how to generate plenty of ideas that you’d probably never even considered.)

The second is to find a niche in which people spend money. There’s nothing wrong with blogging about your hobbies and interests, but if it’s an obscure niche where people don’t spend money, then your blog is really a hobby. (In Part 3 I’ll show you how to test whether a particular niche is profitable or not.)

Now storm your brain!

The first technique is simply to brainstorm what interests you. Almost certainly you won’t hit upon your ideal niche right away, but doing this will get the creative juices flowing, and will get you started thinking in the right direction.

So grab a piece of paper, and spend 20 - 30 minutes writing down the answers to the following questions:

• What are your interests and hobbies?
• What magazines do you like to read?
• What TV programs do you like to watch?
• What web sites do you like to visit for fun?
• What groups and forums are you a member of?
• What sports and games do you play or watch?
• What non-fiction books have you read that inspired you?

Now, don’t worry if you don’t find what you’ve written particularly inspiring! That’s perfectly normal - as I said, it’s unlikely you’ll hit upon your ideal niche just yet. However, by the time you’ve finished reading this series, you’ll have so many niche ideas that you’ll be spoilt for choice!

Just keep your list safe for now, and in Part 2 I’ll show you how you can “spin” your list to come up with an almost endless supply of niches and ideas.

Please make sure you’re subscribed to this blog, so you don’t miss it! And in the meantime, I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading the other articles on UpperMoney.com