Employee to Entrepreneur: Replacing Your Salary With Infomarketing Income Within Six Months
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Employee to Entrepreneur: Replacing Your Salary With Infomarketing Income Within Six Months
by Marcia Yudkin
What if you have no following, no fans, no list but want to create an information marketing business that supports you so you can retire or quit your job? And suppose you're eager to say sayonara to your paycheck within the next six months. Are there business models to follow that boost your chances or reaching that goal?
After giving this question a lot of thought, I've come up with five realistic strategies to generate a full-time income from selling information products and related services within six months.
1. Become an impresario. Remember Max Detweiler, the show producer who schemed to get the von Trapp family singing on stage in The Sound of Music? An impresario today orchestrates events, which in the information marketing realm might be conferences, bootcamps, telesummits, web conferences or virtual trade shows. To do this, you need a strong sense of what a definable, reachable audience wants to learn or experience along with an ingratiating personality that can persuade well-known experts with drawing power to participate in the events.
2. Become a product developer for others. Approach one or more people or companies that already have a hefty following but few things for fans to buy. Offer to create their product empire in exchange for a percentage of the income. Start with merchandising ideas that can be implement quickly, such as branded mugs, T-shirts and stickers and then proceed to the more expensive offerings, like group coaching programs, retreats, themed tours and access to celebrities. You need both a high-flying imagination and down-to-earth marketing skills for this strategy.
3. Collect others' offerings in an online store. Identify a constituency that can't easily find a one-stop information hub with products to buy - such as left-handed musicians, parents of physically handicapped children, nerdy women or aspiring crime scene analysts. Find courses, reports, consulting programs, etc. for this constituency that pay you a commission for each sale. Persuade additional people with general information products to create versions for your niche, with a commission for you. Use pay-per-click ads, media publicity and joint ventures to create traffic to your online store and resell buyers on related products and services after they become customers.
4. Aggressively develop your own product line. To start with, select a niche and concentrate on product types for that niche that can be developed quickly, such as audio expert interviews or PDF compilations of advice. Within the first month, complete a free item, a low-cost item, a medium-priced offering and a high-priced item and arrange them in a classic marketing funnel, where buyers at each level are encouraged to continue to the next level. Then use the traffic building techniques mentioned in strategy #3 to attract customers. And finally, continue to add to the product line as quickly as you can while maintaining product quality.
5. Use outsourcing to develop an assembly line of loosely related ebooks or DVDs. Here you are aiming at an existing marketplace that gathers millions of prospective buyers for you, such as Amazon's Kindle store (for ebooks) or Amazon and eBay (for DVDs). Select a topic in which you have an avid interest and some knowledge. Use keyword research to identify product titles that are often searched for, and develop a cadre of trusted workers from sites like Fiverr, Guru or eLance who can create original work at low rates for which you purchase all rights. You serve the mastermind of this empire, with freelancers performing the content creation, quality control, cover creation and marketing copy - unless you are already good at one or more of those tasks.
The above business models all aim at speed of implementation for fast results. None is a lazy way to riches. Before getting started, calculate how much income you need to be clearing per month from your business to replace your salary, and when you have built to that level, you're ready to say goodbye to employment.
With an intelligent choice of topic and target market and a good measure of hard work, you should be able to accomplish your goal of exchanging the dependability of your job income for the freedom of the entrepreneurial life.
The author of 16 books and nine multimedia home study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information in one form or another since 1981. She has developed and sold more than a dozen multimedia home-study courses on publicity, writing, web site structure and personal branding. Download a free recording of her answers to the most commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information into the privacy-assured request box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm .
by Marcia Yudkin
What if you have no following, no fans, no list but want to create an information marketing business that supports you so you can retire or quit your job? And suppose you're eager to say sayonara to your paycheck within the next six months. Are there business models to follow that boost your chances or reaching that goal?
After giving this question a lot of thought, I've come up with five realistic strategies to generate a full-time income from selling information products and related services within six months.
1. Become an impresario. Remember Max Detweiler, the show producer who schemed to get the von Trapp family singing on stage in The Sound of Music? An impresario today orchestrates events, which in the information marketing realm might be conferences, bootcamps, telesummits, web conferences or virtual trade shows. To do this, you need a strong sense of what a definable, reachable audience wants to learn or experience along with an ingratiating personality that can persuade well-known experts with drawing power to participate in the events.
2. Become a product developer for others. Approach one or more people or companies that already have a hefty following but few things for fans to buy. Offer to create their product empire in exchange for a percentage of the income. Start with merchandising ideas that can be implement quickly, such as branded mugs, T-shirts and stickers and then proceed to the more expensive offerings, like group coaching programs, retreats, themed tours and access to celebrities. You need both a high-flying imagination and down-to-earth marketing skills for this strategy.
3. Collect others' offerings in an online store. Identify a constituency that can't easily find a one-stop information hub with products to buy - such as left-handed musicians, parents of physically handicapped children, nerdy women or aspiring crime scene analysts. Find courses, reports, consulting programs, etc. for this constituency that pay you a commission for each sale. Persuade additional people with general information products to create versions for your niche, with a commission for you. Use pay-per-click ads, media publicity and joint ventures to create traffic to your online store and resell buyers on related products and services after they become customers.
4. Aggressively develop your own product line. To start with, select a niche and concentrate on product types for that niche that can be developed quickly, such as audio expert interviews or PDF compilations of advice. Within the first month, complete a free item, a low-cost item, a medium-priced offering and a high-priced item and arrange them in a classic marketing funnel, where buyers at each level are encouraged to continue to the next level. Then use the traffic building techniques mentioned in strategy #3 to attract customers. And finally, continue to add to the product line as quickly as you can while maintaining product quality.
5. Use outsourcing to develop an assembly line of loosely related ebooks or DVDs. Here you are aiming at an existing marketplace that gathers millions of prospective buyers for you, such as Amazon's Kindle store (for ebooks) or Amazon and eBay (for DVDs). Select a topic in which you have an avid interest and some knowledge. Use keyword research to identify product titles that are often searched for, and develop a cadre of trusted workers from sites like Fiverr, Guru or eLance who can create original work at low rates for which you purchase all rights. You serve the mastermind of this empire, with freelancers performing the content creation, quality control, cover creation and marketing copy - unless you are already good at one or more of those tasks.
The above business models all aim at speed of implementation for fast results. None is a lazy way to riches. Before getting started, calculate how much income you need to be clearing per month from your business to replace your salary, and when you have built to that level, you're ready to say goodbye to employment.
With an intelligent choice of topic and target market and a good measure of hard work, you should be able to accomplish your goal of exchanging the dependability of your job income for the freedom of the entrepreneurial life.
The author of 16 books and nine multimedia home study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information in one form or another since 1981. She has developed and sold more than a dozen multimedia home-study courses on publicity, writing, web site structure and personal branding. Download a free recording of her answers to the most commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information into the privacy-assured request box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm .