Information Business May Not be the Best Business, But…
If you have been reading my blog for some time, you should have known the business model that I preach.
As a blogger, you should really think about yourself as an information publisher. With that perspective, you can leverage what you already have, i.e. your content, to build a successful business.
Think about selling e-books, getting paid to speak to a group of coaching clients, selling the recordings, and repackaging the whole things into a home study course. Nowadays, people are more than willing to pay for your expertise.
For service professionals and freelancers, selling information may contribute up to 50 percent or more of the entire business revenue. Not to mention that information really is the marketing tool that will drive people back to you if they need your service because you are the goto person or expert in that area.
Compare to the service, information business is like passive income.
However there is a secret I have been keeping for some time. As perfect as it sounds, information business is not the best business yet.
You still need to create the content. If you already have lots of articles on your blog, you still need to think of a way to repackage and create an organized information out of them. A course needs a curriculum. An e-book needs table of contents.
For a membership site, it is how you deliver the content. It should be enough so the members feel a bit overwhelmed — that you overdeliver — and at the same time you feed small enough of a chunk for them to take action and get result. The latter is the real and tangible value every member would like to have as the result of their membership.
The perception of quality of your information product often depends on how well you organize the content.
You are right if you guess that is not a one or two hours work. Personally I have spent hundreds of hours compiling and organizing information for my blogging e-course. I know for sure that other information marketers do the same, although some others prefer to hire others to do the work for them.
There is another type of business that doesn’t require you to spend time and produce content. I guess you have heard about user generated content.
Let’s take discussion boards as an example. People come to the site to discuss. They create content for the site owner. And she doesn’t have to do anything but to insert ads, or create a marketplace where people have to pay to list their products to sell, etc. There’s a whole business model around it.
Another example is Twitter. Although we haven’t yet seen a clear business model out of it, without a doubt there is value in collective content.
Creating a platform for people to participate and flourish is really the best business model. However, it is not without a challenge.
It takes a genius to build a platform and grow it to a community site with rabid users. You also need a lot of money to start a company and hire good web application developers. If you want to build a good company, it just makes sense that you hire good people, which cost a lot.
A lot of business around this also fails. In fact, every business has this kind of risk.
This is where information business begins to show its advantage. Your product is not something you create out of thin air based on your random idea. It is what you already know. You find gaps in the market that you can fill in and do it.
When it comes to tools, you could use free alternatives. From word editor to PDF creation tool, you name it. There are free options you could download and use without any limitation. This mean the investment is practically nothing but your time to create the product and promote it.
You don’t expect to make money without any work, do you? A lot of people are willing to work hard. They don’t think surfing or sitting beside the beach for the rest of their life is a good idea. Most of them only want a bit of freedom. To be able to enjoy their coffee. To take vacation regularly.
But work is still their contribution to the world. If that sounds like what you want, information business is worth a try. For me, it is an extension, sort of the next step of what a blogger should do after creating all the high quality content.
What do you think?
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