As I’ve said before, excellent products to market on the Internet with a joint venture are information products. These products could either be delivered electronically via downloads or sent out in hard copy.
There are lots of other excellent products waiting to be marketed via a joint venture, however…
No Product Will Give You Greater Financial Leverage Than
Information Products
And with electronic publishing there is basically no cost involved, such as printing or postage and there’s also no waiting time because the customer can download the info immediately from a Web site within a matter of seconds.
Hard copy information can also be produced very inexpensively and, although you have printing and postage costs when shipping out the product, there is always a substantial markup, which translates to an excellent joint venture product.
Also, information products and especially digital information products have several unique advantages as follows:
Perfect Product
Information products are ideal for people on the Web because people mainly go on the Internet to be entertained or to seek information.
In other words they are information hungry and are looking for specific, opinionated, hard-hitting information on a subject they are interested in!
Location Not Important
The information business can be operated from anywhere in the world. All you need to have access to is a computer and a phone line.
Delivered Digitally
The Internet is an ideal place to market information products because they can be shipped digitally over the phone lines without having to worry about postage or keep any inventory on hand. The business doesn’t have to stock any products or physically ship out anything.
High Perceived Value
There’s a high-perceived value in information products because the customer is getting information that will either…
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- Save them money
- Make them money, or
- Solve a particular problem for them
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Substantial Markup
As I mentioned in the beginning, the markup on information products is very substantial. If something is produced one time, that’s basically the upfront and only cost. This product can then be sold time and time again without any additional manufacturing or production costs.
For example, if a business is selling an information product for $50, their upfront cost is basically what it cost them in time and money to make this one product.
Producing several copies of this product for their customers costs them very little compared to the actual value of the product so their markup is astronomical. This is what makes information products so fantastic especially when you can market them successfully on the Internet via a joint venture.
That doesn’t mean that any old information that’s been rehashed a thousand times can be thrown together and sold. The product has to be good and the information has to be valuable and not shoddy.
Proprietary Rights
It’s important that the person or business has the proprietary rights to a product you’re thinking about introducing in a joint venture.
In other words, it’s important that they have the full rights to sell the product any way they want and at any price. So, whatever product they create with paper and ink (or digitally), that is their product and they have the proprietary right to it. It’s also important to know that a paper and ink (or digitally produced) product is also automatically copyrighted.
MLM or multi-level-marketing products do not fall into this category. This is another reason why they are generally not well suited for joint ventures.
Unique
A business that creates its own product also totally eliminates its competition because no one else can organize and present the information in the same way. Even if others steal their idea they can not exactly duplicate their work or present it in a way that’s uniquely theirs.
Not Capital Intensive
Information products are not capital intensive. There’s no capital involvement as far as stocking or inventory of any products, because there’s no inventory on hand.
Low Risk
The information business is very low risk. You don’t have to worry about products being returned because the value is in the information not in the product itself.
First Amendment Protection
Information is protected by the first amendment of the Constitution under free speech. Which means if you write or sell information about investing, loosing weight, dieting, vitamins etc. your protection would be a lot stronger against law suits.
However, it’s quite a different story if you were to sell actual investments, diet pills, etc. You would then have to be a licensed investment professional, have FDA approval on the diet drugs and you could still be easily sued.
Easily Duplicated
Once an front-end product is successful, you can easily duplicate your success with additional similar products. You can add back-end products that are more expensive than your front-end product. So you can build on this and add related additional products to expand your product assortment.
No Publishing Costs
Basically there are no publishing costs except for the time it takes and the one-time cost for the software needed to create the information product.
For example, using a program called Adobe Acrobat, which can make digital products that can be used on both IBM and Macintosh platforms, costs less than $200. This is pretty inexpensive when you consider the old way of print publishing, which could easily cost you $1000 for a minimum book order from a printer.
No Fulfillment Costs
Also, remember digital products have no fulfillment costs and no shipping costs.
Run On Auto-Pilot
To top it off, the selling of digital products can be set to autopilot and can run 100% totally unattended.
For example, let’s take a Web site that sells a digital information product:
- The customer simply places an order on-line with a credit card on a secure server
- The order is processed in real-time while the customer waits on-line
- As soon as the credit card purchase is approved, the customer can download the information right then – all without involvement on anyone’s part
Here are some information-based products on a wide variety of subjects that are successfully sold on-line and which you could get into:
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- Paid newsletter or e-zine subscriptions
- How-to manuals, reports and guides
- Software products
- CD ROMs
- Audio tapes
- Video tapes
- Membership sites
- Etc.
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