Information Products Are Worthless

By Posted on 4 min read 1116 views

I’ve put a pretty bold statement on the title of this post. Especially considering that most of us in the IM market are selling information products.

But don’t hit the back button just yet, there’s a reason.

First of all though, let me explain why I’ve called this post:

Information Products Are Worthless

It’s because you can find everything that you want to for… free!

That’s right, everything you need to know about is freely available, from marketing to skydiving. If you go to Google now and type in:

“write killer headlines”

You will get something similar to…

Writer Killer head

 

That’s over 2.5 million results which are related to writing killer headlines!

So if everything we need is freely available then why do we make, and people buy, information products.

Because there’s too much information.

And most of the time time the people searching for the information don’t really know what they’re looking for.

That’s definitely been me in the past, and I’m sure it will be me again in the future.

You see modern society has a schooling system that generally teaches us facts. It doesn’t teach is how to solve problems, how to (in effect) teach ourselves.

Have you seen threads in forums or reviews saying completely conflicting views on whether an information product works?

The most common assumption is that some of the reviewers know the product creator.

But then it also happens on some products to such a large scale that this simply can’t be the case.

So what is the reason?

It’s the type of person and the position they were in when buying the product. Broadly speaking there are two types:

  1. The buyer who knows what they need to move their business forward
  2. The buyer who still doesn’t understand what they need to move their business forward

Most buyers are going to be in the second category, and that’s why products that claim to show you how to… “Start Making $3000 A Month!” sell.

Why?

Because that’s the end-goal for a lot of the buyers. But, most of them won’t achieve the end-goal as they don’t understand what they’re truly looking for.

They will flit from one approach to another never succeeding in any of them.

And that’s because they don’t know how to teach themselves.

This is NOT the sort of customer that you want, at least not yet.

But surely that’s great, won’t that mean that I’ll make a lot of sales off them?

You may well make a lot of sales off them. But they will never be happy. They will never achieve their goal and that means that they will blame you. Ultimately that leads to mixed reviews of your services and yourself.

Now look at the other buyer. This is a buyer who knows what they need to move forwards with their business.

They may only just be starting but have done their research and decided that they’re going to learn how to use Facebook Ads to drive traffic to their landing pages and offers as they’re selling a product which will appeal to a social media based audience.

To have got to this stage they must already have a good understanding of how to teach themselves.

Which means… they’ll do it again when using your product.

They’ll put it into practice and focus on it and that will create success. That success will be attributed to you and boost your services and your own names.

The key difference is that this person knows that they can find the information they want online for free if they want to.

What they’re paying you for isn’t just your individual approach, but the convenience of not having to search around the internet finding and testing the free information.

This is exactly the customer you want.

But how do you know if your customers are going to be the ones you want?

You don’t.

This where both your sales copy and information in the product come into play.

By structuring your sales copy correctly you can make sure that you get the right customer. The customer who will put what you’re selling into action and leave glowing testimonials.

But don’t forget when writing your product that…

Most people aren’t good at teaching themselves.

That means that you need to think carefully about the structure of your product and how your members will go through it.

All the processes should be broken down into bite size and easily achievable sections. Never forget that the information you’re providing can be found for free, the reason people are buying it from you is because they’re expecting you to provide everything they need in one place and teach it to them in a manner that they will be able to implement it.

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