People have been selling information for many years. The most obvious kind of information product is the traditional non-fiction book. But there are many other kinds of information products. Audio recordings, for example books on tape or on CD; videos – like “How to improve your golf swing” DVDs; software products; seminars, training and workshops.

People are always interested in learning new things. You might think that you can find out how to do pretty much anything on the Internet, and to some extent that’s true. But many people don’t have time to do the research to find and collate all the information they would need to learn to do something outside of their area of expertise.

If you can find out what people want to learn about, you can create a product and sell it to them. And these days, it’s easier than ever to find out what people are looking for. You’ve probably seen Google’s handy-dandy keyword suggestion tool. It pops up automatically while you’re typing in the Search box.

Give it a try. Go to Google.com, and type in how to followed by a space, and wait a second. Google shows you a list of suggestions like this:

You can dig deeper by adding a letter of the alphabet like this:

Look for interesting topics that you know something about. Here’s an example – I typed how to get more:

The next step is to find out how many people are searching for the keywords you’re interested in. Fortunately, Google comes to the rescue here as well. The Google External Keyword Tool is a free resource which can give you a good idea of the number of people searching for a particular topic every month.

Here’s the result of my search for how to get more facebook fans:

You can see that there are around 1000 people searching for that phrase every month. If you try similar phrases, like get more facebook fans and how to get more fans on facebook you’ll find that there are a few thousand people searching for ways to increase the number of fans they have on Facebook.

Another factor you need to take into account is the amount of competition for your chosen keyword phrase. There are two kinds of competition we’re interested in. Firstly, how many competing products are there? And secondly, how many competing web pages are there?

Competing products are a good thing. If people have created a product and are spending money to advertise it, it means that people in the target market are spending money, which is what you want. A quick way to check on competing products is by looking at the number of Adwords ads appearing for the search term:

You can see that there are only 2 competing ads. As a rule of thumb, before I spent the time and energy creating a product for a market, I would make sure there were at least 8 ads. Back to the drawing board!

We’ll take a look at competing websites in another post.

If you are looking for a simple step-by-step method to build an Online business, take a look at the Simple Cash Blueprint

A Simple Internet Business Model is a post from: Online Business Blog

Take a look – http://plrspecials.com

PLRspecials is a post from: Online Business Blog

It’s easy enough to get an RSS feed from, say, Google Blog Search, and have it appear in your sidebar – if you scroll down to the “Online Business news” section in my sidebar, you’ll see that that’s exactly what I’ve done. But to turn it into a networking system, where your blog headlines could potentially appear on thousands of blogs, takes a talent for spotting the interconnections.

John Reese, of course, is the guy who made internet marketing history by selling a million dollars worth of his “Traffic Secrets” course in one day. He’s also credited with inventing the term “Virtual Real Estate”. Now he’s turned to the blogosphere – and the results will be interesting, to say the least.

Have a look at John’s blog for some of the background to his launch.

BlogRush displays a little widget on your blog, which lists 5 headlines from other blogs on the same topic as yours. Every time the widget is loaded, one of your latest blog posts will show on someone else’s widget.

You get rewarded (by extra distribution of your posts) for contributions to the network – such as people signing up through your widget.

If you’re looking for more traffic for your blog (and who isn’t?), give it a try. Like all the best things in life, it’s free.

BlogRush Syndication Network

Blogrush goes live is a post from: Online Business Blog

Michelle Macphearson has released her “Social Media Daily” blueprint, and you can download it for free.

This is one of those free reports that makes you question the value of all the $47, $67 and $97 products you’ve already bought (well, if you haven’t bought them, it must have been me.)

Michelle lists the specific social media sites you can use to build traffic to your site. There are tons of them. If you do 1/10th of what she suggests, you’ll end up with more traffic than you can imagine.

I hate it when people release free stuff like this, because I’d rather just keep it to myself. However, I take heart from the fact that thousands of people will download this report, glance through it, and leave it to gather digital dust on their hard drive. Only about 2% of the people who read the report will take action.

So… if you aren’t one of the 2%, please don’t download this report. You’ll save Michelle a little bit of bandwidth, and you know you won’t do anything with it anyway. Just roll over and go back to sleep in front of the TV.

Do not download this report is a post from: Online Business Blog

His other products are nothing short of phenomenal. They’ve shown me a whole new way to do business on the Internet. I use Munius, Relusi, Glyphius, Muvar and Nemeas on a daily basis; Rasof about twice a week. I’m not using Artemis Pro and Hermusa nearly as much as I should.

“the software works differently than the customer would have designed it”

My question actually relates to an “undocumented feature” in Relusi, and the response I received from Sufaq when I asked about it; I guess it’s a customer service question.

I also have a question about Muvar.

Actually, I suppose it’s really three questions – each of which is “An interesting, but benign observation that the software works differently than the customer would have designed it.”

If you have any questions for James, now would be a good time to ask them.

James Brausch’s Question Time is a post from: Online Business Blog

The products are the creation of Harris and Tellman Knudson, a marketer I’ve always enjoyed for his no-holds-barred, ADHD-fuelled attitude. In the sales letter, Harris quotes Tellman as stating that the three most leverageable skills are Traffic, Copywriting and List Building. (My interpretation of “Leverageable Skills” would be things you can do once, which keep generating income out of proportion to the effort you put in.)

If you add “Product Creation” to that list, you’d be pretty close to what James Brausch has been saying for some time. And these products are MP3 files – two hours per product – and transcripts.

If you’d like to have a look, here’s my affiliate link.

Moving House or Moving Product? is a post from: Online Business Blog