Bootstrapping with Information Marketing
When you have no money to start out and your job is keeping you busy from doing much otherwise, one area to consider is selling information on a topic that is in demand. In every field people are searching for the right information to help them do things better. This could be from areas such as an hobby or basically how manage their lives.
The advantage with information is that you can present without too much overhead. The information could be in Writing, Audio, video or live in person or conference call format. Another important factor is that you do not have to be the person generating the information. You could locate an expert in the field of choice and interview them. Then market the interview either as audio or video and make a written transcript of the interview.
The most important thing about selling information is to make sure that the outcome of the product would generate results for the client. No point in taking up a cheap PLR book online to sell without knowing that it will bring real results.
The best way to sell or advertise information is on the Internet or you can use some cheap classified ads in your local area. In terms of the Internet you need to have keywords related to the product or problem you are trying to solve.
How would you go about this?
First lets say you have several areas you know well or have strong interest, you would then do some research to locate keywords that are related. Once you find those general keywords, you would then research what are the demands for each keyword on a daily or monthly basis. This is your first step to see what makes sense to pursue. Best tool to test is the Google Adwords tool.
Once you nail down one area to pursue further, the next step is to generate content for your product. Now, this content could be a online booklet, video or Audio file or combination which is highly recommended. To speed things up you could find an expert in the field to help and share the proceeds. You can look at existing articles and form your own product based on these contents.
To deliver the product, you could use a basic blog well presented with the necessary buttons to purchase and download the information right there. You could use wordpress.com or blogger.com for the blog if you do not want to pay for a site. Paypal.com could be used for the payment button side of things.
How do you get the word out?
So far, everything looks good to do. The biggest challenge is to get the word to the right people. The first thing is to make sure you have good presentation of the product and your site. Make it look respectable and have the interest to grab clients. Once that’s done, you could approach people who are established in the related area and ask them to market to their clients. In this way, you could already have 1000s of potential clients to look at your product without any upfront cost. This will need work to call the prospective partners and show them that your product is really worth the effort.
The other way to get the word out is probably to give away some preliminary free information using advertising on social sites and free classified sites. Once people get the free stuff that is good, they could decide to buy the full product.
Lets say you want to market locally. Then you could use local community notice boards, get event planners to present the free side of the product to their audiences etc..
In the end, we all have skills that can help to solve someones problem, we need to get out of our comfort zone and achieve our vision for life.
