How Safe Is Your Infopreneur Business From Going Belly-Up?

 

For many years after I started out as an infopreneur, creating content for the Web, I had no clearly defined business model.

The initial steps were guided by passion. Later on, being recruited to work with a big content publishing company, I just wrote articles and curated links, being paid for the work I did. And even though I closely observed how this large corporation made use of content created by dozens of people, it didn’t gel into a clear concept of business models until much later.

During this time, I was at the mercy of any competitor. The entire venture could have imploded dramatically. Because, novice that I was, I had no idea about what I was trying to build, and how I was going about it.

If that sounds like you, don’t worry. You are not alone.

Turning a Hobby Into a Business

For many people dabbling in Internet marketing, the initial venture is more of a curious hobby or a fond dream than anything serious. The thought of being able to make some extra money while working from home, or the potential of replacing an income and leaving a hated job, or even the wild ambitions of building a publishing empire right from home leads many infopreneurs to explore the arena.

They buy a few courses or ebooks. They write a few articles. Maybe launch a blog. Create an ebook or special report. And soon, they know whether it’s right for them – or not.

Often this decision is guided by early success. When your blog is visited by hundreds of readers, when your free ebook gets downloaded dozens of times, when your email list grows by tens of new subscribers every week, it’s a thrill that gets you more excited about information marketing.

One of the reasons for my blogging and writing is to inspire and encourage you to try being an infopreneur, and guiding you towards some quick and early success – so that you too are motivated to try doing this more effectively.

But even after you’ve decided that becoming an Internet infopreneur is a good choice for your future, it doesn’t automatically mean you’ve got all you need to build a thriving and profitable business around it.

Before turning a hobby into a business, you need to learn a lot more about the nuances of information marketing. At the head of a pretty long list comes a careful study of available infopreneur business models, and the choice of which one(s) is best for you.

What Is a Business Model?

A business model is an overview that describes how an organization intends to create value and deliver it to clients. It’s the nuts and bolts of how a business plans to generate revenue and profits. Value is a pretty general term, which can be defined in economic, social or other terms.

Your model must explicitly plan and list out:

• how you’ll reach customers
• what makes your product or service unique
• what price you’ll charge
• how and to whom you’ll sell
• your product delivery system
• your customer support system
• how you plan to delight customers

But as an infopreneur, there’s one important step to take before you get into the details of each of these steps… deciding what kind of information marketing you’ll engage upon.

We can make lists as long as a few hundred items if it comes to listing out the various types of information business models available. But in a very broad sense, there are only 3 ways to create a viable information business.

1. Lead Generation
2. Content Publishing
3. Direct Selling

All other models are variations and derivations on this basic theme or premise. There are dozens of ways to generate leads; each of them can be a distinct business model with all the above-mentioned components. But in a general sense, it falls under the umbrella term of ‘lead generation’.

So let’s outline each of the 3 infopreneur business styles, so you can see which among them best suits your needs and preferences. Your information business may include elements of more than one of them – and that’s perfectly ok.

Lead Generation

Every business that sells a product or service needs someone to sell it to. And not everyone in the world is interested in what you have to sell. A prospect who is likely to want or need what you are selling, and will benefit from being made aware of it, is referred to as a ‘lead’.

Lead generation is the process of identifying and collecting leads to pass on to a business which tries to convert them into buyers or customers.

Leads are expensive. In certain industries, a qualified prospect is worth $30, $50 or even hundreds of dollars. And people behind those businesses are happy to pay anyone who can send them qualified leads, because they know these are leads who will earn their business a huge multiple in profits.

That is the reason businesses exist for generating leads. You can get paid on a ‘per lead’ referral basis, or on a different scale of compensation that you negotiate with the company or business that uses your leads.

Lead generation is an infopreneur business model primarily because you can attract large volumes of relevant leads through information marketing. Let’s say you’re gathering leads for a home repair business. If you publish an informative article about roof repairs or kitchen remodeling, your readers are very likely to be people interested in the subject because they plan to either have their kitchen done over or need to fix a leaky roof.

Once you have those readers on your website, consuming your informative content about home repair, it is relatively easy to slip in a mention about a company that can help them with home repairs – and invite them to request a quote if they are interested.

Bam!

If an interested prospect fills in the form, you get paid for the referral.

Everyone wins. The prospect gets to work with a reliable company that you refer them to. The company gets to find clients without having to solicit them or advertise for them elsewhere. You benefit from the referral bounty you get from sending your visitors to them.

That’s one of the infopreneur business models. Here’s another.

Content Publishing

A business model that’s familiar to many information marketers is the content publishing model. It’s followed by thousands of publications, like newspapers, magazines, blogs and even news agencies.

In a nutshell, the model involves creating or curating valuable content on a niche and presenting it in a way that generates income to the publisher.

Packaging information in the form of a printed book and selling it in bookstores is an example of the content publishing business model. Reporting the daily news in the form of a printed (or even digital) newspaper which people buy or subscribe to is another. A private access membership site which charges an entry fee to consume exclusive content published for its members is one more.

These are familiar models for many millions of people who see it in action every day. They understand the concept of paying money to receive quality information packaged in attractive and useful form.

A variation on this model is making the published content accessible for free to anyone – and making money through advertising around the content.

This is a common approach to content publishing on the Web, where the diminishing cost of sharing content leads to an expectation that everything should be available for free. You’d think twice about picking up a magazine or morning paper at the news stand and walking away about paying for it. You expect to be charged for it, because there’s a hard cost involved in printing the material.

Not so on the Web. You click happily from one site to another, not ever thinking twice about consuming their content for free. Indeed, if a website owner asks you to pay for their content, you may well become furious!

So to work around this value perception, infopreneurs use a work around to profit from content published. Because a specific type of content attracts a unique demographic of consumers, it is a natural extension to make money from people and companies who desire access to this group of people.

By allowing a business to advertise a related product or service on content published on your website, you are again creating a win-win-win situation.

• Your readers win because they are presented with a relevant offer.
• Your advertisers win because their offer is viewed by interested prospects.
• You win because you get paid (indirectly) for the content you publish.

And there’s one final infopreneur business model to look at.

Direct Selling

It’s clear and obvious what this is all about. Selling stuff – directly to consumers of your content. Or even selling your content itself.

The difference between direct selling and other models is that it doesn’t rely upon any intermediaries, but offers you a way to monetize your audience directly, on your own.

Where the lead generation model requires you to find a business that can use your leads and pay you for them, and the content publishing model relies upon outside advertisers who want to target your audience, direct selling lets you go right to the source – and sell your followers what they want or need.

The products you sell them may be ones you created yourself, or ones you promote as an affiliate to earn a referral commission on each sale you make.

The approach you take to selling can vary based on your circumstances. Some infopreneurs will place ads in and around their content published on blogs, websites and newsletters. Others will weave the selling message into the content itself. Still others may sell their content directly.

Direct selling as an infopreneur business model works extremely well because the nature of content that you create naturally appeals to and attracts a well targeted type of viewer or reader. It is far easier to promote and sell something relevant to a niche audience than it is through advertising to a broad market, even if the latter is much bigger.

With the direct selling model, all you need is a small group of passionate fans to make a decent living. And if you create and sell your own infoproduct, you get to keep most of the profit from each sale.

What Else Does It Take To Sell?

So with this information to hand, you’ll be able to choose the idea business model for your infopreneur business. That’s the first thing to settle.

Once you’ve decided upon a business model for your venture, it’s time to look at some common points relevant to all 3 models. Learning more about them, and mastering the skills required, will help you generate a flood of sales.

The first is copywriting. Copywriting is the art of crafting words that compel and convince your ideal prospects about the desirability of owning the product or enjoying the service that you plan to sell them. It involves a mix of psychology, technical skills and a deep understanding of your marketplace and the forces that drive them.

The other thing you need is quality content. As an infopreneur, you live or die by the nature and quality of the information you put out, and the value that you provide. And since the success of any model you use will depend upon how big an audience you manage to attract, this becomes a major driver of your success as an information marketer.

And underlying it all is one of the core tenets of being an infopreneur…

Understand Your Market

Some information marketers get it right intuitively. Others learn it after making many mistakes. And some take the research route to discovering it.

No matter which way you choose, it is vitally important to understand your market.

If you are an integral part of your own target market, you may be able to figure out your typical prospect’s motivations and fears by putting yourself in their place. But this won’t always work – and especially not if you’re entering a niche market that’s relatively foreign to you.

Yet you need to find out.

• What kind of prospects are those who are your business’ ideal clients?
• How much can they afford to pay for your products and services?
• What value adding methods will they most appreciate and pay more for?

The answers to these will make or break your venture.

Be it content publishing, lead generation or direct selling that’s your business model, whether you have killer copywriting and top notch content on your websites, the most important factor that determines the success or failure of your information business is your understanding of your market – and the match between what you offer and what your prospects want.

Get it right, and the sky is your limit!

All success

p.s. If you haven't yet read my free "The Smilenaire Way" report, grab your copy here - and decide if you're ready to start smiling every day in your business. (When you are, click here)

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Tags: business model, content publishing, direct selling, lead generation, market, niche, research, understand

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