Hot Air Businesses: Why you should offer a physical version of your info product

Run a Google search for the keywords 'info product' and take a second to glance over the results on Page 1 and Page 2. There is a bounty of information out there on creating information products. Half of it is worth reading to reaffirm what you already know, lots of common sense marketing stuff, and the other half more or less is a trite attempt at offering an info product about creating and selling info products !

This is the trend. Anyone who has taken a shot at sifting and assimilating the mountains of resources and information about starting a web business and selling digital products can testify to the ridiculous amount of nobody's out there trying to be somebody. The sad truth is that nearly all of them fall far short of the mark.

Here are a couple of screenshots of some marketing attempts from two different info product sites:





The first of these two 'businesses' makes an attempt at offering you a 'plugin' (likely a WordPress plugin but I wasn't about to give up an email to find out). This sort of tactic is ubiquitous and commonplace amongst the plethora of badly-coded and seedy marketing sites out there, all promising way more than what they can offer. I cannot speak to the validity and effectiveness of 'squeezing' your clients down into an email list. I've never bothered to waste my time trying. A good product, particularly an informational product, lasts a lifetime and doesn't require upselling or lifelong updates to support it. A product that requires that sort of support and effort is a product that requires additional and continued work over time. When I think of a good informational product, I imagine a product that is all encompassing of a subject or niche, a product that contains timeless information that doesn't deprecate, a product that contains legitimate, real, and tried-and-trued information and secrets that months or years to gather, and a product that can be sold over and over and over again. This sort of quality you will never find in a downloadable ClickBank product or from some seedy website employing pop-up's begging you to stay on the page, using redirects to offer 'special' or 'limited time-only' offers, and every other trick they can image to squeeze $40 from you for a subpar, low quality product.

A real entrepreneur's first initiative is providing a great product. His second is making money. If you're determined to set out and create information products, do yourself (and more so, your customers) a favor; don't succumb to the enticing low margins of downloadable products. They're not scalable and you cannot grow a business that provides a genuinely high quality product from providing only downloadable products. Go the extra mile and first, research and develop a product that is outrageously superior to all your competitors offers. Take that information and perfect it. Copyright it, patent it; whatever you have to do. Then, produce that information in the form of a disc or DVD and retain sellers rights. Your goal is to dominate your competition. Employ every tactic in your book to do so.

Offering your info products on printed CD or printed DVD units gives you a physical product to ship. Some of you are cringing, considering the mere thought of establishing a USPS account and adding the additional tables to your MYSQL database to capture more than 'First Name', 'Last Name', and 'Email Address' already has you red in the face. Cut the tension, Johnny. It isn't necessary. Shipping a physical product is no more difficult than configuring a locked-content downloadable product system. In my opinion, it's way simpler. You capture addresses, pay <$4 to ship an info product, and batch ship 2-3 days a week. If the product sales incredibly well, you simply hire a fulfillment center and collect checks. A physical product always scales far better than a non-physical, easily pirated, and cheap info product.

If you don't believe me when I say 'easily pirated' then do this. I'm sure some of you reading this are a member of the guilty few running purely digital info product businesses. Go to google. Enter this search string, replacing 'nameofinfoproduct' with the name of any popular info product or even your own info product. Chances are good that someone has already stolen it and put it up for free public sharing. Try it out:

Search in google: site:mediafire.com 'nameofinfoproduct'  or try this one site:4shared.com 'nameofinfoproduct'. Catching my drift?

Physical info products shipped on encrypted  and printed cd's aren't as easy to pirate or at the very least provide a better layer of protection than immediately downloadable (and immediately uploadable, afterword) digital products. CD printing is cheap. You can get upwards of 500 cd's printed for around $200 dollars and sell each one at a much higher margin. Offer your info product with a spiral-bound guide, workbook, or accompanying printed product and you've got a product that is automatically superior to digital products. DVD printing is no different; it's cheap and easily produced. A video product is even more timeless.

My idea of a perfect info product looks like this:

Printed CD Product + 35-100 page accompanying book or other printed paper product + pocket-sized reference cards with highly valuable information printed on index cards and laminated for storage in a front or back pocket.

Printed DVD Product - 1-5 DVD's professionally produced and edited, not cheesy or gimmicky, with seriously applicable or actionable information along with a printed paper product.

I use We Print Discs for all my disc printing. They're cheap and offer the fastest turn around time. The interface is simple and they have templates that are easy to add your custom printed disc artwork to. Check them out at http://ping.fm/Mp70S

(I do not get a commission or affiliate payment for recommending them, I legitimately use their services, and they do have a 48-lead time.)

Choosing to sell a physical info product can make all the difference in your business. I recommend you test the idea and monitor the response. Testing is always a good option. Otherwise, I wish you luck! If you want to see some my personal results with physical versus digital, leave a comment and I'll correspond with you by email.