Aminology

The information marketing industry is strange. You’ve got the ‘get rich quick’ scam marketer types that (financially) excel in the industry by exploiting the foolish, gullible and poor through tasteless yet rather insanely effective sales gimmicks, and then you have an angry super affiliate from the other side of the online marketing industry waving his fist in the air, denouncing all eBook publishers and peddlers and calling for a crusade to end the insanity of it all.

While it makes for good entertainment, I like to distance myself from both the phony marketer and anti-eBook crusader types. I am also an information marketer, but my approach is serious and reputable. I understand the necessity of good sales copy, but I don’t like over-hyped, everything-is-highlighted-and-underlined sales letters.

Publishing information as a product for sale is a business. And like all business models, there are the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good

The good informational products offer long-term value to the buyer and long-term profitability to the publisher. High quality informational products are usually niche targeted and are written and produced by real experts. They provide the customer or member with the knowledge they were looking for, without asking them for an obscene amount of money. They are typically sold on a professional, non-scammy website with a simple, elegant design and a relaxed sales copy. Good information products thus rely on credibility, positive reviews and a general public approval within its respective niche. As opposed to poor quality products, they don’t rely on an over hyped sales copy to bring in the sales. Good examples of informational products are Seth Godin’s IdeaVirus and Brian and Tony Clark’s TeachingSells program, the latter of which actually offers multiple products through a variety of formats.

The Bad

Unfortunately, there is an abundance of bad informational products. These usually come in the form of an eBook, where the time spent on the actual product is a small fraction compared to the time and effort put into marketing the product. These products rely on positive reviews by unethical affiliate marketers that only care about making a good ROI. What seperates the bad from the ugly is the niche. No matter how bad the information product is, it will never truly be ugly unless it’s a ‘get rich quick’ product.

and The Ugly

The lowest of the low. These products are ‘get rich quick’ guides. They are usually not only of a poor quality, but they have the sole purpose of making the product publisher rich through the poor mans pennies. These products claim to teach noobs how to make millions, yet the authors of these products depend on selling the dream so they can pay their own bills. And what’s even more ugly are the affiliates that promote these products - most of these affiliate fully understand the underlying scam behind it all. A crap informational product can be identified by a heavily hyped sales letter with excessive use of punctuation, highlighting, underlining, and other cheap copy tactics. As a rule of thumb, the more overhyped a sales letter is, the more it is trying to compensate for the sheer garbage that is to await the fool that decides to invest in the product. Certain ‘internet marketers’ take pride in this and come public with their products under the illusion that they are real marketers or entrepreneurs. Alex Goad, author of Google Payload and Project Black Mask, immediately comes to mind.

I will talk a lot more about how I approach information marketing later on, from the basic concepts behind creating and publishing a quality informational product to different marketing tactics you can use to bank even harder from your product. I’ll also talk about why I totally recommend marketing your own goods rather than marketing someone else’s product or offer as an affiliate, so affiliate marketers reading this may want to stay tuned to read my alternative method of making money online. I’m speaking as an internet marketer who happens to be both an affiliate marketer and information marketer.