How to Start Information Marketing in Nigeria

What is Information Marketing

Information marketing, as the name implies, is basically about selling information to people online. This information is usually made available in soft copy and could take the form of e-books, reports (or e-booklets), videos, audio or any other format. For a country like Nigeria, e-books are generally easier and more accessible over the Internet than videos because of the slow internet connection speeds and expensive bandwidth costs.

Don’t let the word Marketing scare you. This is not face to face marketing and you do not need to meet anybody one on one or try to verbally convince anybody to buy anything. In info marketing, your web pages and email messages do all the marketing for you and all you have to do is sit back and wait for the payment alerts to start arriving on your phone.

How it Works

In this type of online business, once you have set up the proper systems and have started promoting and advertising, everything else is nearly automatic.

Information marketing is very good because you can begin to get returns within two or three months of starting up. Once the system is in place, all you are required to do is monitor it occasionally to ensure that you are getting the desired response, and also monitor your bank account. When anybody buys from you, you verify their payment and forward the product to their email and that’s it. This can either be done manually or automatically.

But unlike Google Adsense where you can start without any capital, to get fast and guaranteed results from information marketing, you need to invest a little amount to start up. The first sales you make can then be reinvested into the business and after a short while, you will begin to turn in increasingly bigger and better profits as your list of prospects grows and more people get to know about you and your products.

Also you do not necessarily need to be the one to write this information that you market. There are places where you can buy the rights to resell already existing ebooks or hire someone to write for you.

In our MOB course that I’ve been talking about, people who register also get some good e-books with the rights to resell so that they can start off with that therefore if you are planning to register for the course, you do not need to worry about something to start with. But if you do not have the necessary funds to buy resale rights or pay a writer, and if you do not register for my MOB course then you have no choice but to write your own e-book and hope that it is good enough for people to buy. You can also find some free ebooks with resale rights available online but many of the free ones are not of very good quality.

Once you have obtained the product, the next step is to promote and market it. There are two common approaches you could take to promoting it. The first approach is to build a list of prospective buyers by offering them something for free like a free e-book or a free email course. The strategy of building a list of prospective buyers is known as the indirect or autoresponder method. After using the free stuff to lure them in and increase your credibility then you start sending them emails gently marketing your products to them. Since you have already captured their email, you can keep mailing and mailing them trying to get those who have not yet bought to buy.

Another method is the direct method. Here you do not use an autoresponder to capture emails. All you need is just a web page talking about the benefits of your e-book and trying to convince the visitor to buy. This page, also known as a sales page, will list the benefits and contents of the e-book or package that you are selling and most importantly instructions telling people how to place their order.

For Nigerians, the simplest process of ordering is by stating your bank account and asking customers to pay into it after which they should send a text message to you with the depositor name, payment slip number, amount paid, email and phone. An example of a sales page is this one for our MOB course: www.ng44.com/mobs . Actually, this page has another longer version, both of which we are promoting simultaneously. The other sales page, written like an article, is at www.ng44.com/onlinebiz. And here is a page with ordering instructions: www.ng44.com/buytutors

When a payment is made into your account, you will get an alert from your bank and all you need to do is to confirm the payment with the texts sent to you and forward the e-book to the buyer’s email address. There are also automatic ways that payments can be processed via ATM card but that is a much more complex process.

Once you have your sales page up, your next task would be to start promoting and advertising the page so as to get as many people as possible to visit it, see what you have written and hopefully buy. With a great product, good list and a well designed sales page, you can make hundreds of thousands and even millions of naira from a single product within a very short time. It all depends on how convincing your sales page is and how well you are able to promote it.

One very important rule that you should always adhere to is honesty. It is easy to make false claims and deceptive statements on your sales page and yes it might actually improve your sales but if your product does not contain or do what you claim that it does, then you have automatically become a fraudster and your name becomes tainted online. So my most important advice to intending info marketers is never ever deceive or make false claims about your product. A little exaggeration is sometimes understandable but try not to over-do it.

In my MOB course, we cover the subject of Information marketing and Sales pages very thoroughly. If you are interested in learning, I want to give you a link to one of the massive resource mini-libraries that is only available to our MOB students. This is just to give you an idea of how thorough the MOB course is so if you really want to learn the nitty gritty of everything about online business you should definitely consider registering especially now that we are running a promo.

This is the link to the mini-library dealing with sales pages. Read everything: http://lib.ng44.com/imresources

If you want to learn more about the MOB course package, please visit www.ng44.com/mobs

If you are going with the other method (autoresponder method), the fastest and most effective way to build a list is through paid advertising on platforms like Facebook, Nairaland or Google or contacting popular websites directly. The bigger the list you are able to build and the faster you are able to build it, the bigger revenues you will get and the faster you will get a return on your initial investment.

Starting Out With Information Marketing

The minimum capital you will need to start information marketing is about N25,000 but to start off very well, I suggest a minimum of N47,000. Note that the more you are able to invest especially on advertising, the greater the profits you will make. In our case, we wrote our own e-book by ourselves and we started with an initial investment of about N60,000 spent mostly on advertising. Through continual reinvesting of our initial revenue, we were able to end up with about N2 million in profits after about a hundred days.

Here are the main things needed to start a successful info marketing business:

1. A Hot Product

A useful and highly demanded information product (ebook) is the first key to success. The product you are selling is very critical to the success of this business because you do not expect people to be interested in what they do not need. Generally, your product must be able to solve a very pressing need of the people in the niche that you are targeting. Some popular niches that are always hot are wealth creation, health and fitness (dieting, weight loss etc) and Relationships (finding love, satisfying your partner in bed etc)

Another very important thing to note is that your product must be of very good quality, must be worth the cost (even more than) and must do as you say it would, if not then nothing differentiates you from the many scammers out there. If you cannot create/write your own, you can buy the rights to sell someone else’s book. Such rights are called Private label rights or Resale Rights (or Master Resale Rights or MRR).

You can get resale rights of some good products from as low as N10,000 to N15,000 while the rights of some very powerful products may sell as high as N250,000. Students of our MOB course get some free MRR books that they can use to help get them started and also for practice. If you are good at writing, you could also create your own products and sell the resale rights to others for much more than the actual e-book costs and get yourself even additional revenue.

2. A Credit or Debit Card

This is what you will use to pay for the advertising, the autoresponder and any other online expenses. UBA Africard or Zenith Bank Visa Gold card are good bets. To get these cards is easy, you do not need to have an account with the issuing banks but you may need a minimum of $120 (about N20,000) initial deposit out of which $20 is taken as a one time card issuance fee by the bank leaving you with $100 to spend.

The card becomes active in 48 to 72 hours and anytime you want to load the card, you may need to buy the dollars from a BDC or black market and pay to Zenith Bank. For UBA Africard you may be able to load it with naira directly. To get more details about how to get any of these cards, go to any branch of the respective banks and ask them for details (i.e go to UBA and ask for Africard or go to Zenith Bank and ask for Visa Gold.

You can start with the minimum of $120 (in this case you will use a free website and the direct method). But if you can afford it, you should start with at least $200 (about N32,000). From this amount, $20 will be for the card and the rest $180 for advertising and any other payments.

3. An Autoresponder

An autoresponder is not mandatory in information marketing but it can be very very helpful. Instead of sending people directly to your sales page as done in the direct method, what you do is to use the autoresponder to collect email addresses and build a database list of prospects i.e potential buyers. It is also used to automatically send periodic email messages regarding your product to your list.

For example, in our free email lectures, we make use of an autoresponder. If you have not yet registered for the free email lectures, you can do so by visiting www.ng44.com/freecourse . We just created the various lectures of the course and stored them in the autoresponder configuring it in such a way that anybody who registers for the course is automatically sent a personalised email containing one new lecture every day.

An autoresponder is a wonderful thing that can save you the stress of sending regular messages to your prospects. It can also help you to build trust and credibility with your target market. It is one of the most powerful tools used in information marketing. There are some companies like TrafficWave, Getresponse, Aweber, Mailchimp etc where you can pay monthly to use their online autoresponder or you can build and host your own by yourself especially if your email list is very large.

As mentioned earlier, an autoresponder is not mandatory in information marketing but it is highly recommended and has the added benefit of giving you the contact details of people who have shown some interest in what you have to offer. These types of people are easier to convince and a series of well crafted email messages can help convince more people about your product than just a brief encounter with your sales page as obtains in the direct method.

4. A Webpage

Also known as a sales page, this is where you will put all the details about the product that you are selling. It will contain all the details and benefits of the product that you are selling and it is meant to convince the visitors to buy the product. An example of a sales page can be found at www.ng44.com/mobs which is the sales page of our Masters in Online Business Course. Another longer version of our M.O.B sales page can be found at www.ng44.com/onlinebiz

Now all these things listed above are not too difficult to setup as long as you have the correct guidelines. To make it easy for people living in Nigeria who wish to learn more, I explained how to do this step by step in my Masters in Online Business course. To learn more about the course, visit www.ng44.com/mobs

In the next lecture, we will look at a real life case study of how you can generate N300,000 within 2 months through information marketing using the four things mentioned above. Try not to miss it.

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