How to sell information online

Do you have some information you think might be useful to other people? Wondering if it would be possible to sell that information for good money? Read on to find out how to sell information online!

We are living in the age of information.  When you think about it, most work done these days is either producing on processing information. As automation has replaced many manual labor jobs and the internet has become the most common media, you can rest assured this is a growing trend.

Since most work is related to information, it’s safe to say information is money. The internet has made it possible for anyone to search and to sell information. And the fact is people are making fortunes selling information online.

Before I go on how you can monetize the information you have, let’s look at some of the ways information is being sold.

Ways of selling information

Before the internet information was mainly sold in the form of books and other printed media like magazines and newspapers. You have seen the countless how-to and for dummies manuals and tutorials.

After that came audio tapes and recordings of different kinds. Shortly after them came video recordings which gave new possibilities to the visual information that could be conveyed.

As the internet became mainstream in the 90s a whole new way of searching information became possible. Anyone anywhere in the world could look for information produced anywhere in the world. While this was great for things like freedom of speech and education people soon realized the potential to make money selling the information they had.

There are essentially two ways to produce information to sell. You can either be very specialized in a subject – an expert if you will –  and already know more than anyone else about your field. If you are willing to share your information, (for compensation of course, It’s only fair to get paid for your know-how.) all it requires is putting your knowledge in a marketable form. This might mean writing a book or creating a website for example.

The other way is to specialize in processing information produced by others. I want to make perfectly clear this does not mean stealing or plagiarizing other peoples content. It means finding the solution to a problem people are having by doing research. You then combine only the necessary bits from here and there to offer a solution. You’d be surprised how many problems there are waiting to be solved.

Why sell information online

So why would someone want to sell information online, can you make real money with it? Well the answer is yes, yes you can.

Here’s the thing. If you write a book and that book ends up being a best-seller that sells millions of copies, you will be getting paid for years or decades for the effort you put in to producing that book. It’s of course very hard to write the best-selling book but it’s actually not that hard to produce valuable information and sell it online. You just have to know what people are looking for and find a way to introduce your information to them. And just like with books, once produced, the content will potentially bring you income for years to come.

The internet is so full of information that it usually takes people a lot of time researching when they are looking for a solution to a problem they are having. That’s why people are willing to pay good money if someone has done the dirty work of researching for them and offers a solution to the problem they are having.

The other good reason is that you get to help people by producing content and products from information you probably feel passionate about and are very knowledgeable in. There are few things in life that offer a greater sense of accomplishment and pride than knowing your work is helping people all around the world.

The fact is, if you possess true expertise or are good in looking for information you can make a living selling information online – and that living can be a very good one if you work hard.

People have made millions by blogging, content creation and selling information products. What do you think, would those people have rather used their time working for someone else?

It’s possible to achieve a completely passive income by selling information. If you set your business up right your information content will do the work for you on automation. It of course takes quite a bit of work to create the content in the first place.

How to start selling information yourself

Let’s look at some ways you can start selling information online today.

Anyone can sell information online but to get someone to buy it is a different story. For anyone to be interested in the information you are offering it has to be specific, helpful and unique.

Unique doesn’t mean you can’t combine information produced by others but it’s pointless to sell information that is common knowledge and available to anyone for free with a quick search.

Your role is to solve problems if you wish to sell information. This can be anything from helping people to lose fat to teaching how to sing or even building V8 engines. Anything really that requires know-how to accomplish.

Find the problem

So the first step is to find out what problems people are having in the niche you are in. Let’s take the building V8 engines as an example (I’m not an expert in this subject but I do know something about combustion engines and the mechanics involved so this is just an example from the top of my head).

So let’s say you’ve been building engines all your life and know pretty much everything there is to know about building engines and you might have some valuable knowledge to offer to people. Remember, this could be anything, this is just an example.

I would start by doing something called alphabet soup in Google to start looking for what people are searching for. You take your main keyword, in this example V8 engine and put it in to Google search and insert alphabets after (or before) the main keyword to see what Google suggests. The suggestions Google comes up with are likely real searches people have made and will give you great ideas.

Here’s couple examples:

 

So here I gathered four things people are looking solutions for: V8 engine architecture, best V8 engine to build, cheapest V8 engine to build and V8 engine tuning.

I would then do some keyword research on those terms using a keyword research tool. I use a service called Jaaxy, you can try it for free for 30 searches. There are others but this is the one I’m familiar with and thousands of other people are using it with good success.

Let’s see what Jaaxy comes up with our Google suggestions:

I’m not going to go very deeply to the Jaaxy parameters here but what we are looking for is some decent traffic and low competition. I wrote more about using Jaaxy here. Avg and Traffic tell us the average amount of searches for that exact term/month and the amount of traffic you can expect if you rank on the first page of Google on that term. QSR tells us the amount of competing sites for that exact term.

So with a quick search Jaaxy tells us right away that the Google suggestions are actually very low in traffic and it would really make no sense to aim for those keywords. But this doesn’t make our research a failure. Jaaxy gives suggestions related to your search, so let’s see what we can find there:

From this list I picked the keywords build your own v8 engine and how to build engine. They both have some traffic and pretty low competition (I aim for QSR below 100). The competition is especially important when creating a niche website to sell your information. If you use paid traffic, the amount of searches might be more important in some cases.

How to build engine seems like a great keyword at first glance. It has low competition and good traffic but it is actually a part of a sentence or a misspelled sentence as it’s missing the article an. So let’s see what it looks like if we add that missing word in:

Spelled correctly the keyword has a bit more competition but it’s still very good. Let’s go with it. In reality, it’s quite a broad term and I would go for something more specific but for the sake of example this will do just fine.

Create the solution and make the problem and the solution meet

So you are someone who knows all about engines and you think you could offer a solution to people looking for information on how to build engines. The next thing would be to create a solution. There are many ways to go about this, you could:

• Create a YouTube channel about building engines if you have the means.
• Build a niche website
• Write your own product like an ebook or video tutorial series
• Use social media and paid advertising

Those are just a few examples, the options are many. The most important part is to create useful targeted information about a real problem and then finding a way to offer that information to the right people.

One of the best ways is to create your own niche website as you will actually own this. When you create content in YouTube or in social media you are actually producing content for them, on their terms. The company might remove your content with your hard-earned traffic in a blink of an eye. If creating a niche website is something you might be interested in, check out this post.

Profit

Once you have established content and traffic it’s time for final piece of the puzzle, monetisation. There are a few ways to accomplish this (these are the ways I’m aware of, I bet there are more options however).

Your own product

The first option is to make your own product like an ebook, a tutorial video series or even a complete education site with paid subscriptions.

To get people to buy your product you could create a “squeeze page” with a sales pitch. You would then drive your traffic to that landing page to get sales.

One of the most powerful ways to get buyers would be offering your product to affiliate marketers in places like ClickBank. You would offer up to 70% of your sales profit to the affiliate marketers.

It might seem very stupid to offer the lions share of your profit to the marketer but once you realize how powerful motivated affiliate marketers can be for your business you understand this is a win-win situation for both parties.

If you have a quality product and you are willing to share the profits, the marketers can do the dirty work of driving traffic to your squeeze page through their channels (websites, YouTube channels, social media, email lists etc.). You just need to make sure your product is top quality and your sales page converts well. Then you just sit back and watch the money roll in. The affiliate marketers of course make good profit on your product.

Affiliate marketing

The other way to make money with your information is becoming the affiliate marketer yourself. This could mean creating a niche website, like the building engines we talked about earlier. You would then offer free information to people in the form of blog posts, free ebooks or YouTube videos and include affiliate links related to that niche.

In the building engines niche you could for example write a long tutorial about building high performance valve heads to a specific engine and then offer a parts list from an affiliate site like Amazon or some big car part dealership that offers an affiliate program.

Conclusion

This is just a scratch of the surface of selling information online but these are methods regular people are using every day to make an income online.

If you are interested in selling information or making money online, I suggest you read my Wealthy Affiliate review. It’s pretty much the best place to get started with this stuff. It takes time to make an income online but it’s totally doable. You just need guidance because there are certain things you need to know to succeed and the competition is tough these days.

That’s all the time I have right now but if you have any questions, drop a comment below and I will do my best to answer them for you.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading!