subject: The Three Pillars of Info Marketing Success by:Neil Asher [print this page] So you are ready to throw your hat in the ring of Internet marketing. Let's start talking about some action steps. How do you go about it? How do start your own information product publishing business?
There are three key elements you need to learn to start a business online. You might consider these to be three key pillars of a successful information product publishing business. There's your content pillar, there's your conversion pillar, and there's your customer pillar.
Now, others might break it down in different ways, but this comes from a $6,000~$12,000 a year mastermind program we offer, coaching authors, speakers, coaches, entrepreneurs. We teach them how to grow successful information product publishing businesses, and you can believe that it works, and it works well.
Let's start by looking at the first pillar, content.
Your content is your products. It's all of your videos, your audios, and your e-books. It's your teleseminars, your tutorials, your workshops, and your consulting services. It's the articles that you write, too. In other words, content is all of the material that you teach.
It has long been said that "content is king" on the Internet, and that's still just as true today as it was when the first electronic bulletin boards went up in the early 1990s. Your content is the heart of your information products. It's what's going to allow you to make money online.
The second pillar is conversion. This is all of the spots in your business where you actually ask someone to take action. Prospects opt-in and they convert on your landing page, or they buy something and they convert to becoming a customer. They convert from one level of relationship to another, from stranger to contact, contact to prospect, prospect to buyer, buyer to loyal customer, loyal customer to advocate.
Conversion is all about marketing, but marketing is not just about sales. It includes everything you do to establish the value of your products and expose them to potential customers. It's about positioning, and branding, and promoting. It's the way you get your content into the hands/minds of your customerswhich brings us to our third pillar.
There's a story about a question that a Harvard Business School professor once asked his class, "What's the single most important element that all businesses need to succeed?" Some of the answers were "enough capital," "a good business plan," "an entrepreneur willing to take risks," and lots of other important things.
Then, when the rest of the class seemed to run out of ideas, somebody in the back row piped up: "Customers!" Bingo. That was the right answer.
So the third pillar is customers. To succeed, you have got to attract customers. You got to get customers to come to you in the first place. This requires list building and other activities aimed at identifying who is likely to buy from you. This is also where you really learn about the techniques that you might think of as "advertising."
So there are your three key pillars. You are going to build your information marketing business on a solid foundation: your content pillar, your conversion pillar, and your customer pillar. And just like a stool needs all three legs to stand, so will your business require all three of these to succeed.
About the author
Neil Asher (http://www.neilasher.com/freestuff.htm) has built five multi-million dollar companies from zero, including one he took to $8 million in sales in under two years. He has created and sold successful franchises in England, Italy, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. Visit his web site for access to 17 FREE videos, 6 FREE books and two hours of audio training, revealing "How To Make BIG Money Selling Information Products On The InternetEven If You Don't Have A Website And You've Never Sold Anything On The Internet Before."
