Hello! Sergey Smirnov is in touch. I want to tell you about a very interesting type of business that is gaining momentum every year. More and more people come to it from ordinary spheres of life. Thanks to the Internet, now almost everyone can start earning on their knowledge without leaving home.
In simple words, the infobusiness is the sale of information. No, this is not secret information that few people know, but information that is able to solve certain problems / needs of other people.
The infobusiness can also be described as follows: selling “one’s own expertise” in something. Just imagine how great it is! Not so long ago, in order to earn 100-300 thousand rubles, it was necessary to make a lot of efforts, for example: open your own business, hire employees, purchase goods, keep records, communicate with customers and much more.
And in most cases, it still won't work! That's what the statistics say. If you manage to pass all these tests and the business miraculously survives, then most people are so drowned in it that they simply have no time to live. Let's face it, this lifestyle isn't for everyone.
And reach an income of 100-300 thousand per month without hiring employees and everything else. I call it “money without stress”. We all constantly share information with someone, why not make an info business out of it?
You probably know that free information is not valued, it always has been. For example, a friend asks you something, you chew it up, explain in detail what needs to be done and how, he diligently nods his head ... After a while you meet and ask him: “Well, what did you do as I said?” And he says to you: “No! I didn’t have time, I forgot, I scored.” But if you were paid for the same information, then there is a high probability that a person, having received this knowledge, would immediately implement it in practice and get a result.
Because he paid for it with his hard-earned money! Remember how many trainings, training courses and e-mails you have. books are on your hard drive that you downloaded somewhere for free? Why haven't you studied them yet and never will? Because you got them for free!
Here I will not talk about the multi-million dollar information business, where you can’t do without your team and investments. This article is for beginners who are only - only interested in this topic.
I will say that among the well-known information businessmen in their circles, there are people who earn a million net rubles a month, without having their own team and office. Consider on simple example how a yoga instructor from a small town can become a successful information businessman.
I'm not sure that these trainers get 100-200 thousand a month by training people in the gym. After all, they are limited by the number of audience who are interested in it and their personal time. Now let's imagine that the same coach will start conducting his classes via the Internet.
He can record his tutorial on video and sell it to hundreds and thousands of people who will be interested, because the Internet erases all regional restrictions!
Not only residents of Russia, but also the CIS countries and even the whole world can become clients. After all, there are Russian-speaking people in Europe, and in the USA, and in Asia.
Such training programs are also called infocourses. As a rule, several info courses are created, ranging from inexpensive 1500-3000 rubles per course, and up to obscenely large amounts. It will depend on the niche in which the infobusiness is being built.
The most expensive information course that I have seen on the Russian Internet costs 300,000 rubles. Niche: finance, and the trainer works personally with the client. This method of teaching is called "". Let's calculate how much you can earn on an inexpensive information course. I found a yoga course for 1500 rubles.
To earn 100 thousand rubles, you need to sell only 67 courses. For the Internet, these are very small numbers.
In the information business, there are many techniques to increase sales. If the information businessman's product is of high quality, then expensive information courses will be bought from him! I took the yoga niche as an example, since it is not the most popular, and I wanted to show by this that money is made in almost any topic.
Here are some non-obvious niches I have found:
- mindfulness
- Meditation
- Healing
- qigong
- law of attraction
- Visualization
- Personal growth
How the info business works
If you are an expert in your field, you are good at teaching other people, and you generally like to teach, then you should definitely go into the info business.
The first thing you need to do is create your free infocourse. It could be a small email. a multi-page book or a series of video tutorials. Such a mini-product should be very useful for your future customers.
He must solve some problem or need. But, he doesn't have to decide everything! The client should form an opinion about you that you are really an expert in your field and he is ready to learn from you further, but already for money.
Paid course
Here a product is created that fully reveals the topic and provides ready-made solutions. In essence, you transfer your skill to another person. Make different versions for your product, for example: “standard”, “premium” and “vip”.
In the “premium” version you will give a bundle of bonuses, and in the “VIP” version there will be personal coaching. You will have clients in all three categories. Always give more than what is expected of you.
Now both products need to be packaged. Create a selling site and a magnet site that will collect customer emails.
Next, you need to register for the service. mailing lists and set up an automatic series of letters that will sell paid products at full auto. Through such a service, you will establish trusting relationships with customers. How it will work - we will consider a little later.
Traffic
Traffic (visitors to the site) is the “blood” of the infobusiness! If it doesn't exist, then everything else doesn't matter. Even if the information product is the best of all. What good is he if no one knows about him? And the traffic must be targeted.
I believe that the most important thing in the infobusiness is the product and traffic! You can attract traffic to your information business both in paid and free ways, you can read more about this in this one.
Start
Now we are all set to launch! We start to “pour” traffic to the page with a free course. If everything is set up correctly and you have started to attract target audience, then getting to such a capture page, the visitor, having entered his contacts, receives a free course in the mail, and you receive his email.
Then an automatically configured series of letters (sales funnel) starts working. This series lasts for several days. Each infobusinessman sets it up differently. Someone does offer immediately, and someone only on the 7th day.
The point is that such letters contain useful content, thus, the client begins to trust the author and he decides to buy an already more expensive product, which should be done in the second step.
Someone will buy immediately, someone in a month, and someone will buy in a year. Remember! Your base is your asset! The more it is, the more you will earn. The beauty of the information business is that over time, some customers will become your fans and they will buy everything you offer them!
But remember, you need to constantly work with the database, if you don’t send them useful content, then they will forget about you! Now you know what “infobusiness” is and how it works! Focus on creating quality content and traffic, all other technical aspects can be done by others.
What if I'm not an expert?
What to do if you are not an “expert”, but really want to make money on the info business? You can become a producer of some expert. Look for such people among your friends. There are a lot of people who are true professionals in their field, but they do not understand anything about sales and the technical aspects of the Internet business.
You can take over the entire organization of the infobusiness, and leave only content creation to the author. Producing is also suitable for people who do not really like publicity, and an info businessman is a public person. Also, a producer can have several authors at once, which significantly increases his income.
I wish you an ocean of traffic and a sea of sales!
Part 1 - Quick infobusiness from scratch
In this and the following articles, I will give you the optimal model, . At the same time, in order to start making money in the information business, you do not need any investments at all. Everything that I will tell you here is tested by me in practice. Use this scheme as a map to go through each stage as quickly as possible and not stray in circles for years. If you are not planning to make your own products yet, I recommend the article (opens in a new tab).
In fact, the entire information business from scratch to really big money can be divided into just three stages. it
Stage 1 - Quick infobusiness
Stage 2 - Automation
Stage 3 - Delegation.
And now we will analyze in detail how you best act at each of these stages.
Fast info business
At the very beginning of the infobusiness, you will have quite a few problems. Moreover, the lack of money for development is far from the most terrible problem. The worst thing is that you do not clearly imagine what, to whom, how and why you are going to sell. Until you answer these questions, you will not earn money. If only because people won't understand why they should pay you either.
This stage is often referred to as "choosing a niche" in the infobusiness. You can read more about “profitable” and “profitable” niches in the article about, but here I want to say only the following. It is impossible to choose your niche while sitting in the kitchen.
In other words, you can’t just take it and come up with “on your knee” in which niche you want to do an info business. More precisely, you can think of it, but it will not help you. Choosing a niche is like finding your purpose. This is not done in the kitchen with a piece of paper. Its purpose is forged in the process of work.
I like to compare the choice of a niche in the information business with how a person has been looking for his place in this life since childhood. Imagine a small child of 3-4 years old. Can you immediately tell what he has a gift for and what is his purpose? Only in very rare cases. More often than not, you can only determine what he's capable of. This boy is active and agile. Most likely, he will do well in sports. But this girl taught herself to read at the age of 4. It will most likely be easy for her. foreign languages and humanitarian subjects.
What do we do to determine what the child has a gift for, and not just an interest? We are starting to try many different directions. We give him to different sections, buy him different books and toys. You, too, at the first stage will have to try many different directions. This is what the fast info business is all about. In no case should you try to sit in the kitchen, “suck” niches “out of your finger”, and then sit down for six months to make free products, paid products, try to mold a funnel out of this.
Such funnels are initially unviable. And doing everything seems to be right, you will never see money from your infobusiness. You need to start with the infobusiness in the "manual mode". In other words, you need to do a lot of webinar speaking, sales, audience engagement, and live trainings and seminars.
At the zero stage - no "boxes" and no "automations". We will do infobusiness according to a different model. First, you need to understand exactly what and for whom you want to do. Take different directions. Sell a one-day online seminar on success today, and quickly learn words tomorrow. While you are at the very beginning of the infobusiness, this is the best option.
At the initial stage of the infobusiness, you have no money, no base, no reputation, not even a specific topic. In short, there is nothing but a burning desire to benefit people and earn big money from it. Your way out is sales through webinars. At the first stage, you must become the "black slave" of the information business. You will have to work hard and earn relatively little.
And the best way to start your way in the infobusiness is through online conferences. You need to participate in all possible conferences where there is at least some kind of audience. And you will be allowed to these conferences only if you earn at least something for them. In general, the organizers of conferences live rather sadly. They rejoice like children if the speaker brings them at least a few thousand rubles from his speech. And if you can provide it, you will be flooded with invitations. If you do not really know what online conferences are, then I will tell you in a nutshell.
At the very beginning of your fast infobusiness, you will need to work closely with the organizers of online conferences. There are people who earn in the following way. They take some common broad theme. For example, “women's happiness” or “how to start your own business”, or “the formula for success”, and they gather various trainers who broadcast in these areas.
As a rule, a trainer can participate in a conference if he sends an advertisement for this conference to his database. Having recruited 10-20 speakers in this way, the conference organizer receives a base of, say, several hundred participants who have registered for this conference. Participants listen to the speeches of all speakers in a row, one by one.
Such conferences usually last 2-3 days, 3-4 hours each evening. But there were cases when they organized monthly conferences that went non-stop 24 hours a day. All speakers are trying to sell something. The organizers, respectively, receive a fresh database of emails and 50% of the sales of each speaker.
Naturally, in such a “hellish information business” most often only the very beginners take part. For them, this is almost the only chance from scratch to come up with their proposal at least for some kind of audience. There are a lot of speakers, the audience quickly gets tired of sales. And the speakers themselves are far from top class. That is why the organizers are simply delighted if there is at least someone who can earn at least some amount.
This is your task at the first stage of a fast infobusiness. You need to find such conferences, contact the organizers, persuade them to let you speak without advertising in the database (you don’t even have a database), and then go out and confidently “close” the audience to your product.
Of course, you can try to organize a webinar yourself, and then the article "" will help you a lot (will open in a new tab).
But still, at the zero stage of the information business, it is probably better to entrust this matter to conference specialists. Let's now take a closer look at how this is all done.
First you need to write a competent “speaker's resume”. This tool will sell you to the organizers of online conferences. You need to take a good business photo with a professional photographer, describe in detail your regalia and merits in the topic on which you want to speak.
Everything related to regalia and trust, you can almost entirely copy from "". By reading your resume, the conference organizer should see that you can inspire confidence in the audience, which means that you will most likely be able to sell normally.
It doesn't hurt to have a little more confidence in yourself. Tell the organizer that you are just taking the first steps in the infobusiness, and you don’t have your own mailing list yet, but you can sell well. Even if you don’t have anything in your soul at all, one out of ten organizers will definitely agree to give you a try. Very often, for various reasons, they have unexpected gaps in their schedules that need to be filled urgently. This is where you will come in handy. This is how you can take part in your first online conference without any database mailing at all, and earn your first quick money in the info business.
If you can sell well, then consider that half the battle is already done. You will take a review from the organizer, and then you will just show it to other organizers - that's how I sell well. And soon they will write to you and ask you to speak. So you will not have almost a single free day in the week without performances. This is exactly what we need in the first step.
They can be found in large numbers by simply typing “an online conference on such and such a topic” into the Yandex search. I only ask you very much, do not plunge from the first steps into the study of which of the organizers “threw” and who did not. Yes, there are those who do not pay money to speakers. There are those who change the terms of cooperation without informing you. There are all sorts of people, and at the beginning of the information business you will have to work with all sorts. Whoever allows you to go out to the audience and speak is good for you.
Through a Yandex search, you will most likely get to the selling pages of these same conferences. Scroll to the very bottom and look for contacts. Also, be sure to check out the "speakers" section. Very often the organizers themselves take part in their conferences in the form of speakers.
Collect a dozen of such contacts and start sending them your resume. Trust me it will work. I even ended up as a speaker at the Seliger business conference. Despite the fact that I was just at that stage when I myself did not particularly understand what and why I was doing.
At the very beginning of the information business, you have only one task - to sell a lot and with high quality. Try not to sell large products. That is, it is better to sell 1-2 day online seminars than full-fledged trainings that you have to conduct for several weeks. And God forbid, not annual coaching "to the result."
The chances are too high that you will get bored with this particular topic much faster than you will become a true expert in it and learn how to give people true results. This means that your "coaching" will not be completed. People will be disappointed, a bad rumor will spread about you. They will start demanding money back, but you will no longer have this money, because you will have time to spend it. And then you will have to be very unsweetened. It’s not so sweet that you will “blow on water” for a long time, and be afraid to even approach the information business.
Do you think I made it all up? Oh no! I know dozens of people who ended their fledgling careers in the infobusiness just like that. What I wrote to you above is written in blood, and I myself escaped it with great difficulty. And I ask you to take this seriously.
Remember that live foods will always sell better. However, there is a risk that 1-2 people will buy from you, and you will have to conduct a one-day training for 1-2 people. And you know what? It will be necessary to carry out, do not break. But, you see, is it better to conduct a one-day training for one person than a 2-month training? And it's not funny, I once led a three-week training for 2 people, because I myself fell into the trap that I warned you about above. Nobody warned me about this when I started.
Set the price for your 1-2 day online seminar (training) in the region of 4-6 thousand rubles. I do not recommend selling cheaper, because this will not greatly affect the number of sales, but it will greatly affect the amount of money from sales. Pick a broad topic. The people who come to online conferences are the newest newcomers. They don't need deep knowledge. They won't understand or appreciate them. You need to meet their expectations as much as possible.
At a conference on "women's happiness" it is better to sell a one-day training "how to become a happy woman", and not a training "how to return your loved one who left for a rival" or "how to meet the man of your dreams if you are already over 50". Are there many of those from whom a loved one left? And those who are looking for their chosen one, and who are already over 50? You don't know and nobody knows. Therefore, take a broad topic and use your main trump card in sales.
Oddly enough, but your main disadvantage is your main advantage at the initial stage. When you come to the infobusiness from scratch, no one knows you. Use it. Tell me honestly that you are just taking your first steps in the infobusiness, and you may not yet be as well known in this topic as some great gurus.
But that's why you can give what they can't - your personal attention to everyone. They have too large an audience, they are no longer up to the problems of mere mortals. But you will not spare your time and effort to give maximum benefit to each participant personally.
In most cases, this alone will be enough to outdo other speakers at this conference. But if you still work deeply and - then you will generally become inaccessible.
After training “on cats” (that is, at conferences), you can go to individual partner webinars. Everything will be almost exactly the same there, with one exception - the organizer will put together a webinar specifically for you. Who this organizer will be, how many people he can gather and what quality - 100% depends on your sales results at conferences. If you can sell at the level of 100 rubles per listener online, this is one level. If for 1000 rubles from one listener online, this is a completely different level.
I'll tell you straight, if you learn how to cover a thousand rubles per person, then the owners of large high-quality databases will be very interested in you. As a rule, these are people with a name who will give you not only their audience, but also give you some of their influence. If a famous person collects a webinar for you, then he recommends you. With such a recommendation, the devil himself is no longer your brother. You can safely sell your trainings "on the forehead" for 10, and 20, and even 50 thousand rubles.
I hope you understand better now how to create a business from scratch without investment. But this is only the first stage of the information business. It is very important not to sit on it for a long time, and move on to the second stage (we will analyze it in the next article). How to determine that you have successfully passed the start of the infobusiness? First, you must already have money. No, not millions, but some free money that you can use to automate your information business. Let it be 20-30 thousand rubles a month, which you can safely spend, and not be very upset if you lose them.
Second, you must understand your topic. At the initial stage of the infobusiness, you should already decide what you like and what you want to do. You have tried selling and coaching on topics ranging from forex trading to lucid dreaming. You have realized that you are best at selling on such and such a topic, and it is a pleasure for you to work on it. So everything is OK, you have found your topic in the infobusiness. Then, perhaps, you will change it anyway or narrow it down, but for a start it will do.
And thirdly, you should already have positive feedback from your students on this topic. Invest as much as possible in each participant of your training so that he leaves you a video review. Suggest in training additional bonuses those who are not too lazy to turn on the camera and say a few nice words about you. You will find it very useful in the next steps.
If you have these three components, then it is already possible (and necessary) to move on to the next stages of the information business - automation and.
I hope this article was helpful to you. Don't forget to download my book. There I show you the fastest way from zero to the first million on the Internet (squeezed from personal experience for 10 years =)
See you later!
Your Dmitry Novoselov
The whole truth about the Russian infobusiness - based on the resonant "I'm annoyed that many infobusinessmen embellish reality." Round 2 - fight.
To bookmarks
A little more than a month ago, a resonant material appeared on the site “I am annoyed that many infobusinessmen embellish reality.” I bet you read it, commented it, liked it, and then spent a few more days eating popcorn, watching the battle of the “Ayazov witnesses” with the old-timers of the site. I offer an alternative opinion about infobusinessmen.
Founder of the TurMarketing.ru project Mikhail Ankudinov
When my friend and partner Dmitry and I watched this, we were overcome by mixed feelings: indifference, misunderstanding, sadness and anger.
Our article is an attempt to offer you a second round. Constructive. Such as the idea was to be the first material. There is a problem, and it is much deeper than it seems at first glance. What if we discard all this meme-holivar husk and talk about the honesty and environmental friendliness of the Russian information business in all seriousness?
What is wrong with the Russian infobusiness
Ask any reasonable person what he thinks about infobusinessmen, consultants, coaches and business coaches. And, most likely, you will hear in response that this is a "divorce and profanity." The creators of information projects are primarily to blame for this.
1. People who do not have expertise try to teach and transfer knowledge.
Buy a Russian information product, and you will quickly realize that this is an outright bullshit. Lack of consistency, poor quality of materials and no specifics in the instructions - meaningless boring chatter about nothing. As a result, the complete absence of the results declared during the sale (for the client).
2. There is no methodology by which knowledge is transferred
Even if the information product contains working technologies for obtaining results, they still need to be integrated on the client side.
If you have tried to teach someone something in your life or business, or just change the way it is, the way it should be, then you know that it’s damn difficult. The transfer of the process is painstaking work with a bunch of pitfalls: you need to test-describe-teach-control-fix. There is nothing of this in the infoprojects.
3. Deliberately high expectations and outright lies
Let's be realistic: Russian marketing overestimates expectations. But in infobiz it is elevated to the absolute. Cases and testimonials are invented, and when they really exist, zeroes are added to them. Descriptions on colorful landing pages swear to “bring it to fruition” and provide “ready-made algorithms,” but in practice there is none of that.
The logic is banal: they will buy from us, and then we will shift the responsibility for failure to customers: some will not do it and be ashamed to write about it, others will be engaged in implementation and will not reach the promised numbers, but we will say that they did something wrong - profit.
In the Russian information business, the overestimation of expectations is elevated to the absolute
Most self-proclaimed gurus look like crooks and charlatans who are after money, fame and flock. However, nothing new. A market niche that has a clear set of customer needs and pains that are easy to sell through, no major barriers to entry, and money to start with life cycle passes the transactional stage - the moment when its players cut the loot without thinking about the quality, service and results of customers. By the way, about them.
4. People buy it
It would seem that with our skeptical mentality, critically perceiving the surrounding reality, all this garbage simply cannot be sold. But this is only in theory. In practice, the current client, unfortunately, is stupid and naive. It is difficult for him to distinguish good from bad, because the quality standard has not yet been set. It's nice to believe that a magician will fly in in a blue helicopter and give, if not a bag of popsicles, then at least a well-built sales department.
But those who work in a real business know: they won’t fly in and don’t give. And in general, wizards are mostly crooked - they will break what had somehow worked before, and still leave an invoice for paying for their services.
Does all this mean that the infobusiness is evil?
In a spherical world in a vacuum, entrepreneurs are like unicorns jumping around their garden businesses, and in every place where they burp, reference business processes magically appear and break records for the value of all KPIs.
Entrepreneurs are like unicorns hopping around their garden businesses (no)
In practice, bringing even a small piece of work to some conditional “next” level is going through the throes. Testing hypotheses in search of best practices, and then a long and hard restructuring of “as is” to “as it should be”. And so time after time, piece by piece, process by process.
But the CIS reality is even harsher. An ordinary entrepreneur often does not even understand what “hurts” him and what to work on in the first place.
Here is an example from our business: every day we get calls from travel agents asking us to help get more bookings. Our manager asks what their conversion rate is, what channels they use. Some do not know what it is, others do not understand why we torture them about conversion when they “just need applications”, others name the indicator, but it is five times lower than the target (there is no point in bringing a herd of customers - first you need to “fix” managers). Total: for six such appeals, only in one case more applications are really needed.
Of course, the market is full of normal entrepreneurs who know everything about their business and understand what, when and how to do it. They do not go to trainings and do not buy information courses - they do everything themselves. But at a certain point, even they come to a point where the competence of their team is no longer enough to move on.
The company understands that it needs an injection of external expertise. In an ideal world, in such cases, large players recruit experts or hire consultants, small and medium-sized ones are called the info business. The company receives a structured working experience and assistance with implementation. Profit!
But when 98% of contractors are garbage, and the company does not find those who are in the coveted 2%, the system does not work. That is why we have what we have.
Are there "normal" business coaches?
Does this mean that there are no normal information businessmen-consultants-coaches-trainers? No. Ask the leading companies in your segments or regions that use advanced business technologies, and they will name at least a couple.
Only it will not be the hyped-up BM-Gandapas-Ayazy, whose main problem is that they are trying to be everything to everyone in an attempt to get even more customers, which makes them pop. These will be strong professionals from narrow niches, who are damn hard to find because of the crazy amount of coaching slag that flooded the market.
I have seen normal trainers of two types:
- People who have a high level of expertise in a complex typical task, which a business must be able to solve. In 2017, we decided to figure out how to advertise and manage travel agency social media accounts to get more applications from there. We went to an expert - an SMM specialist who had a large number of such cases in his portfolio. He gave us the technology that our travel agent clients are now using - everyone is happy.
- People who have worked in different businesses ready to adapt them to niches in which no one uses them yet. In 2013, we realized that travel agencies lacked the tools to control sales managers. My partner suggested adapting the technology of morning and evening meetings for agencies, which he had previously used in an FMCG company. At first, agents took it with hostility - there was nothing like it in the industry then. But having tried it, they now do not understand how they lived without it before.
Yes. I confess. Sinful. Infobusinessman.
But wait. Before I tell you how much and where I need to put in to quickly and easily increase turnover by 133 times, while simultaneously managing 742 projects and drinking smoothies on the beach, I want to tell you how I “sinked” to such a life.
Seven years ago, when I was implementing CRM systems, one of my travel agent clients asked me about how my other clients (not from tourism) work with their client bases. I shared with him what I knew, and he asked for help with the implementation of these methods in his agency.
Then I did not associate myself with consultants or business coaches in any way - all this for me was a logical continuation of the work on integrating the CRM system.
We launched the process of reactivating clients (managers began to call clients themselves, instead of sitting and waiting for incoming requests), launched email and SMS mailing lists, and tried to work with social networks. In fact, we took technologies from other types of business and tried to adapt them to the agency. Something worked, something didn't.
But most importantly, I saw that in the eyes of an entrepreneur, this work is of greater value than the introduction of a complex software because it brought money here and now. And when the project ended, I asked myself: “If it worked out in this agency, maybe it’s worth trying again?”
It quickly became clear that my managerial experience was lacking, so I found a partner to complement my technical knowledge. We took a few more travel agencies on a personal basis and continued to try to solve their problems in ways that are not traditional for the travel industry.
My friend and partner Dmitry Potapov, with whom we have been working on TurMarketing for the past six years
And now 6 years have passed since we are seriously doing this, and we are testing and testing everything. And we don't plan to stop.
What does this have to do with business?
After spending a couple of years in personal work with travel agents, we realized what we were getting. Those with whom we worked did not want to leave us. By word of mouth Slowly, new clients were brought in. But the economic side of the issue was lame.
When your client is a small and medium-sized business, it is impossible to earn a normal income by fulfilling orders for a limited number of clients in personal work (at least in our niche).
We cannot take 300 thousand rubles a month from the agency so that it brings as much money as we want. Even the top agencies from our client list will not be able to pay us that much on an ongoing basis.
And then an idea came to our mind: we already have what we have tested with clients from the personal computer, we know that it definitely works. What prevents us from packing it into an info product?
Actually, here's a normal, eco-friendly infobusiness model for you: there is a test group on which everything is worked out. When a certain stack of technologies accumulates, it is described so that it can be repeated, and then there are trainings, assistance with implementation, and that's it.
We decomposed the work of a travel agency into business processes, identified three blocks (in which we are strong, and almost all small and medium-sized agencies experience problems) and made information products out of them:
- Attraction of new clients.
- Organization of the sales system.
- Work with regular customers.
At the same time, we do not even try to climb into areas in which we ourselves are not strong (document flow, tourism product, tax optimization, finance, etc.).
For the test group, we actually perform the functions of full-time departments of marketing, training and supervision of the sales system. And for those who take our information products, we are something like the right franchise.
80% of our sales volume are regular customers. And this is not an accident.
The business model does everything for us: the market is constantly changing and makes new demands on agencies, they turn to us for a personal solution, we test strategic answers together with them, and when we find it, we package it and pass it on to everyone else.
Request not on our topics? We will not undertake, but we will help to find someone who will undertake. No material from the test group for the latest release? So there will be no release. Is the packaged product outdated? We will immediately stop selling it.
These are not show-offs. This is not PR. I just want to show how a "healthy person's info business" can work. I know it exists because I work in it myself.
What do we get paid for
At first glance, it may seem that we are not doing something that agency directors could not do themselves (or attract specialized freelancers). And it is true. So what are we being paid for then? I'll give you a couple of examples.
You all know exactly what sales scripts are. So, for a year, on average, we listen to more than a thousand hours of negotiations between the best managers and clients, identify best practices and weaknesses in the current version of scripts. After that we do new version. We give to managers. We listen again. We are making a new version.
Over the seven years of the project's existence, there have been a ton of such iterations and five major releases. Now our scripts convert three times better than the industry standard.
This is how our electronic sales script platform looks like, which helps agency directors train managers faster
Can a conventional agency do something similar on its own? Do you think the director should do all this himself? Go to the travel agency you are flying through and ask. Actually, I think the answer is obvious. In an ordinary agency, the director, even having ready-made scripts, is not able to persuade his managers to work on them on his own. We have to help.
The second example is about hiring-training-managing managers. If you are at least a little in the subject, then you know that there is no control there. Subordination is nominal, and managers who have worked for three to five years or more do not value the owner, and turn into co-founders (bad ones).
Dima (my partner) did a lot of successful HR and managed his own and several other businesses. When he first came to the project, he immediately said: “We will change the way agencies work, and people will quit. So we need a fast learning system, a well-established hiring process, a normal management scheme and a different salary model.”
Now our internship standard turns a person "from the street" into a manager in three weeks. For a typical agency, this takes three to six months. And directors trust our Excel table with an analytical model that calculates KPIs more than their CRMs (it's not us who are cool - just average CRMs).
Directors trust our Excel table with an analytical model that calculates KPIs more than their CRM
I could go on and on with this list. the main idea I want to convey: we are not information businessmen in the classical Russian sense of the word. We are business processors that use the infobusiness sales model. Travel agents work with us because it is profitable - they do not have the time and competencies, due to which they could independently do what we do for them.
But our merit in all this is small. What we do is not much different from what any passionate owner does in his company.
Every day we ask ourselves: what else can be improved? Where is bottleneck now? How are these problems solved in other industries?
When we ourselves have no hypotheses, we go for external expertise to specialists, business owners from other niches, advanced travel agents. As a result, hypotheses appear, tests are carried out, solutions are found.
In general, the same tourist business as our clients. And we solve the same problems as they do. It's just that we have a wider angle of vision, because we work not in one travel agency, but in several dozens. Well, an info-business add-on - you need to package-sell-implement on their side.
Since you are so smart, why haven’t you opened your own agency and become the kings of the CIS travel industry yet?
Wangyu: this is exactly the question that many of you had in the middle of the article. I will answer you the same as those travel agents who ask me about it. The answer may seem rather cynical to many of you, but at the same time it is very businesslike. I am sure that those who have their own business will understand me perfectly.
Shock numbers: the net profit that the owner of a travel agency can take out of the business fluctuates in the delta of 1-4% of turnover. This means that in order to earn at least 10-15 million rubles a year net, it is necessary to sell tours conditionally for a billion rubles. If you are interested in detailed mathematics - ask in the comments, I will share.
Bringing an agency from scratch to such a turnover is long and expensive. By the way, that is why every time people who want to enter the travel business come to us and ask us to help with the opening and promotion, we honestly tell them about it and warn them about all the difficulties they will face (unlike information charlatans who in similar cases, they sell their product, intimidating the client and making unrealistic promises).
I also don't like doing b2c business. I enjoy providing professional services to a relatively small number of b2b clients. Lack of tangible assets is also a big plus (if you know what I mean).
In our business, 80% of my time is research, testing, product development. We do not depend on anyone - as long as we manage to give our clients results, we will always have them.
In a travel agency, 80% of the owner's time is spent on control of operating systems and staff: endless conflict resolution within the team, graters with tour operators and tourists, tons of paperwork. There is no time or money left for development.
All this can become an understandable and solvable story (with partial automation, delegation, middle managers, and so on), but for this you first need to swell into it for three to five years: open five to ten offices, hire and retain more than 25 subordinates, exit for a turnover of 500 and more million rubles.
Just for what? For a net yield of 1.8%? For the sake of 100% dependence on tour operators? Maybe in order to have more than 200 competitors in a million-plus city and sell a non-unique tourist product? Thanks, but I pass.
Am I ashamed
Is it cynical? Partly yes. Business is generally cynical. But working in my place, I think I bring more benefits. At least that's what our clients say. I do not want to write about their results. Whoever needs it will independently find both cases and reviews. Oh, I said at the beginning that infobusinessmen often invent them. Well, call any of them, ask what he thinks of us - let them tell you everything themselves.
For seven years I have been building a niche information business in this country, and this is not as easy and fun as many people think. My working day starts at 7 o'clock in the morning, and my partner consistently has to spend the night in the office a couple of times a month. When you work for the final result (and do not sell trainings), there is a catastrophic lack of time for anything.
You need to understand what the problem is, brainstorm, test hypotheses, evaluate the result, screw up nine times out of ten, explain to the person who paid you for personal work why it didn’t work the first time, and then take this labored 10% of what worked, pack it into an info product and go to work already own business- writing content for the media, hosting webinars, helping clients implement on the ground, and so on.
I understand why most people think that the information business, trainings and other similar stories are “scams.” Having seen enough information charlatans, entrepreneurs treat all information projects with the same brush and put them on a par with financial pyramids, sects and other game. In vain.
Now more and more high-quality information projects are appearing in Runet, for which it is not a shame - their clients receive the promised results. And almost all of them work on a model similar to ours.
I don't pretend that I discovered something. It's just that it is very logical: tests, fixing the result, packaging, selling, assistance with implementation, profit.
Russian infobusiness is a standard section of society: it has enough slag and nuggets. And you can say as much as you like that infobusiness is not needed, but the market says the opposite: if we didn’t carry value and didn’t give results, no manipulations would allow us to take money from the same people for seven years and, gradually moving competitors, become a leader in your niche.
Am I ashamed for being an info businessman? Am I ashamed that I put my all into my project every day? Never. Among our clients are leading agencies in most cities of the CIS and participants in all the largest travel franchises (who come to us for the experience that they were promised, but the franchisor never gave them). And I hope there will be more like us every day. Fuh ... like he said everything ... wet it!
WriteIn the context of the economic crisis, more and more people are thinking about starting their own business. With development information technologies it becomes much easier to do so. You can open your own business even without investments. The main thing is to have the desire to do something new and not fold at the slightest setback. Any business is the sale of services or goods using a simple scheme of interaction between the seller and the buyer. And for those who have deep knowledge in a particular area, you can start your own information business. making money selling information and knowledge. Anyone can do this today.
Key Aspects
Everyone can profit from training by opening their own information business. What does it mean? A person who shares his knowledge, engages in simple tutoring for a fee, can already be called a businessman. However, if you transfer information to only one student in your free time, as most average teachers do, you will not be able to earn much money. It is necessary to create a product that will work even when the businessman is sleeping peacefully. Passive income is the basis of a profitable infobusiness.
Information technology today gives unlimited opportunities for earning. You can create your own site to attract customers, fill it interesting articles on the topic, invite people to webinars. You can even start a business from scratch. For this, various free resources are offered. Everyone can climb perfectly even in in social networks. The main thing is that the information provided should be of interest to others.
What are the types of information business?
The information business as it exists today can be divided into three categories. The first is a mini-business, which everyone can implement (even without certain skills). Often this option is a branch from For example, big company sells special fitness equipment for weight loss. Additionally, you can earn on information about their correct use. If the mini-business is set up correctly, the founder can significantly save on sales assistants and increase sales of the main product several times over.
The second category includes a start-up infobusiness. Most often, it is done by people who have managed to perfectly develop their main business according to a well-established scheme and, for an additional fee, seek to teach this scheme to others. Information may be provided on discs or special online seminars.
We create an infobusiness without investments
The main resource in this type of earnings will be previously acquired knowledge. It remains only to figure out how to profitably implement them. Anyone can start their own mini-business by taking advantage of the power of social media. All you need to do is create your own group and invite as many users as possible to it. If the information provided is really interesting, the result will not be long in coming.
It is worth being prepared for the fact that at the initial stage, the information business from scratch will not bring much profit. Not everyone will be willing to pay for information. However, there are tricks that will allow you to quickly reach a decent level of income.
Choosing your niche
Each businessman at the initial stage of opening his own business must choose the right niche in which his products will be sold. No exception is earnings in the information business. Your knowledge should be offered to those people who are really interested in it. With the help of social networks, it is quite easy to do this. In user profiles, you can always study which groups people are in, what they do in real life.
Before you create an infobusiness, it is worth doing a little marketing research. You can search social networks for groups with the necessary topics. This will allow you to understand how many people are interested in this or that information. From the same groups it will be possible to lure users in the future. When choosing a niche, you must adhere to the golden mean. If the information is interesting to a large number of users, then an inexperienced businessman will simply be crushed by competition. But a narrow topic may not be of interest to many. This means that the profit will be small.
Communication with a potential client
Narrow communication with a potential buyer of information products is the key to a successful business. First of all, you need to pay attention to your own group. It is worth adding a few notes daily that will arouse interest among users. Each note will appear in the news feed. The next step is to create a newsletter. Each user can send letters with interesting information related to the subject of the group. It can also be invitations to free seminars.
To create a profitable infobusiness from scratch, you will have to stock up on a lot of patience. You can not be intrusive and convince in favor of the product. If a person is really interested, he will show it right away. However, at the initial stage, only every tenth potential client will pay attention to the newsletter. Those who want to build earnings on the infobusiness in social networks need to be prepared for the temporary blocking of their own account. It is not uncommon for spam emails to be marked by users as spam.
Creating a free product
Attract potential clients only with the help of advertising speeches or a video is unlikely to succeed. It is necessary to create a free product with which the user can understand the essence of the information being sold. It can be a free mini-book or a video tutorial. Thus, it will be possible to accomplish several important tasks at once. People will be able to get absolutely free valuable information that is in demand in a certain period of time. Users begin to understand the essence of the infobusiness and become interested in it.
Creating a free product is also a unique opportunity to build a subscriber base. Indeed, in exchange for up-to-date information, people leave their contact details. Thus, it is possible to get rid of those who are not at all interested in the product being sold. In the future, the promotion of the infobusiness will be carried out only among really interested users.
Capture page
Without a small business card website, a truly profitable info business cannot develop. What does it mean? If you managed to understand that the product might be of interest to users, you should create a special capture page. You can do it on one of the free hosting. The page will provide basic information, information business topics. A free course can also be offered here. The whole point is to turn a visitor into a customer. A person who wants to receive a free product will fill out a special form. And half of those who take advantage of this opportunity will wish to purchase a paid product in the future, if it is really interesting.
It will be much faster to attract new customers if you entrust the creation of the capture page to a professional web designer. It is desirable to place it on a paid hosting. If everything is done correctly, the costs will be justified in the near future. It should be understood that a fast info business without investments is almost impossible.
Create a paid product
It is the paid product that is the element for the sake of which the creation of the infobusiness is carried out. At this stage it is necessary to structure the information. Knowledge of data processing and analysis will be useful. A paid product should be an order of magnitude higher in level than a free one. For their money, people want to get really high-quality information on the topic.
How to create an infobusiness that will really make a profit? A paid product must combine quantity and quality. If information is provided in a large volume without a specific structure, the client will lose interest. The design is also of great importance. If this is a book, then you should pay attention to the design. If this is a video seminar, bright special effects are needed.
The material should be understandable to a reader or viewer of any level. Do not saturate the product with all the knowledge on the topic. You need to be able to highlight the main information, pay attention to the details. Creating a paid product is one of the most important and complex stages of the infobusiness. For some, it takes about a year. If the paid product is created correctly, it will turn into a great passive profit tool. Advanced businessmen manage to earn money even in their sleep.
Release of information product for sale
If the paid product is already completely ready, the next step is to prepare it for sale. In advance, you can create special banners to advertise your infobusiness. do not forget to set up a payment system. We need to think about how exactly people will pay for knowledge. The most popular are electronic payments from bank accounts. It would also be useful to have a virtual wallet in one of the online networks.
Affiliate program will help you to significantly increase your income. You can sell your product through other infobusinessmen. People will receive a percentage of the amount of the deal. Thus, the implementation of books or video lessons will be significantly increased.
Promotion of new infobusiness
Even if you managed to win the trust of a certain circle of customers, you can not stop there. Infobusiness promotion will help increase the number of users interested in the products sold. This can be done through paid advertising through banners. You can promote your product for free through the electronic bulletin board. However, this method is not very efficient.
Various contests held on social networks help to attract new customers. You can also take the help of reputable bloggers who will advertise a new product on a paid basis. There are a lot of opportunities for flare-ups. It just takes patience.
Summarize
An infobusiness can really bring in a lot of income, of course, if it is created correctly. You can start earning even without investments. However, this will take a lot of time. And if you create a paid resource and spend money on advertising, you will be able to get the first income in the near future.
More and more people are interested in making money on the Internet, and the question “what is the infobusiness” has long been tormenting many. Friends, in this article we will try to give a complete definition this concept and tell as much as possible about this direction and all its advantages.
infobusiness – entrepreneurial activity based on the sale of information goods. It can be done both online and offline. Although most of it is for work via the Internet.
How can such activity be carried out offline? Have you ever seen ad blocks with an invitation to a seminar? You are invited to listen to the speaker and possibly become a member of his team. This is the information business offline, i.e. you don't need to be online to get the learning product. You just need to come to the meeting.
This is a very popular way to make money online. Its essence lies in the fact that an Internet entrepreneur collects a lot of valuable information, packs it and offers it for purchase for a certain amount of money. You might think that air is being sold here, and there is nothing useful in it, but we hasten to dissuade you.
Yes, there is a lot of free information on the World Wide Web now, but no one will give you all the experience and impressions on a certain topic in the way that you can hear in a video course or coaching.
You are constantly in contact with the author and always learn something new. Buying infoware from a trusted entrepreneur, you can be 100% sure of its reliability and usefulness. This is the main difference from self-study. Many sites provide useful content, but it may be outdated and not relevant for a long time, which will return you back to the web for searches. Do not be afraid to cooperate with information businessmen, do not be afraid to buy their goods. Write, be interested, get advice. Then you can get the most out of such an interesting collaboration.
Why is it profitable and promising to engage in information business?
Especially for those who doubt that our direction can help to become really successful person, we have presented a number of weighty arguments.
High profit
To sell a product or service in a business, you need to invest a significant amount of money. When selling, for example, accessories, phones or clothes, in order to generate income, money is first invested in the purchase of these goods. The service industry also often requires capital to get off to a good start. In repairs - tools, in sewing - a machine and materials, in manicure services - consumables, etc. The difference between revenue and expenses will be your profit, but part of it needs to be put back into business for its normal functioning. Therefore, high profitability will be only if there are a large number buyers, and these are the costs of creating a site, advertising, etc.
In the infobusiness, the costs of creating training materials are very small or non-existent. All you need is a computer, and it's inexpensive. Even the simplest one is suitable for working on the Internet. Educational products are readily bought by people of all ages. If you think that only young people are interested in them, you are deeply mistaken. A large proportion of regular customers are not only schoolchildren and students, but also men, women, as well as elderly people, i.e. pensioners. By following simple algorithms, you will be able to make many sales at minimal cost, thereby constantly increasing your profits.
Ease of use and mobility
You can work anywhere: at home, in the country, in a cafe, bar, restaurant, visiting friends... You don't spend money on renting an office for employees. And the best part is that you can engage in information business from anywhere in the world. All you need is a computer and internet access.
Passive income
There is an opportunity to make money almost on autopilot. You don't always have to spend hours on your laptop. If you wish, you can "put your business on rails" and enjoy your vacation at sea or outside the city.
Fixed income
By regularly demonstrating your knowledge or simply working with affiliate programs, you will regularly increase your income. Information products can be sold for a very long time until their relevance is exhausted. In this case, select new ones and follow the same steps. So your business will always go uphill.
Small investment for a good start.
It is very expensive to build and promote a regular business. Seemingly ordinary commercial sites that sell clothes, shoes or phones online, paid a lot of money so that their Internet resources would bring at least some income.
Our team is engaged not only in infobusiness, but also in other types of Internet marketing. We work with a large number of individuals and legal entities and we know what prices are currently on the market. When our team was born, in the first month we spent 100-150 dollars. If you want a faster start, then you can quite meet the 25 - 35 thousand Russian rubles.
Types of products in the infobusiness
- Own product. You independently study any direction, record the acquired knowledge in digital format (audio, video, text), create attractive packaging, advertise and sell.
- Partnership programs. If you have read our article about affiliate programs, you already know that you can make good money on the Internet by advertising the products of other entrepreneurs. There is no need to bother with packaging or promotion. Just sell and get a good percentage for it.
- Overbought information product. You can agree with the author of the course or manual to transfer all rights to you for a decent reward. Then all the profits from sales will go to your wallet.
What exactly do entrepreneurs sell online? Video courses, audio courses, trainings, webinars, seminars, consultations, electronic books… They are very popular, especially given the affordable price range, with the exception of coaching. This type of training can be much more expensive.
How to learn to make money in the infobusiness?
There are two options:
If you are trained by a good practitioner, the result will be visible in the next couple of months. Earn from 1000 dollars in 30 days is more than real. The main thing is not to waste time looking for valuable information on websites and portals. Remember, no one will just give you useful knowledge. You have to pay for everything. This is an investment in yourself. You are your business. Take your studies and knowledge seriously, and then you yourself will be surprised by the results.
We are sure that your friends will like this article. Click on any button and share it on social networks!
