Infopreneuring, or information marketing, gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to feed the information-hungry masses worldwide, and achieve financial freedom in the process. Since the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s, people all over the planet have jumped aboard the information superhighway, driven by an insatiable desire and thirst for knowledge. They're looking for answers, for jobs, for solutions to problems, for long-lost relatives, and for just plain information. This means explosive growth for the infopreneuring industry.
By a stroke of good fortune, the Information Age has serendipitously coincided with the Enron era and corporate downsizing. Entrepreneurs, small business owners, and anyone who has searched unsuccessfully for a legitimate work-at-home business opportunity can now realize the future of their dreams. All it takes is a computer, an Internet connection, a little creativity, some ingenuity, and a lot of motivation.
More than mere rhetoric, the infopreneuring phenomenon is a reality. Witness the infopreneuring empires built by Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs and Ken Evoy of SiteSell fame. These are world-renowned Internet gurus who have achieved enormous online success, not by ripping people off with "get-rich-quick" schemes, but by selling marketing tools and information about true-to-life business models that work for real people in the real world. For every "info guru" you hear about, there are probably dozens more out there you haven't heard about--all happily securing their futures by selling their own infoproducts.
For small business owners and entrepreneurs across the globe struggling to keep their businesses alive, infopreneuring could provide the income infusion needed to rehabiliate their anemic growth. For business start-ups, an infopreneuring enterprise could be ideal. The benefits include:
- Low start-up costs
- Low overhead
- Selling to a global market
- Less time-for-money tradeoff
- More financial freedom
- Consistent passive revenue
- Work from anywhere capability
- Creating a lasting legacy
Offline businesses can also benefit by:
- Replacing paper promotions
- Adding multiple income streams
- Selling wares online to supplement offline sales
This doesn't mean there's no work involved. As with any legitimate business, infopreneuring requires commitment and motivation. But it is fairly simple to start up. By following a step-by-step process that begins with brainstorming topics, then researching the market to find out if your ideas have profitability potential, you can easily begin building your "brand of one" by producing basic infoproducts such as Tips Booklets and eReports. These will help establish you as an expert in your field. Later you can progress to audio and video products, such as teleclasses and Webinars.
The start-up costs are minimal because your products are created, and delivered, digitally. No inventory, no storage, no shipping costs. You can see why the infopreneur's motto: "Create once, sell many" makes infopreneuring so attractive. Once you've got your infoproducts produced and your marketing mechanisms in place, you no longer have to sell your time for money. You control your business--it doesn't control you.
Laying the foundation for an infopreneuring business means--you guessed it, obtaining information--educating yourself on what market need your infoproducts can fill, how to package your knowledge, and what marketing methods will work best for selling your goods. Once you've established yourself as the "go to" person in your area of expertise, it's only a matter of adding additional revenue-generating streams to your lineup. These can include affiliate marketing, selling ads on your website or in your ezine, using Google AdSense, creating a subscription-based website, and entering into joint ventures that expand your reach into similar, but differently targeted, markets.
Although it may appear to be a complex process at first glance, infopreneuring is actually a simple business model that takes less time and effort to start up than most other businesses. Of course, it may not be the ideal business FOR everyone, but it is definitely do-able BY anyone. Explore your options and see if infopreneuring is right for you. It might just be the ticket you've been looking for to gain your own financial freedom.
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