An info product is any product that can be digitally created, sold, and transferred to your customer. Information products have almost zero production, storage, or distribution costs. This gives info products a nearly 100% profit margin and an ability to scale that other product types can’t compete with.
Common examples of info products consist of computer software, apps, courses, e-books, dating sites, etc. We have a list of info-product examples later in this post.
Info Products Have No Production or Distribution Costs
I got my start selling white-label physical products through Amazon.com. While it doesn’t sound very complicated, there are a ton of costs from this business model.
First, you have to buy the product from the manufacturer, pay a freight forwarder to have it shipped to the US, pay import taxes at customs, the list goes on. With physical products, you get nickeled and dimed at every step of a long supply chain.
Selling digital products cuts out all of those costs. When a customer purchases, the end-product is transferred from your server to their computer at the speed of light. This makes it a fantastic business model for small players. They won’t need to negotiate the best rates with a dozen people in the supply chain.
Info Products Scale Very Easily
The scariest moment of my physical products business was the first big order of widgets that I made. I had to spend $20,000 to get 1,200 widgets from China to California with no guarantees that I’d make that money back.
It was a scary 5-week wait, but the products arrived, and they sold out instantly. Great news! Except I now had to wait another 5 weeks to restock the widgets so I could continue selling. During those 5 weeks, I lost thousands of customers and my high Amazon ranking.
With info products, you don’t have the same limitations on how many widgets you can sell. Stocking 100,000 copies of computer software is no different than stocking 1. This means you can go from a tiny business to a substantial business overnight.
Examples of Info Products
1) Computer Software
Computer software has some production and maintenance costs. Still, it’s one of the greatest things you can sell online. Particularly if you implement a monthly payment SaaS model.
What’s a SaaS business? Some of my personal favorites include LastPass, Headspace, Zapier, Oberlo, and Trello. The graphic below contains tons of examples, but it’s nowhere close to an exhaustive list.
2) E-Books
E-books were the go-to monetization method for blogs back in 2011. The logic was that you already had a ton of text just lying around, why not compile it into a book and then sell it to your audience?
3) Digital Courses
If you start selling digital courses, you can make an absurd amount of money. Here’s Sunny Lennarduzi’s explaining how she sold $100k worth of courses with a single YouTube video. That’s more than most people make in a year.
4) Membership Site (or Facebook Group Access)
If you can find a lot of like-minded people online, many of them are willing to pay a monthly fee to be a part of a community. Simply run a private forum or Facebook group and collect members. This can also be a part of your digital course.
5) Ads or Affiliate Deals
This is cheating a little bit in that you don’t own ads or affiliate deals. And I don’t recommend this as an info product because making your own will pay better.
That said, running ads and doing affiliate marketing are the two most popular methods for people to monetize their blogs (although creating your own product would be more profitable). And I do consider ads and affiliate info products because there are no distribution costs, and you can scale infinitely.
6) Music
Most people will think of selling music on Spotify, iTunes/Apple Music, Tidal, Google Play, Amazon Music, TikTok, Tencent & more. You can sell on all of those platforms.
The advantage of selling music on your website is that these middlemen don’t take a considerable cut or limit your prices. They also don’t block you from getting your customer’s email address.
7) Data
There’s so much data out there that I’d be willing to pay for if somebody would just collect it.
- As a blogger, I’ve purchased a subscription to a hrefs to check keyword volume before.
- As an Amazon seller, I bought a subscription to JungleScout to check the sales volume of Amazon products.
- We all got hooked to Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and who knows what else because we wanted to know what our friends looked like at the beach.
You can make a lot of money selling data that is currently hard for people to obtain. And you don’t need to build a sophisticated website either. If you have difficulty getting data compiled in a spreadsheet, I’m convinced that people would buy that data from you.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve learned what an info product is and how to create one for yourself. Check out my guide on creating your own product for even more product ideas you can use to monetize your blog or YouTube channel.