Throughout the career of information marketers, there are three distinct phases they tend to go through. You have to better prepare yourself on how to negotiate for this phases.
Here are the three phases of being an information marketer.
- The Unknown Phase
In this phase, you’re relatively unknown in the industry. You’re driving primarily “cold” traffic – through pay per click, through SEO, through article marketing, etc.
Your conversions are generally pretty low; from 0.25% to 1.5%. Your conversions depend primarily upon the strength of your sales letters.
This is the most difficult phase of being an information marketer. Unfortunately, it’s also the phase that a lot of people get stuck in. Marketers will also often keep starting new websites that end up in this phase, rather than progressing existing websites to the next level.
2. The Take-Off Phase
This phase usually starts when you’ve finally figured out a way to successfully sell one product. Let’s say for instance if you’ve just figured out how to profitably sell one product via marketing funnel, that marks the beginning of the take-off phase.
Once you’re successfully sold one product, then your concerns change quite a bit. Instead of getting a business off the ground, you’re now increasing business. It’s a very different mindset.
The two primary things that people in the take-off phase are concerned about are building a list and creating new products.
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If you have a good product and your upselling skill is solid, you can often get as much as 10% to 25% of your buyers to buy from you again – even if the next item is significantly more expensive than the first. That’s why it’s so important to start adding more products.
Building your list will allow you to start developing more long-term influence and clout in the industry, as well as build your most powerful marketing tool. I guess you have that the money is in the List.
3. The Solid Reputation Phase
Getting to this phase normally takes nine months to a year and a half of solid progress. At this stage, you have acquired a solid reputation in the industry. People now know who you are and what your company stands for.
You’ll start getting traffic that just comes from direct type-ins and people who Googled your company name. This is “reputation traffic” – word-of-mouth traffic.
You’ll also see your conversions increase tremendously, without you having to change your sales letters. Again, this is because people know you’re not a fly-by-night website. You have a reputation, which builds trust. People are more willing to pull out their credit cards and place their faith in you.
At this point, your main concerns are adding high-ticket items and subscription programs. This is the stage at which you’ll start to have “hyper consumers” – people who will buy anything you put out. It may be time to roll out that $1,000 DVD program or $10,000 live program. Or perhaps roll out that $47 a month subscription. At this stage, you have earned the trust to do it.
These are the three typical phases of an information product marketing website. Don’t get stuck in the first one – progress through each phase as quickly as you can. The real money is made in stage three, not stage one.
Now you have it. You have just been exposed to the 3 phases of Information Marketing. So you don’t have to be upset when you don’t make enough money at the first Phase, just work your way up to the third phase while building a reputation in the process and you would reap the benefits.