How to Start An Information Business – Even if You're Not an Expert (Yet)

So you’ve done everything right and you’ve been in business for a couple of years, or a few months, and you’ve got a few thousand subscribers. Now you’re making sales, but you’re thinking that there may be demand for something similar in your niche.

You already have an email list, so you don’t need to use Adwords for Facebook ads to drive traffic to a survey.  You can just send an e-mail survey out to your existing list, and say “Hey, are you interested in this new topic? If so, would you fill a quick survey out?  And if you’ll fill it out, I’ll give you {guess what?} a cheat sheet for whatever it is for the topic we’re branching out into.”

Could you use ad traffic when you’re two years into this?  You could.  But, if you can use your own e-mail list, you’ll actually get a deeper level of response because the folks on your e-mail list trust you a whole lot more than the person who came from a Google AdWords or Facebook ad.

You can use this method to create deeper and deeper trainings.  So, if you sold 5 different trainings on your topic, and you go out there, and you run another survey that says, “hey, what are your challenges right now?”  People tell you that there’s a new challenge, that you haven’t taught on yet, you can now create a training on that new topic.

Okay I’ve told you how you can keep expanding your niche and your trainings.  The next step is for you to pull the trigger.  The reason I’m stressing this right now is that I’ve discovered a big percentage of the folks that are looking for this kind of information have not pulled the trigger yet.  They’re afraid of pulling the trigger.  And, until you pull the trigger, you won’t have anything.  When I got started in this business, I hardly moved anything.  But I knew that the best way to learn would be to get out there and start asking questions.

Let me share this:

I remember when I first got started:  I set up an e-mail list, and I set up an ask page… well, it was probably just a regular opt-in page, and I was getting subscribers.  It was a basic topic.  A very, very basic topic.  Then I would send an e-mail to those folks every day – I was sending an e-mail with a tidbit of useful information in their niche.

Where was I getting my information? I didn’t know it yet so I was going online and studying a topic, and then I would summarize what I had learned in an e-mail.  I built trust and relationship that way because I was doing the research and giving people the quick answer.  That’s what folks were looking for.  So then I started sending an e-mail out that said, “hey, what’s your biggest challenge with XYZ?”  And then I would put a promise in the e-mail.  I don’t tend to do this anymore, because I get so much e-mail that I don’t look at very much, if any of it.

I would say at the end of the e-mail if you will answer this question and respond to me within the next 24hrs, I will personally give you the answer to that.

What happened was, people would give me these questions, I would put them on a Word document.  And then I would go through, and if I knew the answer, I would just write the answer.  But, if I didn’t know the answer, I’d go research the answer and get it back to that person.  And in the process of researching, I was learning the very things that people wanted to know about in the niche.  And within 5 or 6 months in the business, I had folks coming to me, asking me to do more than just teach them, but to take them by the hand and coach them.  And, if I’m speaking to you right now and you’ve been trying to get started, for a year, 2 years, 3 years, and you haven’t pulled the trigger.  Wouldn’t you be far better off to start, even though you don’t know very much.  Ask questions, answer questions, do the research the same way I do, and maybe in 5 months you too can have folks asking you about taking them by the hand.

You can take this business as far as you want.  But, it’s got to start somewhere.