Alex Pooley's Blog

Here’s a slick recipe to build a niche site that delivers what people want in your niche, with little effort. I’d bet that you could find a stack of ebooks charging $27, $57, maybe even $77 for this advice.

Goal: To create an info product with little use of your time.

Setup: Do a little research to work out what niche you’re interested in targeting. You want something narrow enough that you can fill a specific need, and broad enough that there’s enough potential sales volume. Something like “beagle training” is a good idea, something like “training beagles to run through tunnel obstacles” is not.

Method:

1. Create an “above the fold” page that asks the reader to tell you specifically what information they are seeking. The goal is to acquire information from people that visit your site. Promise that in return for submitting the form, you will send them an answer and copy of your info product when you’re done.
2. Create a PPC campaign to drive traffic to the site. Let it run for at most a week, and aim to acquire around 30 questions.
3. Run off to a site like guru.com, or Elance and find an expert in your niche.
4. Record a question answer session with the expert. The questions include, and are based on, the questions that people submitted from your question page. The recording is now something that you can sell, or offer as a bonus to a complementary offer.
5. Run off to a dictation site (E.g. idictate) and get your audio interview transcribed. Now you have more fodder to sell.
6. Start to sell your goods by building a “1 page sales letter”. Use it to replace your “ask a question” page.

This is stupidly easy, but I thought it was pretty elegant. You can mold the interviews like play dough to create articles for article submission directories, marketing fodder, etc.

I heard about this method from a webinar by Jim Edwards and John Carlton. I don’t know if it really works, but if you’re in to info products you would be hard pressed to develop a more efficient process.