One of the decision you need to make when growing your information product business is whether to include a continuity offering into your product portfolio.
What is a continuity offering?
Any recurring revenue generation model that brings you continuous, repetitive revenue is consider continuity. For example, our InfoMarketer’sZone private information product members site grew out of the fact that customers of our Ultimate Information Entrepreneur’s Success Package required ongoing support, motivation, tools and advice as well as instant examples of what was working in our various infoproduct businesses.
Offerings like membership sites, paid newsletters, paid coaching clubs, insider clubs, some software models generate recurring revenue where the customer is billed automatically each month, quarter or year to keep the information coming.
A choice many information entrepreneurs are faced with is do they offer one-time products such as ebooks, reports, audio or video products only or should they focus on continuity products?
We operate both continuity and one-time sale products and I would suggest that most information product businesses could benefit from having both.
The short answer is that you should plan for both models in your business. Not only does it give you more flexibility, multiple streams of revenue but it really does meet the needs of your customers in most markets.
We like to issue systems, process guides, how-to guides in the form of manuals, home study courses, guidebooks, etc… and then augment the one-time products with continuity where they get extra updates, personal help, tools, or other associated ongoing value.
Also – we often see a one-time sale product leading to high rate of conversion on the continuity side. We also do a good many cross-sell and upsells where we get the one-time sell and either drive continuity through a one time offer reduced subscription rate or trial.
So, when you set your information product business strategy consider what information lends itself best to one-time teaching versus information that can be provided month over month in a continuity business model…planning for both will give you a much higher profit level and consistency in revenue generation within your business.
