Over the last few years of creating and marketing ebooks and infoproducts we’ve noticed a very interesting and powerful trend…
The greater the volume of free content, the more in demand packaged, for-sale information products!
Seems strange right?
You would think that the more free information available, the less demand there would be to pay for that information, yet the opposite is actually true.
Why is that?
THE OLD WORLD
It used to be the only way you could share your thoughts, stories, knowledge, expertise or training with people was through books, and the traditional publishers had a pretty good lock on the process of getting that done.
Information providers in the old marketplace were writers, authors and trainers – the average person with valuable information to share couldn’t penetrate this elite group of professionals.
Not only was getting traditionally published extremely rare, but it was largely done for either personal satisfaction, prestige or branding – but certainly extremely rarely did publishing become a profitable exercise for the author.
How things have changed!
THE NEW WORLD
Now my grade 3 child knows how to both search for and produce (via blogging, Facebook or Twitter) anything he or she wants, for free. My grade 5 child has put together his own YouTube videos and has a blog.
About half the people I know are either on Facebook, Twitter or actively blog…producing content several times a week.
So – what are the implications of this massive free-zone of content?
There are 3 consequences – study the last one as it is quickly emerging as THE NEXT big opportunity on the internet:
1. Traditional publishing is falling into the sea…it is becoming less and less relevant each day. Relegated to a group of celebrities who haven’t yet figured out there are better ways to get exposure, one can see a day when traditional publishing is a tiny fraction of where it is today.  Read this interesting piece by Garrison Keillor
2. The amount of content published is increasing astronomically! We have 10-year olds writing blogs and social network pages, housewives starting their own home-based blogs, and disgruntled workers branching out into their new fields by taking on new personalities on Twitter, Facebook or with their own blog. Tons and tons of content – all for free…WHICH LEADS TO…
3. An immense and rapidly growing opportunity for information publishers to match desires and needs of those seeking information online with paid products (ebooks, self-published books, manuals, courses, membership sites, etc…) that quickly and easily summarize or make the vast universe of information applicable to their particular problem or desire.
People are getting it…membership numbers over at InfoMarketer’sZone are going crazy because people understand they are sitting right at the edge of a massive opportunity to make people’s lives simpler and add value through information organization, publishing and marketing.
Yes, traditional publishing is sliding into the sea, in its place opens two new realities…on the one hand, the wild west of massive free content and on the other, value add, simplified, organized information that people will find increasingly value as they get lost in the sea of free information.
In short, we are right at the edge of an information product revolution – I can tell you from first hand experience, it is FUN!
