How to Sell Expensive Info Products with a Podcast in 2023

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Selling Info Products with Podcasts is a challenging task, but when approached correctly, it can be the right monetization strategy for your podcast.

This is because when we combine podcasts and info products, we find ourselves:

Developing a marketing channel with access to a highly valuable and engaged audience through a podcast,
Offering a product that is in high demand.

Why Choose Podcast for Selling Info Products?

Apple Podcast Algorithm - podcasts downloaded and listened

High engagement – 97% of podcasts get listened to within a week from download
High disposable income – Podcast listeners are more affluent (41% of listeners come from a household with annual disposable income above $75k), and info products tend to be expensive
Significant growth potential – 35% of Americans are listening to podcasts monthly, and listenership is projected to grow by more than 10% annually
Low competition, makes it easier to stand out – the competition is tiny with only 800,000 shows (this is nothing on a global scale when compared to 25 mln YouTube channels and 500 mln blogs)
Storytelling capabilities – 58% of listeners, listen to from 76% to 100% of an episode – easier to sell, tell a story to build interest in a product

Why having an info product is the right monetization tactic?

E-courses surpassed $200 billion in revenue and are on the path to reach $325 billion by 2025
Considering that the market was at $107 billion revenue in just 2015, this means over $20 billion revenue constant growth year over year

How do Info Products Work?

Info products are basically online course people choose to pay for. Given how much free information is available online, you should analyze your market before deciding on what kind, of course, you should prepare.

To launch a successful info product with your podcast, you need to consider a few things.

Info Products solve a problem a person has

To be successful with selling info products, you need to meet at least some of the following criteria:

You need to care about the niche and about the product you are developing
The problem needs to be valued by your niche audience
Your niche should be growing so it will be room new players
The need to solve a problem should be urgent or irritating so that people will take action
Offer a simple way to solve a complex problem
Your clients need to be online. They need to purchase products and have a disposable income

Many Info Products are Valuable for companies or entrepreneurs

Many info products are successful because of the value they deliver to large corporations. These products develop skills helpful in the world of a large corporation:

CV and portfolio building
Communication skills
Public speaking
Specific skills (coding, teaching, accounting)

If an info product offers to help to make or save money, it makes an attractive promise for a buyer.

You can create a successful info product in more emotion-driven markets

An info product with a good market potential doesn’t have to focus on earning money. You can create a product addressing emotional needs. Those products can be sold within hobby communities or marketed to people with a passion.

Personal finance
Making money
Fitness and weight loss
Beauty and cosmetics
Fashion and jewelry
Sports
Pets
House
Self-development

These info products can focus on saving time for the client. The product should allow them to avoid a lengthy and costly trial and error period if they would like to solve a problem on their own.

How to Give Information within a free Podcast and still have enough value left for the Info Products?

That is a valid question, but often it is a source of unnecessary fear. Don’t worry.

Your podcast is like a showroom or a sample for an excellent product – it presents, and delivers value to your potential clients but also incentives them to buying the main product.

Always Give Free Information -it is a sign of expertise and a genuine commitment to helping people. A winning factor here will be a convenience for the user. If you have a complex problem, it might not be solvable within one podcast, or even within ten. If you drip the information, you will advertise yourself as knowledgable. Still, people will choose to buy a product that conveniently offers one, coherent solution within one collected body of knowledge.
High-quality Free Info promises an even higher quality of paid info – your clients are smart. They know not all secrets are revealed to them within free products. Also, if a free product is exceptionally good, people will be aware that there is always more to get even better solutions. Here your info product will come in.
Free products solve smaller problems – with your free podcast, you can quickly solve small problems that require quick 15-20 minutes of educating a listener. Great info product should combine dozens of simple solution and by creating synergy allow to solve a significant problem worth spending money.
There is already competition – your solution will not be the first and the last to market. There is already probably some competition offering free solutions. But competition comes and goes. Just make sure your product is better, more attractive financially (it can be more expensive than the competition’s if you offer enough value), and more accessible.

Educational Podcast - qualities of a good speaker

How To Sell Info Products With a Podcast?

Selling info products through podcasts requires you to present yourself as someone who can deliver on its promise. We can summarize the whole approach into 3 main steps.

Step 1 – establish yourself as a reputable source and build a relationship

Build authority as you offer excellent value for free – solving smaller problems, finding answers to compelling questions, and connecting facts into actionable tips build market authority
Show reliability when you deliver Great Value with a Podcast for an extended period – make sure your podcast is up and available for people for some time before you start selling. This way, through regular publishing and interactions with people, you show your reliability.
Build trust and brand online with a show – use your podcast as a marketing platform to show your expertise and knowledge. Consistently showing you know how to solve problems will be a convincing factor for people when they face an offer to buy.

Step 2 – align your podcast for selling

Build engagement with a podcast and make people interact with your website – by engaging people each step of the way you make them more willing to buy.
Convert listeners to an email list – mailing list is an excellent tool for selling because it allows you to have a more intimate and personal relationship with your audience. Being allowed to enter someone’s mailbox is a sign of trust.
Tease the Info product creation and launch with your audience – product announcements build interest. People who are listening to your podcast are already interested in the market you represent. By announcing a product and discussing features, you are increasing your chance to sell.
Build urgency – use your podcast and create some urgency around your product. It can be done with limited offers or by merely discussing why your listeners should act now.

Step 3 – start selling

Offer a bonus for mail subscribers and early birds (early access or free consultations) – always offer some kind of bonus for your listeners when launching. It is an excellent opportunity to reward your loyal fans and add some more value to your product.
Automate selling process – build webinars, email sequences, retargeting ads to convince people to buy. Just launch, unless you already have thousands of listeners or mail subscribers, will not guarantee success.
Use ultra-precise marketing – leverage the capabilities of modern marketing tools. This will help you to avoid spending your marketing budget on the general population. Show your offer only to the people who are very interested in buying.

podcast ideas brainstorming and content planning

How to Create an Info Product?

Picking an info product you want to develop and offer to your clients resembles the same process you would use when considering how to choose an idea for a podcast.

The process should take you some time as you will need to invest multiple hours in developing your info product. But don’t drag it. If you already have a show, I think about 2 hours of focused research that should give you an answer.

Find something you care about – making the right info product requires time. To make it a successful outcome, it requires you to care about other people succeeding. You can only make it happen within a niche you enjoy
Take the path of least resistance – start by thinking what you already know and how you can capitalize on that. That can be a quicker way to develop a useful info product than learning a new skill from the beginning.
Understand your audience – you are most likely not representative of your audience. Your idea of a problem your audience needs solving might not be something they actually struggle with. Reach out, analyze, and ask what actually requires solving!
Find a problem that justifies spending money on a solution – solving it for your users will save them time, or it might earn or save them money. All those options deliver value, but you need to make sure people also see it like that. Think about how to blend into characteristics of an investment and a pleasure.
Find a reasonably complex problem – that it won’t be simply solved with 5-10 Google searches. Value comes from solving something that otherwise would require spending a lot of time and money – the more complex the problem you solve, the higher the chance of finding interested buyers.
Make it easy, breakdown the solution – people search for instant gratification, so make sure the solution you are offering is easy to understand and implement. If your product looks complex, people will not be satisfied.
Deliver value and make the product available right when people need it (sales) – develop sales techniques to reach people who are looking for a solution you are offering.

Educational Podcast - benefits for students

6 Key Elements of a Succesful Info Product

As you need time to build an info product, take action to ensure its success. As there are elements of a successful podcast, there are also common traits of successful info products.

Below is an overview of the key elements you should address to improve the chance of success.

1. Don’t sell bad stuff – build something you can be proud of. Info products can be sold at a decent price point. If you focus on selling those products with the help of your podcast you should grow a business you will be proud of.

2. Your course should be thorough and valuable – since you are giving free information anyway through your podcast you need to create something more valuable. Also, consider that other people, YouTube videos, and bloggers are also providing free information. Your product needs to be worth purchasing. It needs to cover more topics and deliver more solutions than a few hours of web browsing would provide.

3. Prepare in-depth and exhaustive material – right info products should make sure users get a deep understanding of their original problem. Also, since an info product will cover hours of material it should intelligently connect all the threads and offer in combination more than consuming similar free content on the web would do.

4. Offer more than the competition – you probably will find info products offered by other people. Review their course outlines. You will quickly find that the majority offers similar basic staff at an overpriced level. Make sure your product leaves them miles behind by adding so much value that actually you will have no competition.

5. Offer unique value – unique value is different than more value than your competition. By offering more than the competition you can simply do a more in-depth and more extended course. Unique value comes from a deep understanding of people’s needs. You will also often find unique value at the crossroads of different fields.

6. Make the product long, so it requires time to consume – don’t inflate the length. You will achieve lengthy material by doing what we already mentioned. Offer more than competition and going in-depth should be your goal. Finally, don’t compress the material but also don’t drag it forever. Makes something great, that will require a couple of weeks to consume (and fully understand) rather than offering something that can be reviewed over a weekend.

How to Price Your Info Product?

Pricing strategy for your product is essential because you want it to succeed on the market but also because of the time and effort required to build it. When you are developing an info product, you are sacrificing other sources of income you could produce at the same time. You need to factor all alternatives when thinking about how to monetize a podcast.

Most importantly, make it actually worth the price and don’t sell crap – people will notice quickly if the offer is poor. You will get bad feedback and a high return rate.

Let me share 3 guidelines for finding the right place for your info product.

Make sure your solution is the best on the market – review what is the core offer of your competitors. The chance is that you will find more than a few basic courses. Their authors probably already tried to price them competitively, so they should be within a similar price range. Review that basic offer, and as recommended, offer more value. That should easily allow you to double the price of your competition.
Factor in Marketing Budget – if you want to sell and promote your product actively, you need to have a budget for that. Without setting a marketing budget, you have two options. You can sell it passively, thus limiting potential and not getting all the value, or you can spend money on marketing and sales, but it will consume the profit margin and end up earning very little.
Make it worth your while – price it correctly. Make sure that you will get a reasonable return on investment. If you are going to spend 100 hours making the right info product at the same time, you could have recorded around 50-100 podcast episodes. Price your product in a way you will make more money from selling this product than those 50-100 episodes could bring you in 3 years from ads or other affiliate offers.

Conclusions

Selling Info Product with Podcasts is an excellent combination of offering a product in a high demand market through a fast-growing marketing channel.

Interestingly, most people are focused on downloads and monetization through ads. Developing an Info Product and selling it with the help of your podcast will allow you to monetize faster than waiting on the buildup of your subscribers and getting higher CPM revenue from ads.

Having a good info product can be a better, faster, and more profitable way to monetize your podcast.

For your info product to be successful, it needs to offer high quality and provide unique value.