In the year ended 2007, Barnes and Noble, Borders and Amazon had collectively sold $13.59 billion worth of books and other information products such as music and DVDs. And this is in North America alone. That’s a lot of dollars.

But what exactly happens when someone buys a book or a CD? Are they buying the paper that the words are printed on? The plastic that the CD comes in? No. They are actually buying the “ideas” behind the book. And these ideas are of GREAT value to the people who buy them.

For example, the “ideas” behind a book can solve problems, entertain and even help the reader to make money and improve their lives. It’s all about delivering the right ideas to the right people when they need it most.

So if the value of the book (a $13.59 billion industry) is not in the book itself but rather the “ideas”, then the Internet offers the ULTIMATE VEHICLE to get the right ideas to the right people.

Why? With the Internet, you can tell EXACTLY what “ideas” consumers are looking for, you can promote and sell the ideas on a web store front, you can collect money for those “ideas” via a payment service like PayPal and you can deliver your “ideas” instantly to your customers!

As an information marketer, I’m very clear about this. Whether its an eBook, MP3 audio download or Camtasia videos or even software, I am actually solving problems and adding value to my customers with ideas through the process above.

I love this because there’s no “hard sell”. A good marketer delivers the right product to the right person just when they need them – that is, when they are searching for the solution online.

There’s so much potential in the online information marketing industry that I can’t even begin to explain. For example, you can tell what “ideas” are hot in the marketplace by researching the number of searches for particular keywords.

For example, I can tell you that there are 81,100 searches per month around the word “Hypnosis” and that there are 324,906 searches per month around the word “foreclosure”. By digging deeper into these keywords you will be able to formulate a clear idea about what the searcher is looking for and even determine if they are willing to pay for this information!

Then its just a matter of matching the searches with the information product. With information products, you could create your own or find products that offer an affiliate program on ClickBank for example. This entire process of analyzing what consumers are searching for is called “Keyword Research”.

One of the best tools I have found so far for doing keyword research is Keyword Elite by Brad Callen. I like this tool because its simple to use and very effective. I use it almost everyday. But I’ll be digressing from this post if I go too much into it. I’ll probably do a post about how I use in on another day but if you visit the site, Brad has already created 5 videos to show how you can profit from effective keyword research.

So now you know what I do. If you are looking for new opportunities, then I recommend selling ideas on the Internet too. ;)

Tags: information marketing, keyword research