Ahhhh… remember the good old days?   When you could set up a “business” selling ebooks, CDs, and DVDs, on Google?  Maybe make them entirely downloadable, have your customer service person handle the complaints, and you just spent a little time each day managing your PPC account?

Info Marketing, that’s the dream.

Move some electrons from here to there and money winds up in your bank account.  (While you, of course, munch on Doritos and chase cheap thrills in God-knows what way suits you!)

Enter the Kindle, the economic crash, and the general education of consumers over time and…

Oh well, you know the rest.

It’s getting harder and harder to sell information products these days.

EXCEPT….

Except if you knew what information marketing was REALLY all about in the first place…

If you understood that the dissemination of information was really just a leveraged way to communicate with your market…

To build RELATIONSHIPS with your prospects…

And that you didn’t rely on information alone as a SUBSTITUTE for that relationship.

You see, smart marketers have only incorporated information products into a more traditional product funnel all along.

Because an introductory DVD which outlines the SYSTEM you’ve got for solving XYZ problem is really best suited to position YOU as the only one in the world to SERVICE THAT PROBLEM!

The key word being service.

I’ve come to MANY high end professionals like this…

My present monthly health coach, for example, is someone I chose after (a) reading a book on her philosophy; (b) joining a paid continuity club where I relentlessly consumed her philosophy, recipes, interviews, and more.  And I actually came to both Perry Marshall and Terry Dean only after a similar course of info-consumption. (I’ve been worth tens of thousands of dollars to each of them!)

Now, most people smitten with the information marketing dream don’t want to conceptualize it like this.  They want to hide behind the information.  At least twice a week someone says to me “I’ve been working so hard at doing X for years… so everything I do going forward from here on in is going to be an effort to productize this knowledge… I’m sick of trading dollars for hours”

Well I’ve got news for you Joe…

That’s a BIG meatball you’re asking the market to swallow!

Because while every new marketer I speak with gives me some version of being sick of delivering service, every consumer I speak with tells me they’re sick of marketers trying to hide behind info products.

So you do the math!

But take heart…

Because if you KNOW the right model…

If you’ve spent years trying to master information marketing, your skills will NOT have gone to waste, and you still CAN have the dream with free time, independence, and the money you want.

But you’ve got to add something to the mix…

For most businesses, this means HUMAN CAPITAL.

One of the most natural ways to do this is just SERVE the market with a completely done-for-you solution.  But unfortunately this is often VERY expensive, time consuming, and difficult to manage.

The sweet spot is COACHING… you serve the market by CUSTOMIZING a solution for each individual, but you’re not responsible for the work itself.

And when you do it right, you can LEVERAGE everything you know about info-marketing to achieve what you’ve been looking for all along in your business…

And you can even manage other coaches to free even more of your time. (As long as you keep the bar HIGH for the people you allow to coach for you… they DO have to be able to deliver the results you promise!)

Now, I’ve sold coaching in almost every variety you can imagine.  From  some of the MOST EXPENSIVE coaching ever (when I used to do corporate team building and name development workshops, sometimes for as much as $25,000 for a two day project) to hundreds of individual pay-as-you-go sessions, to a sold out monthly coaching board (GlennCoach.com)

I’ve SUPERVISED many coaches to success to0 (both from a skills perspective, but also regarding how to market their practices).

Up until this point, I always recommended coaches work hard to sell FREE sessions using my stepladder system (bulls eye keyword –> opt in site –> dozens of content gifts –> contact for free session)

But THIS YEAR I’ve discovered a NEW model that makes the above look like a cheeseburger at La Fondue.

In fact, it’s so dramatically changed how I think about marketing a coaching practice that I’m recommending to all my coach-supervisees (with one minor exception), that they NEVER do another free session again!

On Monday (10/8/12), I’ll launch this program with Terry Dean, David Oliver, and Dan Gallapoo.

Watch your inbox for a special 50% off introductory price.

Onwards and upwards,

Dr. G 🙂