One thing you need to do to succeed is to gain customers for life; this gives you a big competitive edge. It's like my friend with the yard care business: he charges premium rates for services other offer for less, but people keep using him, and they're getting good value. Why? Because my buddy has made his business indispensable to his clients, which may be the most important thing any business can do. Any business can do this by providing customers with the information they need, in a form they want, and making it easily available to them. Whether the information is the product itself or a supplement to the business, this is a great way to become indispensable, and should be your ultimate goal.
A lot of businesspeople never consider this option. It's not just that they don't think about information products; they've never thought of themselves as experts, or believed that they could become indispensable to the customer. What they know is that this is the product they sell, this is the business they're in, and this is how they do it - because this is how everyone else has done it for the last hundred years. So they're focused on being more like an employee of their business than anything else. They have their business; they know the product they sell; they may even sell it extremely well, but this is just the routine, the way they do things. They've never thought about if from another angle. They've never considered the dynamic of stepping back, putting yourself in the expert position, and then being able to use that expertise to make yourself more money in your business - and then to also teach other people and become an information marketer who is indispensable to their customers.
A fellow information marketer I know, told me about a lady who runs a website design firm. It has 26 employees, and it's growing by leaps and bounds. She often goes out into the local community and gives seminar speeches; she does a great job, and gets a lot of business from it. When he spoke to her, he said, "Well, that's great! But you're limited in terms of how many people you can reach, both in the amount of time you have to do your seminars and by the number of people in your local area. What you could do is take that seminar speech and record it, and you'd have a simple audio CD that's no longer limited to your local area. You can offer it, free of charge, on your website and send it out nationally and internationally. Or, you can have it transcribed and create a print product."
When you're thinking about information products, I don't want you to think, "I've got to be a big-name author or speaker and it's got to be perfect." That's not true! An information product that makes you an indispensable expert can be as simple as talking into a tape recorder about what you do in your business - what it is that makes you an expert (which you are). Have somebody transcribe it for you and BOOM! You've got an instant information product without having to be some English professor who knows all the grammar rules inside and out. People don't really care about that. What they care about is that you come across as an expert who knows what you're talking about - than a person has an information product that's going to help them in some way.
It's natural to be a little hesitant, a little afraid, when going into something like this - but don't let it stop you from taking that step. So what if you're afraid of what your competitors are going to say about you? Who gives a hoot about them? You want your competitors to talk about you! You want them to be a little bit intimidated by you - or at least to respect you. You shouldn't care less about what any of your competitors say, because you want to be the company they follow!