An information product is simply any a portion of knowledge that can now be passed on to others. The information can be put into an e-book, e-course, a special report, an Mp3 recording, a teleclass or even a membership website.

Creating and selling information products is a great way to earn a passive, residual income from home. It does not matter if you are a college student, a grandparent, or somewhere in between, you have information in your head that people are willing to pay for. In addition to topics you are already familiar with, it is easy to research topics you have no prior experience with, and create information products around them.

If you are a virtual assistant, for example, you may have a great client base and are able to earn a nice income from home. However, you cannot work twenty-four hours per day. Your income potential is limited to the amount of hours you can work in a day. As you grow your business, you attract more clients and receive more work. Your reward for hard work is more work. If you want to go on vacation or retire, your income stops.

On the other hand, when you create and sell information products, you are creating unlimited income potential for yourself. You work once on creating your product, and then you can sell it over and over again via a website, twenty-four hours per day.

You will still have to market your product, but you have unlimited potential to earn income off of the hours of work you put into the product. With a standard job, you can only get paid for your work once.

Another great benefit to creating information products is that you do not need much money to get started. If you are creating an e-course, you will need word processing software and an autoresponder. You can write the information and then load it into the autoresponder, which will automatically send each day’s course to the subscribers.

For e-books and special reports, you will also need word processing software. Since different people have different types of programs, you can convert your file into a pdf format. Anyone who downloads Adobe Reader (for free) will be able to read your e-book or report. You do not need to have special software to convert your file; there are many ways to create a pdf for free, such as Google docs.

For information products containing audio, for about $20 per month, you can subscribe to www.audioacrobat.com. This service will allow you to record audio from your telephone or computer microphone. You simply add a bit of HTML to your website and your audio can be heard streaming live, over the internet.