Information product creation and marketing is one of the most lucrative business models on the internet today. It is easy to get started in, can be accomplished in a short period of time and can provide you with long term residual income.

This method of making money online is both popular and profitable. Many people who used to hold on to regular jobs while dabbling in internet marketing to earn extra income have long since quit their day jobs and enjoyed the benefits of earning online through info product marketing. But how does one create information products?

Here are 5 simple and easy to follow steps in product creation.

Step 1 - Niche Identification

In this first step, you browse around the internet looking for opportunities. The goal is to find out what people are talking about and see if in their discussions there arise any problems or questions which need some sort of solution.

Think about a topic you are interested in or may have some knowledge about.

Then go to forums that are related to these topics and dig down by searching for certain keywords related to the topic. You can also go to Yahoo Answers and do a search for keywords related to the topic and see what sort of questions or help Yahoo Answers users have been posting about.

Step 2 - Market Research

In this next step, the goal is to see if people are spending money on information products in this niche.

Take those same keywords you were searching for in the previous step and go to Google and do a search for those keywords. Take note of which keywords had plenty of AdWords ads on the upper portion and right portion of the search results page. A keyword which has at least 10 or more ads is a good sign, if people are advertising on the keyword, then there must be money to be made from that keyword. However, you should also check each of those ads to see what is being advertised. If there are no information products being advertised, that can be both a good and bad sign, and you can find the answer to this in the next step. If however there are other info products advertised, then this is a good sign that this is indeed a profitable niche. Also note what kind of products these are; whether they are free reports, ebooks, audio or video.

Step 3 - Direct Survey

This is a step where a lot of information products go wrong because the product creators are quick to make conclusions based on favorable results of the previous two steps.

Take research a step further by actually creating a survey and driving AdWords traffic to a survey page. Be sure to use the keywords that you used in the previous steps, as this will also give you an idea which keywords your potential customers will be most receptive to when you promote your information product later on.

This step is to further support the results of your previous steps. In the survey you can ask your respondents specific questions that relate to their problems or questions about a certain topics, what format they are most receptive to (ebooks, audio, video, etc), and other telling questions that will help you structure your information product.

Step 4 - Product Creation

This is the step where you put together your information product to meet the needs of the persons you have surveyed. You can put together this product yourself if you have personal knowledge about it, or you can simply have it outsourced by people who are experts in this field in places like guru.com, Elance or other sites where you can find experts on the field that you can tap to produce your product with your own input based on what you have found in your research.

Step 5 - Making it Available

Now that your info product is ready, you have to put the product on the rack for buyers to see it. What this means is, you have to put the product on a website created specifically for this purpose. With a good amount of promotion and advertising, you will be on your way to earning a decent passive income from your information product.