SELLING INFORMATION PRODUCTS ONLINE

And why it’s so easy, this guide is pretty much all you need!

Congratulations! If you have this special report before you, you have already taken the first steps towards making your fortune on the Internet…

With the help of this report, you will find that taking proven marketing techniques and applying them to the Internet is really quite simple. By applying the Internet and email marketing to your business, you will be able to contact more potential customers, more ‘prospects’, more quickly and more cheaply than has ever been possible. What’s more, you will have access to a wider range of products to sell than you might have imagined was possible.

The Internet can even be used to deliver your products, and collect the money and pay it directly into your bank account!

With the information contained in this special report, you will learn how to:

· Save hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds on postage

· Contact an almost infinite number of potential customers at the same time

· Find out who is buying what, and from where, and how you can easily get into ‘hot’ markets

· Apply what you already know to multiply your profits still further

· Find out where you can find additional help and resources

· Take your next steps towards that dream lifestyle…

So let’s get started right away…

In fact, before we go any further, let me just say that a ‘dream’ lifestyle will remain just that – a ‘dream’ – unless you start to take the actions explained here and elsewhere towards making it a reality. And to do that you need a clear idea in your mind of where you’re going, and the direction you need to take to get there. Life (and business is a part of life) is essentially about paths and choices. If you choose the easy path of least resistance and settle for ordinary and everyday, then you’ll stay in exactly the same rut you’re in now.

To make the changes you want to make, you will need to start thinking differently, acting differently and focusing on goals and ambitions beyond anything you’ve previously thought possible. Others have succeeded by doing just that (and then taking the necessary actions to get there), and so can you. Your business can still be totally ethical – in fact it has to be to work over the long-term – but your efforts from now on need to be focussed on what you most want to achieve in life. Success can be yours, starting right here.

Now, to get on…

Please always be aware that the only way to achieve long-term success in this business, as in any business, is to treat your customers fairly, honestly and courteously. It’s not just a matter of your peace of mind, either – your customers are your only source of wealth in this or any other business.

The difference in the information products trade, that separates it from practically all others, is that it’s the same customers, time after time, who will make you rich.

That doesn’t mean you’ll be selling them the same old, same old, time after time. On the contrary, it means you have to sell them the very best products – products they’ll be delighted and thrilled with – in order that they will willingly come back for more, and then more again in many cases. So, your customer database is your most valuable asset.

I really cannot over-state it: Your list of customers is your most prized possession, and you must neither abuse it yourself nor let anyone else abuse it, or your route to riches will just disappear before your eyes…

So, that out of the way, let’s start to look at why the Internet has transformed what used to be known as ‘mail order’, and made millionaires out of ordinary people like you and me.

You might remember me explaining to you that the mail order business can be conducted from almost anywhere in the world. Some of the most successful people live in ‘the middle of nowhere’, and it’s done their business no harm at all.

The Internet, though, takes this concept to a whole new level. Not only can we conduct business from almost anywhere, but we can do it from a different location almost every day of the year if we choose to. As long as we have an internet connection, a phone line and access to the postal system, we just need our wits and a laptop and our business is right there with us.

Not, you understand, that we’ll need to interrupt family holidays or disturb the peace of our exotic beach hideaway with endless phone calls from ‘the office’, nor will we have to hurriedly arrange emergency board meetings under the palm trees - although that would be a major improvement on most people’s working conditions…

No, we can do far better than that. Once our ‘system’ is up and running, we can take care of the smooth operation of our business with just a few hours work most days, and maybe just an hour or so per day (mostly to check how much money’s flowing in) when we fancy a ‘rest’. That’s how much the Internet has transformed the information business…

So let’s see how

Well, it’s still really easy. Just as easy as the original ‘Mail Order’ system, except now that system is even more efficient.

Yes, you still need to:

1. Find a hungry market

2. Find a suitable product for that market

3. Put the two together and collect the money

Except that now, all three components of that simple system are easier to do than they’ve ever been - thanks to the Internet.

Always, always, start by identifying a market

First, give up any ideas you had about turning your hobby into a business: it’s no good finding or producing the most wonderful product in the world if there aren’t enough buyers to make it lucrative. Not merely profitable, or you’ll be settling for the kind of income you already get in your ordinary job, or less, and probably devoting just as many hours to earning it.

That’s not what we’re trying to do here, so look for lucrative markets – large groups of people who have money and are ready to spend it. The simple secret behind that is explained in ‘Everyday Way to Make Millions’, and the principal is the same here.

One major difference is that now we can easily find which markets are hot, and which are up and coming by using the Internet.

Start by looking on www.alexa.com and make a note of the levels of traffic for different websites in different niches - traffic equals interest, and interest equals potential customers. Look for all the niche markets you can think of and make notes of the numbers involved.

You’ll find very good search tools now on Yahoo! Just enter http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com (formerly www.overture.com ) and you’ll find a whole range of helpful information and statistics to help your research.

Use Google www.google.co.uk for research too. In fact, in the UK, Google is far and away the most-used search engine. Enter the search term ‘newsgroups’ on the most popular subjects to try to get an idea of what the people in those niches are looking for. Stick around until you’ve got a sense of the most pressing problems, which might be your opportunities. Even join some groups and simply ask questions.

You can also use the various tools in Google Adwords to find keywords in your likely niche, at www.google.com/adwords and see which terms are most searched-for. The adsense tools are being improved and expanded all the time, so do visit the site to see what’s available now.

Another good place to research information products is Clickbank www.clickbank.com Apart from their very convenient payment-handling facilities, they act as a store front for information marketers as well as affiliate scheme managers. Their products are helpfully ranked in order of popularity within each category and sub-category, so you can see just what’s selling and where you might find a niche of your own to sell to.

List brokers will also be able to help – without you buying a single name or address at this point. By entering the right search terms you can find out the size of the buyer lists they hold in any niche you can think of – a very good indication of where you should be selling!

In case you are unsure, it’s vitally important that you understand this point – the busiest, most crowded markets are the most lucrative ones, and they are the markets you must exploit. Putting it simply - if there’s no competition, there is almost certainly no business to be had, for you or anyone else. Most successful entrepreneurs don’t invent products and markets, they successfully exploit the ones that already exist. You must, though, give your product a new twist to differentiate it from the crowd – either in the product itself of the way you market it.

Once you’ve found your likely market you must look for the products to sell them. There are thousands of products to be found and sold online Then, after you make contact with the potential customers … but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

You must source a good product

Or, better still, a range of products that you can sell to the hungry buyers you’ve just identified. Good products have to be of saleable quality, of course, but they also have to be easy and cheap to despatch, preferably by post, be more or less unbreakable, and give high profit margins.

Information products fit the bill perfectly. CDs, CD ROM’s and DVD's can be replicated cheaply, are very sturdy (when posted in DVD-type cases, not the flimsy, brittle ‘jewel’ ones they usually come in) and weigh next to nothing. They are also nearly worthless to a casual thief and at the same time extremely valuable to the niche customers who’ll be buying them from you.

There is also the purely digital range of products (software, e-books etc) that can be downloaded by the customer or emailed to them after electronic payment of the fee, where there is no postage and no manufacture involved at all, beyond creating the original and installing it on a website page. They are much, much cheaper to produce and distribute. Plus, they satisfy the modern customers’ ‘want it now’ attitude.

But where do you find these products? And why, if they’re so good, aren’t they selling like hot cakes already? Well, as I’ve said, we’re not talking about selling lawnmowers and fridges here (or even office safes, although it has been done – imagine the shipping costs!).

In fact these products are just not found on the High Street, yet there are hundreds if not thousands of them available. Simply go to Google, and type in ‘how to products’, or something similar, and you’ll get millions of ‘results’. Not all of them will be for products you can sell, of course, but there will be plenty.

Everyone wants to know ‘how to’ do something at some time, whether for their work or their hobby or through necessity, and almost every requirement, every niche market, will have ready-made products already created and ready to satisfy it.

Introducing OPPOLs – how to use Other People’s Products Or Lists to make you money

What the owners of these products don’t have, in many cases, is the skill or the will to actually market them to the general public. That’s where you come in. The product owners may be happy to let you sell their product in exchange for a share of the price or a proportion of the net profit.

The product owner will often retain responsibility for manufacturing and dispatching the product while you will be the one responsible for actually selling it. And of course, you both make money.

These schemes are known as Joint Ventures, where you sell someone else’s product (or they sell yours).

If the owner just wants to offload the whole product - or if you can persuade them they do - for what you will both consider a good price, you may be able to buy an exclusive licence for the product. It then becomes yours to re-brand if you wish, and sell at whatever price you care to put on it. You just need to contact them and ask.

Some other product-owners may be quite capable of selling their own products and be selling them already. Many though, will still be happy for you to help increase their sales, through your growing marketing skills, in exchange for a percentage of the price.

These arrangements are known as affiliate schemes. Briefly, your sales literature (advertisements, direct mail and website) leads customers to the product-owner’s payment page. The product owners use special software to track where the customers came from, ie, your site, and pay you accordingly, often once or twice a month. Beware, though - some of these schemes pay well, while others will offer only a very small percentage in commission.

In time you may find you want to produce your own products, as our ‘Everyday’ experts suggest, but when you first start out you will easily find more than enough niches, and more than enough niche products, for you to start to make a very good living, and much more quickly than if you are creating the products from scratch, too.

But I can’t finish this part without reminding you that your major priority here is ‘quality’. You must not sell products you wouldn’t be willing to buy yourself (given that you were in that market ‘niche’, of course). So, be prepared to buy, at retail price if necessary, the product you intend to sell, although you might be able to secure a free sample.

Only if the product is up to scratch should you attempt to sell it, either in a joint venture, as an affiliate, or by buying a licence to reprint or reproduce.

But how to show the customers the product?

Well, you’re not opening a shop, that’s for sure, but marketing is marketing, and the best products in the world and the keenest customers in the world won’t make you rich if they never get to meet each other.

Once again, the techniques you’ve been learning elsewhere will still apply, but the Internet gives you the ability to reach an almost infinite number of potential customers for no more money than it costs to reach one or two. The trick is in getting them to read your sales ‘literature’ online instead of mailing it, at not inconsiderable cost, to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of addresses.

So, how do we do that? Well, here we can still use one of the oldest methods in the book – small ads. You will remember (or still have to hand) the two methods for writing successful ads that you heard about in ‘The Everyday Way to Making Millions’. If not, look it up in the transcript or listen once again to that part of the CD.

Here, all you need to do is use the address of the website where your sales letter is to be found, in your ‘call to action’ - where you literally tell the prospective customer what to do next. You are simply directing them to your sales copy at this point. Don’t try to sell anything directly from the ad.

The sales copy on your website will be a version of the sales letter you would otherwise have been sending out as direct mail to potential customers. Here though, instead of spending all that money on postage, you have grabbed your potential customers’ attention by posting an inexpensive small ad in the places where potential customers are most likely to read it – niche magazines and national newspapers are best.

Then, the ‘call to action’, rather than telling them to phone or write, tells them to type into their web browser www.mywonderfulsalescopy.com or whatever your website address may be.

When they do that, they’ll be greeted with your sales letter and, most importantly, an easy way to order and pay, there and then, by simply clicking on a link that takes them to a payment page. Once there, they give their card details, their card is debited and the order is placed - all in a minute or two at most.

You can get people to your site in other ways, too

You can still mail people perhaps, but maybe with with just a postcard or simple letter, telling them about the website, or you might pay for ‘Adwords’ on Google. These are essentially small ads that appear on the right hand side of Google pages, tailored to the subject you’re searching for. So, type in ‘dogs’ for example, and the ads will be for dog food, dog training, dog grooming, etc.

There is a very good Google tutorial on adwords – just key ‘adwords’ into the Google search box and you’ll find links to it.

You might arrange to have links from other people’s sites (and vice-versa). They’re not very difficult to do and they may improve your search engine ranking.

You could be very clever and issue a press release to a trade or ‘interest’ magazine, always with your website address embedded within it. Ads like this, that don’t look like advertising, can be up to six times as effective as paid ads.

The secret of getting them published is to find magazines that are short of ‘copy’ and to match the ‘house style’ of the publication as far as possible.

A specialist copywriter could write it for you. You might try www.elance.com if you don’t know any copywriters.

Don’t panic

Now, this may start to sound rather complicated; setting up the website, getting people to it, writing the sales letter, arranging to collect credit card details, despatching the product etc, It isn’t really. In any case, there are companies and freelancers that will either do most or all of that for you, or sell you packages and ‘how to’ guides that make the whole process much, much simpler than it sounds. For a comprehensive help and advice about sales letters and all other copywriting, go to www.cinnamonedge.com

Look on the Internet for ‘web hosting’ to get you started, for copywriters and copywriting manuals if you lack that particular skill, and for ‘fulfilment houses’ for when the orders start to flow (though not until you have a product ‘ready to go’). The best of them will understand your needs and may even guide you through the process. And, let’s face it, for the potential earnings involved here, a little brainwork and time spent getting it up and running has to be worth it.

Collecting the money

The best part! Although for some people this seems to be a stumbling block. I’d advise you to make it as easy as possible for your customers to pay by giving them as many payment options as you can. You can still use the postal service to deliver cheques, postal orders etc, and you could take down credit card details by phone, but these days most internet business involves money changing hands (or bank accounts) electronically.

Search for Clickbank, Nochex, Paypal etc, or ‘online payment facilities’ on Google and take the time to find the one most suited to the size of your business, but Paypal www.paypal.co.uk is very widely used. Clickbank www.clickbank.co.uk is excellent, not just for payment handling but also for delivery of digital products like ebooks and software. 1 Shopping Cart www.1shoppingcart.com are also very flexible and offer all kinds of other services you might use, including autoresponders – see below. Whoever you use, it’s essential that you have the facility to collect credit and debit card payments online – in future most of your business will be done that way.

Collecting customers

The ‘fourth part of the trilogy’, you might think, but be assured, this is probably the single most important element, however successful you’ve been at parts 1, 2 and 3. You will have gone to a lot of trouble, and perhaps expense, getting potential customers to your site, or having them request your brochure, for example. With luck, a fair percentage (maybe ten per cent) will have bought your product and very few will have returned it under guarantee. Always give a guarantee with your first offer, by the way. So, you have customers. Now, is it easier to go out and find another new lot of customers to sell another batch of your first product to, or maybe for your next product, or is it perhaps easier to contact your existing ‘list’ and ask if they’d like to buy something else from you?

I can assure you, the second option is by far the easiest, and between ten and a hundred times as lucrative! After all, these people are in the market for the kinds of products you sell. Furthermore, they are real buyers, not just browsers, and you’ve treated them fairly by delivering what you promised, so they trust you and your products already. You’ve already taken the first steps towards developing a relationship with them. They’ve ‘tested’ you by buying a fairly inexpensive item and you’ve delivered, and so now is your opportunity to offer them something a little more expensive…

Soon you’ll start to see the benefits of treating your customers well, especially if you treat them even better than they expected, but straight away you will also start to reap the benefits of your website performing what is probably its single most important function – capturing your customers’ contact details and building a list. Because now you have a list of customers not merely enquirers and as I said right at the beginning, it will be the same customers, buying time after time, who will make you rich So treasure that list, nurture it and your relationships with the people on it – it could be your passport to a lifestyle that matches your wildest dreams…

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