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Friday, January 27, 2006

SELLING INFORMATION PRODUCTS: What Sells, What Doesn't

SELLING INFORMATION PRODUCTS: What Sells, What Doesn't
Copyright © 2006 Stacey Morris

The internet provides an ideal opportunity to provide our clients and customers with high-value products, at low cost to us. Most products can be delivered over the internet, including ebooks, audio files, and home study courses. The production and delivery cost for these items is low, which allows us to focus on developing superior content, without regard to how much to spend on packaging.

The question you may ask yourself is, “What products should I develop?” But that’s the wrong question. Your goal is to serve, not sell. If your product and information is of sufficiently high quality, and truly serves your target market, the selling will be easier. Why? You can be extraordinarily passionate about a topic, but if there’s no market for it, you’re working in a vacuum.

Why not find out what your market really wants, and then supply it to them?

A hot market is golden. Building a product blindly, with little idea of how it will be received, is unnecessary and silly. But building to your customer’s needs and wants makes sense.

So how do you find out what your target market really wants? Below are two methods to find out what is really selling out there. Rather than assume you know what’s best for your target market, be willing to research what they’re currently buying. The market is the best indicator of what people want.

MAGAZINES

Paper magazines are much more expensive to produce than ezines, and they require a steady readership and usually some advertising. You’re looking for special interest magazines that cater to a very specific crowd. You’ll have trouble finding these at your local newsstand, so search on the internet for “your target” + “magazines.” Enter different variations, and you’ll find a number of possibilities.

For example, I just found 3 Yo-Yo magazines through an internet search. Not my target market, but clearly there is a market.

The next step is to order copies of a few issues. You’re looking for ads and coupons for products. When you find a specialty magazine that’s been around for a while, and that displays similar ads consistently, you’ve narrowed down what your market is buying.

CLICKBANK

A second strategy for finding what’s popular is to search on the internet. Specifically, if you’re interested in developing information products, like ebooks or audios, a great place to look is ClickBank, which sells more ebooks than any other outlet. They identify the hottest categories of ebook sold currently from their site, further identified by title.

A category that sells well on ClickBank should be able to sell well in other markets, and specific key words in the title of popular ebooks should give you an indication of what people are looking for now.

CONCLUSION

Tailor your products to what your target market wants. People buy from those they know, like, and trust, and if you can accurately assess specifically what people want, you’ll establish that trust quickly. Don’t assume you know what’s best—do your research.

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Are You Ready to Become a Real Infopreneur? Download your "Website Success Checklist" at
http://www.ServiceBusinessCoaching.com

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Ronald
http://www.affiliateutopia.com/

How to have your own online business

How to have your own online business
Copyright © 2006 HowToAll

So you've decided to have an online business. Before you start having those big cash flow dreams, stop and get some tips for having an online business. There are many internet information resources for doing this sort of thing. However, the basic tips for an online business are very close to those of a traditional business. Here are some basics:

• Write a business plan and revise that plan periodically. Your business plan should be thought of as a living document. As with any business, you will initially find out what works and what does not work and will have to change your plan accordingly.

• Be very careful about buying webspace and pre-packaged website templates for your business (the “we will build your website” people). You'll find that down the road it will be difficult to change the site plus get source code to it. You are better off outsourcing the web design with a freelancer and purchasing your own domain and installing the site yourself.

• Make sure you follow all security measures when running a site that accepts credit cards for purchases.

• If you expect to receive a lot of phone calls, you may want to consider hiring an answering service.

• Run your online business like a business. You will need to discipline yourself with working hours to take care of all offsite matters because you will have them. A lot of people make the mistake of treating their internet business merely as a website, which can be very detrimental because running an online business requires an approach that you would have with an offline business.

• Your marketing plan needs to include search engine optimization (SEO). This is important because you want your site to rank in the top 10 of search engine query results. You would be wise to study SEO techniques or hire the services of a SEO consultant.

• Some other marketing ideas include posting your web address on the back windshield of your vehicle or coordinating with other websites to include a backlink to your site. Word of mouth is always one of the best tools for advertising your site. With the advent of Google Adword, Overture and other similar advertising, it is possible to drive targeted traffic to your site by finding keywords that have very low bids. You will be able to measure your conversion ratio of such traffic with sales in realtime.

Customer service is even more critical as customers do not “see” you and building trust with them is a little harder. Performance builds trust.

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Andrew Smith is the co-owner of HowToAll, a site providing information on how to get things done on a numerous topics.
http://www.howtoall.com

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Ronald
http://www.affiliateutopia.com/