Selling Information
Products Online
In my experience, before most people set up an online business
they’ve already got a pretty good idea about what they want to sell.
It’s often something they’ve worked with in the past or something
they use in their spare time, like model aircrafts or football
memorabilia. The Web, they believe, is the perfect way to get those
products to the public with little expense.
But not everyone comes online with an idea in hand. In this
chapter and the next, I’m going to look at two kinds of product you
can create and sell on the Web: information products and software
programs.
Let’s start with information products.
On the Web, information products mean e-books. These are small
books that are downloaded from the Web (like this one) and are
usually aimed at niche markets. It costs a lot of money to make a
print book and if the market is small, few publishing companies are
going to bother with the risk and the expense. E-books cost little
more than the time it takes to write them.
And anyone can write an e-book! You don’t have to be John
Grisham or the world’s leading expert to write a book. Everyone
knows something that other people don’t know, whether it’s how to
fix a TV or how to tell the difference between a blue tit and a
crow. You don’t even need to write it yourself. If you’ve got an
idea for a book, simply find yourself a ghostwriter, tell them
what’s on your mind and get them to write it for you!
If you don’t want to do the writing yourself, finding a writer
for your e-book is dead easy. Finding a good writer though is a
whole other ball game. Everyone and their aunty thinks they have
what it takes to win the Pulitzer if someone would just give them a
chance, but even most college graduates have a hard time
constructing a sentence, let alone writing a complete book. And you
don’t want any old book. You want a book your readers will enjoy
reading in a style that speaks to them.
If you’ve already hired someone to write your newsletters for
you, they’re probably going to be the first person to ask. Every
time you hire a new writer, you’re taking a risk. You’ll have no
idea how talented they are, how much they know about your industry
or how well they can write in the style you need. A writer you
already work with though, does know about your industry—and you know
how well they can write.
If you don’t have anyone on call though, Elance is a good
place to search. Again, check the portfolios carefully and pay
attention to people’s feedback. Elance encourages its clients to
review the work of the people they hire. These are great pointers to
the reliability and skill of a writer you’re thinking of hiring.
One little tip for hiring writers on Elance is not to pay too
much attention to the amount of work the writer has done in the
recent past (another little piece of info Elance gives you). You
don’t want to hire someone who’s too stressed to give your book the
attention it needs, and just because someone’s new to Elance, or
doesn’t use it very much, doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot of
experience. They might have a lot of clients outside Elance.
In short, you want to find someone who can show you an e-book
they’ve already written and ideally on the subject and in the style
you want.
Now, once you’ve made the hire, it’s important to remember
that you’re paying someone to do the writing not the thinking. It
will be up to you to supply the writer with all the information he
needs to get the job done. The more you help the writer with the
ideas you want the book to contain, the greater the chance you’ll
get the product you want.
And finally, don’t be surprised if the writer demands that you
stump up some cash in advance. On Elance, a deposit of as much as
50% isn’t uncommon. This a result of all the unscrupulous buyers who
have bought services and not bothered to pay the bill. Too many
writers have been stung in the past and most of the more established
ones will want to see at least some cash to know you’re on the
level. There’s often room to negotiate the deposit though, and you
can sometimes use milestones to lessen the risk on both sides.
In essence, there are four categories of books. Of course
there are a plethora of subcategories in each of these main
categories, but the main ones are:
Usually fiction: novels, short stories, poems, romances,
sci-fi, historical, adventure or humor are the most popular, but
they’re all hard to sell online. Most people prefer to buy fiction
in stores.
Spiritual books, devotional writings, uplifting
life-experiences, Biblical or other religious writings, stories from
the heart, or life-changing principles. A select market that you
need to know well to make pay.
There is a constant need for reference material
both for business and academic use. This could cover everything from
supplementary reading for school kids to advanced math tutoring for
university students. Know something others don’t?
“Do-it-yourself” and self-improvement books. Straightforward
approaches, pictures and analogies that teach everything from
archery to amateur zoology.
Although all these types of books sell, the
how-to-books and guides are by far the best sellers on the Web. You
don’t have to be massively original here. The most profitable books
are those that offer a slightly new take on a topic with proven
popularity. There’s no point in picking a subject that only
interests you and your best pals.
I’ve found that these are the ten most popular—and most
profitable—topics for “how-to” e-books.
1.
Making money.
2.
Saving money.
3.
Saving time.
4.
Saving effort.
5.
Building a more comfortable life.
6.
Achieving greater success.
7.
Solving a problem.
8.
Increasing knowledge.
9.
Attaining better health.
10.
Gaining information.
Those are pretty general, and clearly you’re going to have to
generate ideas that focus on a particular topic. A book entitled
“Making Money” isn’t going to sell many copies; a book entitled
“Making Millions in Your Pajamas” will.
When you’re looking for a topic, first make sure it’s a
subject that you do actually have some knowledge about—or
alternatively, make sure you hire a writer who does.
If you’ve found a subject that no one else has touched, or
even come close to touching, it’s unlikely that anyone will want to
read it. The reason that there are millions of romances on
bookshelves—and almost all of them the same—is that publishers know
they sell. And like you, they’re interested in making money not
breaking new ground.
So how do you assess the popularity of your chosen
topic? Here’s a simple three-step process:
1.
Identify keywords for your book idea.
2.
Conduct a search of your keywords to determine how many people are
searching for the information you’re putting out.
3.
Run
your keywords through the search engines and look for the following
information:
A.
The
number of e-books already available on the subject.
B.
The
number of paid sponsor ads for the search. This indicates that
there is interest on the subject—otherwise big companies wouldn’t be
wasting their marketing budgets to sponsor the searches.
And what does all this information tell you? First, it
tells you whether there is a market at all; and secondly it tells
you whether the market is saturated.
We discussed earlier the importance of choosing the right topic or
your Ebook. The Internet is primarily used to communicate,
entertain, educate and research. It is thus no wonder that
nonperishable, information-intensive products - including books,
travel guides, magazine subscriptions - are the most popular online
products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based sites to
advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range of topics, have
been sprouting all over the Internet.
Ebooks and guides on various subjects have been prospering in
the recent past. Anything you can put in a physical book, you can
put in an Ebook. You can sell just about any content — as long as
you have an offering that has a market and an ability to get it
(legally) to your customer. Yes, there are exceptions. In some cases
you might be competing with big companies with a chunk of the market
share.
Here are some categories that you may pursue:
Personal advice, motivation and self help
sites
There are several sites aimed at the individual - mainly
motivational and self-betterment sites. Such sites offer tips,
articles, advice and counseling on how to build self-esteem and
self-confidence and reduce stress for a happier life. You may also
provide great inspirational quotations, inspirational stories,
motivational poems, and other resources to motivate and inspire your
visitors. It could include psychology tests, IQ tests, emotional
intelligence tests and personality tests for self-help improvement.
The market for personal advice and counseling, especially for
students is pretty big. You can provide educational counseling
through such sites. Professional advisory information and training
is covered in a subsequent category.
Fitness and health, diets, weight loss
sites
These sites provide complete guides, articles, tips and
counseling on proper eating and exercising habits, benefits of diet
and exercise, fitness techniques, diet articles and diet tips,
weight loss, as well as some of the popular diet plans. It includes
tips from fitness experts, reviews of fitness and diet programs,
message boards, forums and discussions on health and fitness.
Information of various nutritional and diet supplements,
healthy and non-healthy foods can be included. Some of the popular
fitness and health sites are eDiets.com and WeightWatchers.com.
Not all the sites are comprehensive in nature; most in fact
focus on some specific program(s) and try to promote those programs
to their members. Members are provided not only great details about
some proprietary programs, but also personalized guidance to suit
their individual cases. Members are also able to share their
experiences. Generally, such sites will also offer privileges and
discounts to their members to avail of fitness equipments or
nutritional supplements or membership of fitness clubs.
Credit Help websites
This category includes sites offering
access to consumer credit history records and related content, for
example ConsumerInfo.com and CreditExpert.com. Such websites also
offer credit counseling and tips as well as credit consolidation
services. Articles, guides, and tips for credit improvement are
provided.
Medical research websites
These sites focus on medical issues and/or health insurance.
Medical research websites provide an extensive listing of research
resources on various diseases and promotion of health through public
education. It includes clinical information as well as information
about doctors and hospitals in all states. Information on medical
ethics and fraud is also provided.
Medical Journals, publications, and articles are often
presented. Such websites are a good resource for lists of National
Institutes of Health, medical encyclopedias and dictionaries, and
extensive information on prescription and nonprescription drugs.
Apart from these, all information related to Medicare and health
insurance can be found on these sites.
Consultants, paralegal and legal researchers and consumers are
amongst those who have interest in such sites.
You may also like to consider a site that provides information
on health and medicine for the general public or for a specific
target group, say women, nursing mothers. While there are quite a
few sites that offer this type of information free, there is room
for those that can provide uniquely targeted information. Alternate
and complementary medicine and therapy is another area evoking
considerable interest and audience.
Personal Finance and Investment
These sites offer advice and tips on managing personal finance
and investments. These include articles and guides from financial
experts and assist in retirement planning. Such sites provide
comprehensive information on various investment plans such as
investing stocks, mutual funds, bonds, real estate and so on. They
also offer advice on taxes.
Finally, once you have selected your subject, it’s just
a question of putting it all together and making the sales. Show it
to your friends and colleagues to get their feedback, add some
pictures to break up the text if you can, and upload it onto your
server.
Your basic sales method is likely to be through a
website, but e-books also make great bonuses, joint venture
opportunities and ways to add extra value to your sales.
Information products have two great advantages. First,
they’re dead easy to put together. If you’ve always thought of
yourself as a bit of a writer and want to do it yourself, you can
have fun and hit the keyboard. If you’d rather pay a pro, you can
probably make the money back once you’ve shifted about thirty or
forty copies—follow my marketing methods and that will take you less
than two weeks.
Best of all though, information products give you an
unending stream of revenue. Once you’ve uploaded the book onto your
server and set up the website and payment system, they money pretty
much rolls in by itself. There’s no shipping, no inventory, no
fiddling about with order sheets. You just keep an eye on the
marketing, make sure the users keep coming and count the number of
times people download. Put a series of books like this out, combined
with my marketing methods and you’re looking at a very nice way to
make a living.
You can also sell a range of other products. One of
these is software, which is discussed later on in this book. For
now, lets examine some other marketing techniques such as Press
Releases.
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