If you are interested in selling information products, you can either:
Write your own articles and e-books and sell them in your online store at your own website
Buy the re-sell rights to someone else’s e-books and articles. This is quicker and easier but will of course cost you money initially.)
Promote other people’s e-books and articles on your site. Basically, this means you become their affiliate and have their links on your website.
Sell e-books on eBay – if you either buy the re-sell rights to other people’s products or if you write your own material for these e-books.
Most people think that to sell information products over the internet that you have to have your own website. That is an incorrect assumption. There are at least two great ways to sell information products without having your own website: eBay and affiliate marketing.
eBay
You could even build your whole online business around eBay. Tens of millions of people browse eBay every year, looking for all manner of products and even services – although eBay is less well known for selling information products. If you sell information products like e-books, you can get over the hassle of having to package your products and mail them off to customers. You just need to e-mail off all those e-books that people will be queuing up (in your inbox) to buy from you!
One note of caution, here, before you get carried away with how easy it is to sell information products this way: the fact is that people don’t often associate eBay with information products like e-books. You have to think laterally – like a buyer not a seller - but when you do, your potential market is massive. For instance – if you have written an e-book about diet, you should place your e-book under the health and fitness category; if you have written an e-book on ‘25 Ways to Improve Your Golf Swing’ for instance – then you should put your e-book in the sports category on eBay. That way, you’ll know that your e-book is targeted at an interested audience.
One other really clever trick if you’re not sure what to write your e-book about - is to check out the popular categories at eBay; eBay has a feature which allows you to see what the most popular searches are, so you can find out where your biggest potential market is and develop or buy a product to meet a need which that particular niche market has.
Affiliate Marketing
You can have a highly successful and lucrative online business just by you being an affiliate – promoting other people’s products. You can find what sorts of things people are selling online through Froogle – launched as you may expect, by internet giants Google; basically, it’s the world’s largest online shopping directory. You can find information products here too.
You can even do the otherwise impossible task of finding out what products NOBODY is selling – which might just be where your niche is for selling your own product.More likely, you will find out who your competitors are if you intend to sell goods or services online.
If your online business is going to be based upon affiliate marketing, though, you can easily find out what the high price information products are and from there you can decide what may be good affiliate partners to seek, based upon the product and what percentage you would get from sales as an affiliate marketer of this information product.
For people to buy your information product, they need to have faith in it. They need to know that it is a quality product which they will benefit from having. One of the best ways to build up this faith in your product is to get yourself known as an expert and all other forms of promoting your information product derive from that.
Acquiring Expert Status
To be seen as an expert in your chosen field for your online business, you should have plenty of articles and content on your site, which needs to be search engine optimized. But you should also get your articles out there on the wider internet and real world – in trade journals, appropriate websites and article directories – all with your information product website link, of course.
You should get yourself on relevant message boards and make some appropriate noise so people know who you are.
You may think that this takes some time – and it does, but it’s worth it; however, what you may not also know is that you can hire freelance writers to do all of this for you – even submitting articles to directories for you. So long as you’re assured of the quality of the information, you could certainly go down this route to grow your own information product business online.
Good articles and e-books tell you something new. They may even have in them interviews from actual experts in the field.
You could also insert a link to invite people to subscribe to your newsletter or something like that, in which you advertise new information products you have for sale; the more you and your business are in people’s faces, the better. It takes, on average, five viewings for people to trust you enough to buy from you.
Give Something Back
Consider strongly giving people re-sell rights to your work. That will spread your marketing of your online business further. You can protect your document so that it cannot be changed and your by-line cannot be removed, if you want to.
Make People Want Your Information Product
Create a sense of urgency so that people feel they must buy now from you or forever miss out on a great deal. If they decide to go away and think about it, you’ll have lost a significant number of sales – either because they genuinely forget to come back – or because they can’t be bothered.
Web 2.0 Marketing
To maximize the sales of your information product, you need to get people excited about it. Build a buzz about it. Using Web 2.0 techniques of chat rooms, message boards and blogs is a great way to advertise your information products. Just make sure you aren’t spamming. Put good quality messages on boards or blogs and include a link to your information product. If you appear from your messages to know what you are talking about, people will be more likely to click on your links and buy your information product.