Mystery Solved! Getting Your Infoproduct Business Online
By Jeff Smith
Posted Monday, July 5, 2004
How do you get your own infoproduct online, collect cash from orders 24-hours a day 7-days a week while you're not even paying attention?
Having assisted many people with their online marketing efforts - and having setup several online marketing sites myself, I know that at first, it can be a mystery.
How do you create your own website? How do you take payment? What do you use to capture and build your own list. How do you signup and track affiliates who can bring in many sales for you?
Here's the information you will not find in any eBook, interview or course - and best of all, its free.
Step 1. Finding a Webhost
You will need to pay a webhosting company to give you space and features you'll need to upload your web page(s) so that people will see it and place orders.
There are thousands of webhosts out there - I've tried many and my recommendation is this webhost: (http://www.infoproductcreator.com/part/thirdsphere)
You get up to 500Mb of space (lots for most websites), terrific features such as cgi, Perl, simple configuration tool and statistics as well as the ability to setup additional domains for only $10 each.
Step2. Developing Your Website
Once again - you have many choices of HTML editors - or the programs you use to actually code your webpage.
Relax! It's not as tough as it seems.
If you don't know ANYTHING about HTML - the you should learn the basics. Even if you get someone else to build your website, you should know the basics of HTML so that you can a) get a fair price for your work, b) communicate what you want to your web designer and c) make changes to your pages as time goes on.
Here's a great site for learning the basics of HTML at no-charge.
(http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp) OR
(http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/)
Here's a few tips for building your product website:
1. Keep it simple, and all on one page. Sometimes called a minisite - it's been proven again and again that your product page should be a single page with a headline, subheadings, lots of benefits, a strong offer and order link.
2. Go easy on the graphics. Numerous tests have shown that a strong headline and strong copy will outsell fancy graphics
anyday.
3. Your order page should be a well-written, targeted sales page. As with any profit-producing sales letter - the focus must be on benefits. Produce your sales letter in MS Word first, then simply convert it to HTML.
4. Other than your main sales page, you will need pages that will...
1. Present articles you write online
2. Sell your newsletter or follow up list
3. A thank you page after your customer places an order
4. An opt-in page containing a form from your autoresponder that sells your visitor on signing up to your newsletter, minicourse or update list.
5. A thank you page for opt-in list singups.
6. An information and terms page on signing up affiliates or partners.
6. A tools page where you help your partners and affiliates make money with pre-written ads, letters, signature files, and training.
I know - all of this can get overwhelming! Don't be scared off, just pick off one item at a time and use existing successful websites out there as examples. You cannot steal content word-for-word, but you can definitely be influenced by how others have done it.
Step 3. How Do I take Orders?
Funny thing the internet, it's radically altered the whole payment processing industry -now you have online payment processors and merchant accounts that allow you to collect money - in an automated fashion, from your customers.
So how do these guys charge for their service?
Each one will have a combination of...
1. Up-front signup fee. Fee you will need to pay just to get an account setup - ranges from next to nothing with Paypal to several hundred dollars. You should plan for $50-$80
2. Discount fees or - in other words - commissions of your sales they keep.
They all take something - Paypal is low, below 2%, while Clickbank is high at over 7% - but each package has it's value in additional services/features.
My suggestion is:
Use Clickbank for those starting out. Simply because it has the most features in one service you will find.
When you begin to get into high volumes, then saving a few percentage points per sale becoms ALLOT of money, that's when you would move away from Clickbank to Paysystems, 2 Checkout.com and put a front end system such as 1AuthorizeNet on the front end.
Step 4 Uploading my web pages and eBook
You will need a way to get your .html files and other website and digital product files up to your webhost - it's not tough, but you will need a tool to do the upload.
Now - many webhosts do offer a "File Manager" option as part of their user tools when you signup for an account.
However - you will want a separate program for transferring files - called a File Transfer Protocol program.
By far and away the best value is a program called WS-FTP. You will find a no-charge trial version at (http://www.download.com) - the paid version is quite reasonable at less than $40.
Step 5 Pick and Autoresponder
You MUST, MUST, MUST have an autoresponder to help automate your online business.
The small investment you will make serves as a virtual sales force of thousands continually calling on your prospects day
after day, week after week until they buy.
Your autoresponder automates signups, list administration, sending out a series of scheduled messages, 1-time broadcasts,
unsubscribes, and backups.
Here's 5 ways you should be using autoresponders to triple your profits --
a) 4-7 Part Minicourse gives you multiple exposures of your products
b) Post-sales follow-up series, thank you, survey and back-end product sales
c) Broadcast ezine, newsletter or announcement at least bi-weekly
d) Affiliate training and tools message sequence
e) Article postings. Many article submission directories require that your article be available on-demand from an autresponder address
You have a few choices when selecting an autoresponder service, after years of trying various options, I've found the best service to be this one: (http://jbsmith.proautoresponder.com)
Step 6 Setting Up Your Affiliate Program
OK - some may say this is NOT mandatory to run your own successful online infoproduct marketing business.
What I say is that you are missing the boat if you don't setup your own affiliate program - assuming you are marketing
your own products.
With over 600 affiliates, I now have a global, 24X7, dedicated and highly effective sales force that put my product in front of millions of eyeballs - all without me lifting a finger.
If you want this type of action - then you will need to run your own affiliate program.
One way of doing it is to use Clickbank as your payment processor - they offer an affiliate management program as part of their payment processing package. There are some drawbacks including lack of statistics, and issues with handling multiple
products sold from multiple pages, but for someone starting out they are OK.
A second option is using separate affiliate tracking software - my favorites are either Groundbreak's Ultimate Affiliate (http://www.infoproductcreator.com/part/groundbreak) or 1AutomationWiz at:
(http://www.infoproductcreator.com/part/1automationwiz/)
There you have it.
6 basic steps sit between you and turning your desire for making money online into a reality.
Don't let these steps get in your way - the world needs to see your products!
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How To Create and Market Income-Generating Information Products - 5 Experts Share Their Trade Secrets In the Ultimate Teleseminar! Find Out How 5 Online Experts Make Their Living Creating And Marketing Information Products
(http://www.creating-infoproducts.com)
About the Author
Jeff Smith is the author of the top-selling "Ultimate Information Entrepreneur's Success Package" helping thousands package their knowledge into profitable eBooks, special reports, ezines and audios. Visit his site here: (http://www.highertrustmarketing.com)
