exposure where we can offer products to a virtually endless number of consumers. With an audience as virtually endless as the internet, one can find buyers for just about any type of product. What's more, with this online selling boom came e-commerce website selling solutions. It has never been easier to set up an online store, and begin selling your products of choice.
Many e-commerce web hosting companies even make it so that you do not have to carry any inventory, or be involved in any shipping. Your job is to simply market your site, take orders, and they do the rest. In most cases, you set your mark-up price, and all they keep is the wholesale and shipping costs. Or if you prefer, you do not have to sell any items period, and make all the money for yourself. If you are an expert in a certain field where information is a huge commodity, you can write and publish an e-book for sale by download. Small publishing costs, no inventory, no shipping, just pure profit. Not an expert? No problem, buy someone elses e-book that gives you resell rights.
Selling online does not require a great deal of capital or connections, nor does it necessarily require alot of time. All you need to get started in online sales is ambition and creativity.
Below is a terrific article taken from www.entrepreneur.com, written by Tim Knox, CEO of three large technology companies. In the article he outlines what he feels is the very best online product to sell, and how to sell it.
The Best Product to Sell Online
Making money from so-called "info products" is easier than you think.
August 23, 2004
By Tim Knox
As more and more people move to the World Wide Web seeking their fortunes, the number-one business question of the recent age has become: "What's the best product to sell online?" The answer is simple: information. No other type of product is easier to create, faster to bring to market, easier to distribute and potentially more profitable, often offering profits of 1,000 percent or more.
Informational products come in many forms. An info product can be a digital book (an e-book), a digital report or a white paper, a piece of software, a web site or a newsletter. Any product that's informational or informative in nature can be considered an info product.
Here's why information is the best product to sell online:
It's fast to create, fast to market. Forget a product development cycle that's years in the making. Forget an intense design and costly manufacturing process. I've literally created info products in as little as two hours and had them generating revenue shortly thereafter. If you have an appealing topic and a computer, you have all the tools you need to create an info product.
There's no inventory to stock. Forget filling your garage with boxes of cheap watches and cases of megavitamins that you'll never sell. When you sell information, there's no inventory to stock. Your product is digital (I like to call it electronic air) and requires no space in your garage, just a little space on your computer. One of my most successful info products is a 30KB e-book that requires almost no space at all.
The startup costs are low. When you sell information, you can literally create a product for next to nothing. If your product is an e-book, the only investment required is the time it takes to put words to digital paper. And if you become an affiliate marketer of someone else's info product, your investment can be zero.
There's an automated sales and delivery process. Thanks to internet technology, you can sell info products 24/7 and never lift a finger. In fact, you don't even have to be awake or at home to make money with an info product. I know many successful info entrepreneurs who are getting rich despite the fact that they work as little as one hour a day. They check their website and their e-mail, then go play golf or hang with the kids for the rest of the day. You can completely automate the sales and delivery process so your site does everything for you. An automated site can give a potential customer your sales pitch, take the order and process the payment, deliver the product by e-mail, and even follow up in a few days to make sure the customer's satisfied and offer to sell him additional products.
Customers get immediate access or delivery. Online consumers are an impatient lot. They want things now! These are the people who stand in front of the microwave, impatiently tapping their foot and frowning at their watch. Selling information is the best way to give your customers immediate satisfaction. As mentioned earlier, an automated site can process the order and payment, then immediately e-mail the product's download link to your customer.
There are no shipping and handling charges. One of the things I never liked about selling hard goods was the manual process of taking the order, running the credit card, and placing the order with a drop-shipper or filling the order of my stock. I hated finding a box, packing peanuts, printing the label, taping it all up and lugging it to the post office. Every minute I spent filling orders was time that I wasn't being compensated for; therefore, my profit grew smaller with every minute spent on shipping and handling. Informational products require no shipping and handling—most are delivered by e-mail. In the time it takes you to click your mouse, you can deliver an info product into your customers' hands.
What topics make for good info products? Someone once said, "If you can teach people how to feel better, look younger, be thinner, get rich or be more attractive to the opposite sex, the world will beat a path to your door." And those topics are just the tip of the iceberg.
An e-book is no different from its paper cousin, except that it's meant to be delivered and read electronically. Topics for e-books are as wide-ranging as regular books. A few recent bestsellers show people how to:
Start an eBay business
Make money in real estate
Make your own beer
Protect yourself against a mugger
Get the best deal on a used car
Play a better game of golf
Where do you sell info products? Although some e-book authors go the traditional route and actually sell their e-books on CDs at neighborhood bookstores, the largest marketplace for digital info products is on the web. At any given moment, there are thousands of info products for sale on eBay, Yahoo! Auctions, specialized e-book seller websites, and even Amazon.com.
When marketing your own info product, you can't wait for customers to find you—you have to bring your product to them. Seek out those who would be interested in what you have to say. If you've written an e-book on how to brew your own beer, check out the online forums devoted to the topic of beer. (You'll might be surprised to find that there are hundreds of forums for beer lovers!)
Without posting an obvious ad, which is usually not allowed, offer to send free copies of your book to whoever will take one. Don't worry about giving them away for free at first. Once your book finds an initial audience, these people will help you sell more books by referring customers to you.
I also recommend that you create a website to help sell your e-book. When John Grisham wrote The Firm, he had copies printed up and drove around selling them out of the back of his car. A website is the modern day equivalent of the bookseller's car trunk.
If you'd like to cash in on the sale of information but don't think you can write an e-book of your own, never fear. Finding someone to work with you on such a project is easier than you think. We'll address that topic in next month's column.
Here's to your success.
