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Information…the Virtual Product with a Real Future.

When you think of profitable products you probably think of things like clothes, food or cars.

True, these are massive markets, worth many millions of pounds. But some of the most profitable products in the world today are not real products like clothes, food or cars – they are virtual products like information.

Products that we read and use to keep us informed, entertained, educated or improve our lives.

Every time you use a telephone directory, buy a newspaper or read a book you are a customer of the lucrative information industry.

Information is a very valuable product indeed.

Other people will pay – and pay highly – to learn what you know.

Information is something you can sell extremely profitably.

UK consumers spend over £2,000,000,000 on books alone each year, and books are just a small part of the information business!

Although printed information products are still a major way of selling information the Internet has transformed the way information is produced, sold and distributed.

The very latest information products are virtual information products, produced electronically.

And there’s every reason to believe that they will become one of the biggest and most lucrative products of the 21st Century.

The good news is that electronic information products are easy to make, market, sell and distribute – much easier than printed ones.

If you have ever wanted to publish a book, publish your own magazine or sell your own software – but been put off by the time, expense and commitment it involves – you’ll find it’s relatively easy to sell information online, just working part time from your own PC at home!

On this page we will look at a variety of information products you can publish and sell for profit on the Internet – specifically e-books, e-zines, blogs and software (shareware).

Four Tips for Successful Internet Publishing

One: Only sell the very best quality information online.

Poor quality won’t sell, no matter how good the technology.

Remember that there’s a lot of information available on the Internet for free (some of which isn’t very good), so if you are to sell it successfully it must be top quality.

Two: Choose the best subject areas. Internet publishing is great for subjects that are fast-moving, current, need regular updating and which appeal to an international market – and information which would be difficult or expensive to publish and sell worldwide in a conventional paper format.

Three: Always test as you go. When you are selling information online it is very easy to market a product that is still in the course of preparation and see what interest it creates – before actually going ahead and producing the product. You can also change your sales literature, prices etc., at the touch of a button and find the best way to sell it too.

Four: Write it out first! Most online information products start out in exactly the same way as paper products ….with a good idea, an outline and a written manuscript. This manuscript then becomes the basis of your dynamic online product.

How To Create the Perfect Information Product

At the beginning of this page, we compared virtual information products to real, physical products like clothes, food and cars. Despite the many differences this is a good comparison to make when creating your own products to sell on the Internet.

Think of it this way: Just as a physical product like a washing machine has key features – for example, keen price, easy to use, washes clothes effectively, and is reliable – so every good information product should have key features too. The reason is simple: It is these key features which make customers want to buy it!

When planning and creating your information product you need to make sure it has as many strong key features as possible. These strong key features are as follows, and you could use this section as a checklist when creating your own products:

□    It Should Inform: Does your product tell your customer something they don’t know? This really is the acid test of any information product. Base your product on lots of facts and pack it with ‘I didn’t know that!’ appeal.

□    It Should Enable: Knowing a particular piece of information is one thing, but what is the purpose of knowing that information? The best information products enable their users to do something with that information – such as to maintain, change or enhance their lives using knowledge.

□    It Should Educate: The very best information products develop the pool of knowledge and understanding on a given subject – in other words they educate. And a good product should do it in a way that is interesting and practical.

□    It Should Entertain: Information products aren’t (or shouldn’t be) like the dull textbooks you might have used at school. They should be well organised and presented, written in an interesting, attractive and digestible way and incorporate value-adding techniques such as photographs, illustrations and examples where possible. This is easy to do with online publishing.

□    It Should Be Exclusive: If possible, your information shouldn’t be easily available elsewhere. If it is, your information should be more comprehensive or of better quality.

□    It Should Offer Real Benefits: This, at the end of the day, is the most important feature of any good and truly successful product – especially an information product. It should offer the customer actual, tangible benefits – preferably ones that they can attribute directly to your product. When creating your product, build-in and develop as many strong customer benefits as possible.

Here are some examples of real benefits:

□    Saves the customer money.
□    Saves the customer time.
□    Saves the customer effort.
□    Makes the customer’s life easier.
□    Makes them more attractive or desirable.
□    Makes them healthier.
□    Helps make the customer money.
□    Helps the customer’s job/career/life be more successful.
□    Solves their difficult or unpleasant problems.
□    Makes hard tasks simpler.
□    Offers them real enjoyment or pleasure.

Great Ideas for Information You Can Sell Profitably Online

Here are some good subject areas for information you can sell online.

This list isn’t and cannot be exhaustive. You may well be able to create a successful product of your own based on a totally different subject area. To see exactly what is available, and for even more ideas, search the Internet.

Business Opportunity & Make Money Products: These products offer a very strong benefit – to make the reader more money, revealing and explaining to the customer ways to increase their income or even get rich. Products in this area include newsletters, e-zines and e-books offering moneymaking tips and strategies, homework ideas, ideas for casual employment and even business plans.

Self Improvement & Personal Development Products: These products offer the customer information on personal, social and even spiritual development. The benefits they offer include social success, enhanced status, confidence and peace of mind rather than purely financial advancement. (In the USA, around 80,000 new self-improvement/personal development products comprising mainly books, manuals and courses were published last year, many of them available online.)

Career, Vocational & Educational Products: These products give customers the information they need to change or develop their career or learn a new work-related skill. Products cover a wide range of mainly non-academic subjects, such as accountancy, computer skills, design, yoga, astrology, fitness, creative writing, proof reading, beauty therapy etc. Many courses lead to a qualification.

Health Products: Health information products are usually e-books, occasionally also newsletters or e-zines. They offer advice on health improvement and cover such subjects as diet and weight loss, nutrition, organic lifestyles, allergy, fitness, stress, smoking, drug dependency and advice for avoiding or living with major diseases such as cancer or heart disease.

Tax, Financial & Investment Products: Tax, financial and investment products offer customers information on tax saving, legal tax avoidance, managing their finances and investing in the stock market and other financial opportunities. They are mainly newsletters, but there are also some e-books and e-zines.

Gambling Products: Gambling products offer customers information on how to be more successful at gambling and range from general advice to specific plans or even tipping services. They principally cover horse race betting, but also other forms of betting e.g. football, casino, financial betting and lotteries.

Trade, Business & Professional Products: Trade, business and professional products are aimed specifically at business owners and managers. Some of the subjects you can cover include business management, finance, law, taxation, employment issues, health and safety, marketing, negotiating, foreign trade and business development.

Entertainment & Hobby Products: Entertainment and hobby products are a relatively small part of the published information business, but they cover a wide range of interests.

Examples of successful entertainment and hobby publications include newsletters for stamp collectors or coin collectors, newsletters for new mothers, and newsletters for fans of any one of the thousands of pop bands or sports teams, magic tricks and illusions.

For the rest of this In the rest of this Lesson we will look at some specific information products which you can create, publish and sell on the Internet. These are e-books, e-zines and newsletters, blogs and shareware.

How To Publish and Sell E-Books

The term e-book is short for electronic book. An e-book is like a conventional book – sometimes with images, sometimes not – that can be delivered and read electronically. Generally, the delivery method is by downloading over the Internet although it can be delivered by disk too. E-books can be read on a computer screen, the screen of a PDA (Blackberry, iPhone, or similar device), some mobile phones, or on a dedicated e-book reader. E-book readers are becoming more and more sophisticated.

After a slow start, e-books are now growing in popularity. Exactly how many are sold is impossible to tell. While there are statistics on how many e-books retailers and bigger online publishers sell (and they show amazing growth), none of them take into account the ever increasing number of e-books sold by small businesses working from home.

Publishing and selling your own e-book is a relatively easy way of selling information online. It’s just like publishing an ordinary book, except that it’s much easier, cheaper and faster ….and the sales potential is global!

The Advantages of E-Books

The benefits of publishing your own e-book are numerous. E-books are easy to distribute compared with paper books. E-books don’t need to be shipped in trucks and placed on shelves in bookstores. They can go straight from the writer’s computer to the reader’s computer. In many cases this takes just minutes. Try to beat that for easy distribution!

E-books are very cheap to make. E-books don’t need to be printed onto paper and bound which can be an extremely expensive process. (If the buyer wants to do this they pay the cost of it!) In most cases you don’t even need a CD or disk. All you’re actually making is electronic files and these cost nothing to make and send.

Very importantly, the e-book revolution has put the writer in control of their own writing, and given them the chance to make most of the profit from it. Because you don’t need an agent, publisher or distributor, more of the cover price goes into your own pocket. Better still, the ‘cover’ price of e-books is very often higher than printed books!

You can sell almost anything as an e-book! Bookshops will only stock certain types of books – often only mainstream subjects they are sure there is a market for. If your book is unusual, or very specialised, or even controversial in some way – then you might find it impossible to sell it to the bookshops. On the Internet, however, things are different. You are free to publish virtually anything you like. Even if it’s very specialised, you can still sell it in large quantities as your marketplace is global.

Getting Ideas for Profitable E-Books

The first question to ask yourself when looking for great e-book ideas is this: Why do I want to produce an e-book? Decide this straight away, because if you’re not sure of your intentions you’ll end up with a weak e-book. Are you writing because you have a personal story you want to tell? Do you have a message to preach or a warning to pass on? Are you filling a gap in the market? Are you writing simply because you think you know something that people will be willing to pay good money to discover? Do you want to write an e-book mainly to get publicity for yourself or another business (which can be a very good reason for producing a book)?

Passion is a very good way to get inspiration for writing a book. If you’re creating an e-book about your own interests, or to help others learn about a particular subject, you’re doing it for passion. Write it as if you don’t expect to make any money, but it would be a nice bonus! Since you’re writing the e-book for fun, it needs to remain fun. Don’t bog yourself down with details. If you’re passionate about something let your experiences tell their own story and you’re sure to end up with an excellent book.

Many publishers create e-books to generate exposure for another business or to remind people of their business. (These books are often given away rather than sold.) For example, some companies create helpful e-books covering subjects such as ‘How to Keep Your Garden Pest Free!’ which may act as a plug for a gardening centre or a new type of pesticide. If you’re planning on developing this type of e-book be sure to offer enough usefulness and value without too much advertising. After all, you want people to enjoy it, read it, use it and remember it as a book and not an ad.

Don’t start on your e-book, until you’ve got a clear idea of what it is going to be about. If you do, you can’t expect people to read it, let alone buy it. If you’re still stuck looking for inspiration try looking through the category listings at Amazon.com.

How To Create Your E-Book

If you’ve got an idea for your e-book, well done! The initial idea can be the hardest part. However, a good idea in itself often isn’t enough. You need to organise it into a logical plan. And be sure you define your core message ….and stick to it.

For example, let’s say that you want to write a book based around a popular hobby like gardening. That’s all well and good, but what are you going to cover? ‘Gardening’ alone isn’t enough ….actually, it’s far too much. If you’re not careful you will end up with an e-book that covers everything badly and nothing well!

Decide what result you are hoping your book will achieve? Particularly, what benefits it will offer. Use the checklists we provided earlier. What do you have to say to get that result? That is your core message. Also, it’s usually the case that if you are producing a book from research, rather than your own knowledge, you will need to define your core message even further.
 
Try to divide your choice of subject into several different areas, which you could devote a chapter each to. Ten is a good number to aim for in an e-book. For example, in a gardening book you might have chapters on: ‘An Introduction to Gardening’, ‘Soil and Why It’s Important’, ‘Seeds and How to Plant Them’, ‘Feeding and Weeding’, ‘Popular Plants and How To Care For Them’, ‘Pest Control’ and ‘Taking Cuttings’.

Whatever you decide on, make sure you have a broad outline for the book prepared before you start writing. However, one very attractive feature of e-books is that you can update and edit them at will. Correcting mistakes, adding information and issuing new editions is easy. So, don’t miss the opportunity to update and improve your product as you go along.

E-books can be exactly as long or as short as they need to be. E-books range from a few pages to full length books of 500 pages or more (e-books are always organised into pages like conventional books). But there’s no need to worry about paper sizes, binding, page pairings and the other issues that determine the size and length of traditional books.

Another profitable possibility, if you have enough material, is to publish your book as a part-work or course. Instead of just one instalment your customer receives their material in 6, 10 or 12 (or more) instalments; weekly/monthly or when they wish to download each part. The main advantage of this is that the selling price can be much higher. However, since fulfilment can be handled automatically with modern mailing list management software, it need not involve you in any extra work.

With an e-book you can also include images (photos), either downloaded from the Internet or taken with your own digital camera, and colour graphics that would be expensive to print on paper. Remember, however, that the quality of reproduction will only be as good as the reader’s screen, so the simpler they are, the less likely you are to disappoint customers who don’t have the latest technology.

Finally, before you start producing your e-book, think about the way in which it is going to be distributed and delivered – this will be discussed later. There are a few formatting do’s, don’ts and restrictions that apply to e-books (and other types of electronic publishing) and which might impact on your content.

How To Publish Your E-Book Easily and Simply

Almost all e-books start out as an ordinary wordprocessor document – such as MS Word – so you need no special skills to actually write and originate them. However, once your e-book is written you need a way to deliver it online. Few professional e-books are delivered as wordprocessor files. Instead you will need to convert your e-book into one or more widely acceptable e-book formats that can be downloaded, opened and read by the purchaser.

Currently, there are five basic ways readers can read e-books:

•    On their computer screen.

•    Printing from their computer and reading the paper copy.

•    Reading from handheld PC’s, also known as PDA’s (Personal
     Digital Assistants) and Pocket PC’s.

•    Using some mobile phones.

•    Using a dedicated e-book reader.

As the concept of e-books is relatively new, there are currently lots of different e-book formats and no single universal standard.

So, you may need to publish your e-books in several different formats to widen the market as much as possible. This can be a little time consuming, but using modern technology isn’t particularly difficult or expensive.

Publishing your e-book in PDF will allow you to reach the majority of readers. PDF is also quite flexible from a writing and production point of view.

Converting to PDF: PDF is a file extension meaning portable document format. Developed by Adobe Systems, customers need Adobe Acrobat Reader to read the file, which can be downloaded free from the Adobe website. PDF is probably the closest thing to a standard in the e-book industry at the moment.

If your e-book is in PDF format, you’re usually assured that it will look the same on your screen as it does on the viewer’s screen. An important feature has been the introduction of protected PDF files, which are secure and can’t be copied.

You can convert your e-book to PDF format using the Adobe Acrobat program itself. This is quite expensive to buy (about £200) but you can convert a limited number of documents free by going to the Adobe website.

You can also browse google for pdf convertors which can be downloaded and used for free.

The last stage of the e-publishing process is to upload your converted e-book to some web storage space, from where customers can download it.

You can store your e-books on your own storage space if you have some – if you have a website it can usually be stored on the same server. Alternatively, you can use an e-book delivery service. (A web search will provide you with details of companies who can do this.) Uploading your e-book is done by using an FTP program and your website host or delivery service will provide the instructions on how to do this.

Selling and Marketing Your E-Book

Once you have written and formatted your e-book all that remains is to sell it!

There are several options here. You can either sell your e-book yourself or you can sell it through an e-publisher or library site. You can also sell your e-books on eBay and other auction sites.

To sell your e-book yourself you will need to set up your own website and to create sales literature to describe and sell your e-book to your visitors.

You can accept payment using your own secure server facility or a payment provider such as PayPal. When you receive a customer’s order and payment, all you need to do is e-mail the customer with an access password which they can use to download the e-book from your web storage space.

This can be handled by an autoresponder system if you wish.

This is a system that automatically sends out your product in response to a subscription request from new readers.

A major autoresponder company is Aweber, but as of late they are a bit pricey and they have had issues with running with internet explorer.

A cheaper, but still high quality option, is Wizardresponder. This is the one I currently use and it has been excellent, and a much lower cost.

Other Important Considerations When Selling E-Books and Online Information Products

If you can’t or don’t want to write your own e-book (or any other online information product for that matter) then hire an author or writer to write it for you. Then all you need to do is publish and sell it. Pay the writer either a flat fee or a royalty for every time the product is downloaded and sold online.

Another opportunity worth considering is to buy the rights to publish an existing product online. Most book, magazine, newsletter and software publishers are preoccupied with selling their product on paper (or on a disk/CD in the case of software).

They don’t have the time or know-how to sell the product on the Internet. However, they might be willing to sell the electronic rights to their product. Approach conventional publishers and ask them. Offer them either a flat fee for the electronic rights or a royalty per copy sold.

One attractive option is to develop a paper information product which is already a proven seller into an electronic product. This way you will know that there is a demand for the product even before you begin to sell it!

One important issue to consider when publishing online is that of copyright.

Electronic information products are automatically the copyright of the person who creates them (i.e. the writer), or the publisher who buys the rights from them, just like a conventional printed product.

However, when publishing information online, you should be aware that it is very easy for other people to copy them either electronically, or by printing out unlimited copies.

Currently it is technically difficult to prevent others from copying your copyright work, although Adobe’s PDF format offers a degree of security.

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