The latest updates on information selling and running an online infoproduct business

The single most important part of your web site is how you get your mailing list. You need to attract people to sign up to your mailing list. That's because once you have their email address you can sell to them at a later date. If people visit your page and then depart, you've lost the opportunity for a sale. The best way to get a mailing list is to offer your web site visitors something for nothing. A free report or an ebook which provides them with real benefits. Once they realise the benefits of getting your free offer, they will subscribe. Over three quarters of the people who visit this site, for instance, sign up for the free report on selling information products. Without a mailing list, your sales will be much less than is possible with a mailing list. Making sure your site generates subscriber information is essential in the infoproduct business.

TrustRank is a system pioneered by computer scientists at Stanford University. The system has been shown to work and it does one specific job - it ranks web sites according to the trustworthiness of their networks. In other words, if your site is linked to good, positive trustworthy sites, you will get a higher search engine ranking. Similarly, if your web site is linked to poor sites which have little content and which are considered 'spam' by TrustRank, your web site will not be rewarded with high search engine positioning. The system is designed to ensure that only sites with real, useful content get high rankings. At the moment it is possible to get a high position with only a little content. This new system, as yet not introduced by any search engines, will sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were. For you, what it means is that your web site and its link partners need to be solid, reliable and non spam sites.

Your web site should be making extra money by selling affiliated products which complement your infoproduct. But how can you increase the click throughs to your affiliate site?

Many affiliates make little, if any money, out of their affiliate schemes. But some make tens of thousands each month. What do these people do that the rest of us don't? For a start they actually buy and use the products. Few of the top affiliate sales people make money from products they don't believe in. They gain that belief from being actual users of the product. The next thing they do is write about the products knowledgeably. So, instead of just having a link to an affiliate product, they might have a review or a guide to using it. Then there are links on that page.

So, you can increase your affiliate product sales if you provide content about the products, rather than just a link.

Would you like to personalise your web pages so that each viewer's name is included in the text? How would that make your viewers feel? A page just for them. Does that sound impossible? Well it is perfectly possible - indeed it is very easy.

If you want to know how to automatically include a viewer's name anywhere on a web page and therefore increase your likely sales go to:

http://www.infoselling.com/personal.htm

In a couple of days you could be personalising your web pages for your customers, dramatically increasing the chances of sales of your products. By the way, this idea is free of any charge.

If you look at a traditional retail business you can see some of the things we ought to do online. For instance, most retailers are selling things other people have made. Even car manufacturers don't sell their cars - they get other people (car dealers) to do that job.

Well, as an information product creator you are in the manufacturing business. You create new infoproducts in much the same way that a car maker develops new cars. So, why do you bother to try to do all the selling yourself? Get yourself some dealers. In our business they are called affiliates. Most affiliates sell very little, but that's because they are not supported by their manufacturer. I admit I'm as guilty of this as the next infoproduct creator.

But using the car analogy, car dealers are provided with brochures, adverts, posters, sales literature, email campaigns, newsletters and so on - all by the car manufacturers. Supporting their dealers in this way helps increase sales.

So, for your ebooks you need to provide similar levels of support to your affiliates. The more work you do for them, the more sales you will get. So my affiliates can expect to receive lots more information in the coming weeks!