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Information products are powerful tools. If E-bay is the "CD" of your business portfolio, then information products are the stocks. They are either hot or they are cold. Information products are powerful tools that simply "create" money. You put together a system that sets you up as the expert. From there, you sell kits, tapes, books, etc about the topic of your business. You do need some good marketing strategy to sell these items though. Here are some critical points about selling information products on-line:

The average person sees a product 28 times before buying it on-line.

The basis of any advertising program is repetition. One-shot deals don't work. This is often why flyers and short-term newspaper ads yield bad results.

You need to divide the random observers or visitors from qualified and interested buyers. You need to start a mailing list, and send out newsletters. This informs your qualified buyers that you are there and keeps them interested in your program.

Open the door to your public. Ask them to give input and discuss the product at length with them. Make your sellers feel that you care about them and that your product IS worthwhile.

Make your newsletters personable, don't give your subscribers the hard sell, sell softly and talk about yourself and your life with your potential clients.

Work WITH your clients. You should talk to dissatisfied customers and get their view of your product.

Below is a list of profitable on-line products for information sales:

Home Businesses

Medical Products

Sex Products

Testing Products

Legal Products

Cooking/Food Products

Gambling Products

Gaming Products

The most important point to remember is how to move people from one part of the pyramid to the next and ultimately to the buyer's area. The mailing list and communication is the method of facilitation for this business. When potential buyers respond to ads, you HAVE to be there to talk to them. Using services like answering services or "virtual offices" simply disguise who you are. You are selling your business, so talk to your customers and sell your product yourself. Most people know it is a small operation. Stop hiding behind your website or advertisement, only large retailers and corporations can do that.

I will list below the most common mistakes information sellers make on the internet:

Selling information products you are not an expert on

Refusal to talk to or face customers one-on-one

Improper website design

Creating a fagade to hide behind with 1-800 numbers, and dead phone lines

Failure to engage the customer directly and follow-up on leads

You can't sell information you are not an expert on. It comes across in the information product. Your customers will ask for refunds. Your speech and e-mails will not be convincing. This is a nightmare. Don't try this!

Refusing to talk to potential customers is a death nail. You are doing this because you are providing a garbage product. A strong product has a good history, low or now returns and you can talk to customers afterwards. If your product is shoddy or you are unsure, give it away first and test the waters. Poor customer feedback will destroy your reputation. It is better to test the market with any market before selling it. This is a critical point you simply must understand.

Improper website design is also a common mistake. Please note customers do not like to make a lot of clicks on websites. This means your newsletter must gather information in what Google calls the "hot zone" of the screen. Users should be able to input their e-mail address without additional clicks. Users should be able to input their addresses, purchase and perform any or other critical business activities with a minimum of additional clicks. Small business owners need to wake up.

Let's recap these items:

Put your mailing list sign-up in the Goggle "hot zone" of the screen

Put your purchase link in the Google "hot zone" of the screen

Always create a mailing list sign-up

Creating a fagade to hide behind creates confusion and "space" between yourself and your customers. For instance, customers respond by calling your 800 number with live operators but you e-mail them from a yahoo address! That's ridiculous. Facades need to be complete in order to work, and they seldom inspired trust.

Trust is exactly what you are trying to build. You should simply not do this. Talk to your customers one-on-one and watch the sales come in.

Following up leads and creating a customized response for inquiries is key for sales. Call your people and let them call you. This seems contrary to the big sales mentality. Trust is the cornerstone for internet sales. Open the door to inquiries and you open the door to sales. It is that simple. Once you build this trust, you'll be able to send out one e-mail to you list at 7pm, and in the morning when you wake up, you'll have $1000 in your Paypal account. It is that simple.

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Large corporations often use what's called the "open house," or brand-building, model of advertising, which is expensive, time-consuming, and requires a lot of brand equity and trust over time before people make decisions to buy from them.

With the "marketing funnel" model, a person makes a small purchase (yes, supplying an email or physical mailing address is considered a payment of sorts), and over time you "funnel" your customers towards more and more high-end products and services, step by step, by selling them to the next level.

The two are entirely different business models, and they both work in their own ways. For most entrepreneurs, however, the brand-building model is too cost-prohibitive and time-consuming to use by itself, involving many resources that simply aren't practical. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use it within your means.

In fact, you'll soon see how to incorporate both the open house and marketing funnel models in your system (for starters... we're just getting warmed up!).

So by "funneling" (others call it "backending" or "up-selling"—Dan Kennedy calls it "gathering the herd") your prospects into paying customers, you're setting the stage to provide tremendous value to them. So much value, in fact, that your customers begin to look forward to receiving content from you. And with that value comes the opportunity to take your customer to the next level, where you can sell higher-end goods to them.

And this isn't a one-sided benefit. Both you and your customer benefit by this relationship. Your customer benefits when he gets even more value...something he really wants. You're helping him in that regard. And of course you benefit as well by slowly graduating your customer to your "A" list, where you can provide even more value.

I once knew a salesman from a large workforce management company. This company sold expensive computer systems that helped call centers forecast their incoming call volume, determine how many customer service people they needed to handle those calls, and even generate the most efficient schedules for those reps in order to maintain a desired level of service.

This guy was an old pro when it came to managing his leads. When a potential client company would issue a request for proposal to him (basically an opportunity for his company to provide a quote based on the issuing company's needs), he would keep track of all the people involved in the decision-making process, plus any supporting personnel. Basically anyone's info he could get his hands on.

Now when he learned that a key person moved from one company to another (which was fairly common), and that new company was in the market for his product, he would personally contact his "lead" from the old company (now working for the new one) and continue his funnelling efforts there, while still maintaining the funnel at the old company.

Now imagine he was doing this for all of his leads, wherever they ended up. He had funnels in place everywhere. Do you think he had skinny kids?

Personally I think every sale he made was well earned. Anyone who can keep track of all those funnels and people hopping companies deserves to earn a profit.

Figures 2-1 and 2-2 show the typical marketing funnel. Figure 2-1 shows an offline version of the funnel model, and figure 2-2 shows the online equivalent. Note that the only differences are at the top of the funnel, signifying the manner in which you obtain your leads. Online they visit your website before they supply their information and become a lead. In the offline world, they would receive your offer in some other manner.

A truer representation might represent your target market as suspects, who become prospects only after raising their hands (i.e. they become your prospects when they become your leads), but however you view them, the goal is to obtain leads, where you will then attempt to convert them into paying customers.

Notice how the width of the funnel gets smaller towards the bottom? The width represents the number of customers at that height, or stage, of the funnel.

However, the smaller the width, the more money they are spending with you. In fact, the amount of money they spend with you can be thought of as being inversely proportionate to the width of the funnel (more or less). So the 20 percent responsible for 80 percent of your profits are at the bottom of the funnel. The other 80 percent that give you 20 percent of your profits are towards the top. This distribution is a general observation and not a mathematical absolute. As I mentioned earlier, it might be 70/30 or 90/10 or somewhere in between.

This is no accident. Your "A" customers, your biggest advocates, are in the smallest segment of your customer base...the bottom of the funnel (but the top in terms of the value you deliver to them).