Because it is the first of the year, you will no doubt begin seeing lots of ads and emails trying to help you to establish some new goals for the new year. One of the most popular is to set up some sort of online business that generates some sort of automatic stream of revenue. This article will talk about selling information and how you should deliver it to your customers. I want to talk about delivery since it generally is the biggest stumbling block that most people face.
Make something
Let assume you have a topic in mind. Lets say its “Learning the Yahoo Ecommerce Platform” This is just an example, I know its not as flashy as your idea. We are going to assume that you have written or recorded a lot of good content and now you want to sell it. I tend to gravitate towards offering some video content along with some printed text. People are using video right now and its a hot addition that is sure to help you convey your point. The problem is once you have your content finished, chances are the individual files, (or videos) are slightly large. Most of us are concentrating on giving the consumer a good amount of information that is valuable, not on making the size of the file perfect for delivery. What generally happens is that you have a file or master file that is too big to email and you do not know how to offer it online so that people can download it.
Delivery. So in order to solve the delivery problem you have two choices. You can spend some money and a whole lot of time in learning how to deliver your content digitally. (someone buys it and receives a download link) or you can send it to them. I use to be a huge fan of the digital delivery method but have since switched to the old school system of sending you a cd. Here is why. If you are not a tech buff, there will always be someone who does not know how to download your content and they will not be happy about it. Digital sales offer immediate gratification and if you sell your reasoning well enough, your customers will order your cd. Here is why:
- The cd can hold a decent size video, so you do not have to worry about any videos where the length was greater than ten minutes.
- You can put a lot of content on the cd, a lot.
- You can add bonus reports or excel files for people to use in their own business.
- You can add in the price of media shipping, into the cost of the product
Burn it, then ship them
My favorite technique is to use Amazon’s Fullfillment program to deliver my cd’s and products to customers. First of all, it’s amazon, and they are very organized and ship very fast. The second reason is, If I ship a case of cd’s to them, they will ship them out automatically for me, this makes the automatic revenue stream more refined and possible. I would much rather ship a case of something to amazon than to deal with individual orders. This makes life very easy. If you sell your product on Amazon, its an evern bigger bonus. Amazon is slowly taking over the world with their Ecommerce platform and you will eventually end up competing with them in some sort in the near future.
You can read more articles about selling information products here.
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