The packaging of your information product has a huge effect on perceived value, notes self-publishing guru Dan Poyner.
For a book, binder format has the highest perceived value. But binder products are more expensive to produce, more difficult to store, and harder to ship.
Publishing your book as a traditional “bookstore book” has more prestige — people revere book authors — but the lowest perceived value, because buyers compare its price with books sold in bookstores.
Hardcover books, which can be printed with or without dust jackets, have higher perceived value than paperbacks.
“Oddly enough” says Dan, “a hardcover without a dust jacket has a higher perceived value than one with the dust jacket.”
Reason: books for professionals do not have dust jackets. Think of the leather-bound volumes you see in the library or conference room of any law firm.
E-books also have a higher perceived value than paperback books. Because an e-book doesn’t look like a traditional book and has a larger page size, buyers see it as a specialized report rather than a regular book
According to an article in Customer Service Advantage, spell-check fails to catch 7 out of 10 errors.
Therefore, you have to proofread your copy carefully. But that’s difficult to do if you’ve already read the copy multiple times, because your mind skips many words.
Solution: proofread your copy backward.
Why it works: the copy loses all meaning when read backward, forcing you to focus on the words one at a time.
My Internet business runs on Web Marketing Magic, an integrated software including shopping cart, e-commerce, auto-responder, ad tracker, affiliate marketing, e-mail distribution, and more. You ***Choosing a shopping cart***
If you want to start an Internet marketing business, you need a shopping cart for taking orders online.
The two most popular seem to be 1shoppingcart.com and infusionsoft.com.
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Domain names can be purchased cheaply here, for less than ten bucks per name: www.bobsbestdomains.com
Tip: If the domain name you want is not available, you can always get some variation of it.
Example: I wanted www.myfirstebook.com for a landing page selling an e-book on how to write and marketing e-books. It was taken.
Solution: I bought www.myveryfirstebook.com
A variant of some kind is almost always available.
Write key-word rich meta tags for each web page on your site. The most important meta tags are the title and description tags.
The title tag is what your visitors see at the top of their browser windows when they visit your site, as well as what they see in their bookmark lists. Failure to put strategic keywords in the title tag can result in pages being poorly ranked. The title tag can be a maximum 95 characters including spaces, but ideally no longer than 6 or 7 words.
When your web site comes up in a Google search, the description tag is what the user sees on the search engine results page (SERP). It should incorporate strategic key words and clearly communicate what you offer, who it is for, and the key benefit. The description tag should be a maximum of 220 characters with spaces.
Your major key words should also be placed in the keywords meta tag, though Google pays less attention to the key word meta tag than to the title and description tags.
Recommended typefaces for web sites include Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, and other popular san serif fonts.
If your web pages are too light to read on screen or when printed, use a boldface font like Helvetica Bold Condensed.
The most common error in web page design is using too small a type size. Use at least 12-point type. Even 16-point won’t look awkward, and larger is easier to read than smaller.
For web page headlines, use Impact or Arial Bold in 2 or more point sizes larger than the body copy.
To succeed online, you have to find good products to offer your customers, buy them wholesale, and sell them at retail.
Where can you find wholesale sources of products to sell online?
Here are a few sources to get you started:
A web site full of product suppliers and manufacturers all in one place.
The National Mail Order Association’s directory of wholesale product suppliers.
Tiran Zaken has a huge warehouse full of close-out specialty merchandise you can buy at a deep discount and resell to your customers at a profit.
SMC has been around for decades ... a good source of wholesale merchandise, mainly low-end consumer knick-knacks and other items.
Buy remainder hardcover and paperback books at deep discount; bundle them with some CDs or DVDs on the same topic and sell for a princely sum.
Thousands of e-books you can sell to your subscribers and visitors as an affiliate for a nice commission.
Source: Richard Lovett, Analog, 1/10/10, p. 55.
Want to spread your ideas and content virally online? Create a free e-book and post it on this site. You can also browse the site and download dozens of interesting and useful e-books for free: www.ebook-maniacs.com
The content in special reports, white papers, and other information-based marketing should meet these B.E.S.T. criteria:
Source: Junta42 white paper, “How to Attract and Retain Customers with Content Now.”
Primera Technology’s Bravo SE Disc Publisher burns and prints quantities of professional-looking CDs and DVDs automatically, including colorful labels. Unit costs $1,495. A sensible investment if you want to dupe your own audio and video info products at home.
For details or to order, visit www.bravose.com. Or call toll-free 800-797-2772 now.
As entrepreneurs, most of us can’t afford the expensive graphic art studios Fortune 500 companies use, yet we want our marketing materials to have visual appeal.
Here are 5 low-cost/no-cost graphic design techniques you can use to liven up your print and online promotions:
Source: Newsletter Formula, Vol. 1, Issue 1, p. 12.
According to an e-tailing group survey, visitors don’t buy online for 7 reasons:
Action steps: test lowering your shipping and handling charges; expand your payment options; test coupons on your shopping carts; and make sure you have secure socket layer (SSL) security logos on your site’s order forms and shopping cart. These include VeriSign, Entrust, TRUSTe, and GoDaddy.
Source: eMarketer, 6/30/09.
Newbie Internet marketers despair that there is too much competition on the web and therefore no room for them.
What they do not understand is that the information business is not competitive in the way most other businesses are.
For instance, a consumer shops and makes a decision to buy a certain model refrigerator. If he chooses my brand, I have his money and all the other refrigerator manufacturers have lost the chance to sell to him — at least until he needs a new fridge.
But consumers of info products are information junkies. They will buy many e-books, DVDs and courses on a given topic. So if your products, marketing, and reputation are good, they will buy your information in addition to the info products of others, not instead of.
Tip: successful sellers of information products in your category are great potential joint venture partners. Approach them and suggest cross-promotions.
According to Internet marketing guru Howie Jacobson, Google ranks “authority” websites — sites that provide valuable information on a topic — higher than ordinary websites.
Here are the 4 things you need to have an authority website:
Added bonus: having an authority website also helps position you as a thought leader in your industry.
Source: Early to Rise, 7/1/09.
Normally, web sites built by amateurs (that’s you and me) look boring, ugly, or both.
Now, with XSitePro, you can design your own professional-quality web sites quickly, easily, and affordably ... even if you have no design talent.
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Which teachers of “how to get rich on the Internet” are worth listening to ... and which are just hype-masters blowing smoke?
This free site lists the Internet marketing gurus I know to be successful, knowledgeable, and worth listening to: www.internetmarketinghallofame.com
According to Internet marketing expert Amy Africa, the average user spends 10% more time on web sites that have a lot of photos showing people. Reason: according to Amy, when we see other people’s eyes, we stay longer.
How does this translate into more online revenues? “The more you stay, the more you pay,” Amy notes. (That’s the same reason why Barnes & Noble now serves coffee and puts out comfy chairs for you to sit and read.)
Tip: You can find cheap, royalty-free stock photos of almost any image, including shots with people, at my favorite online stock photo resource: www.dreamstime.com
Source: Thinking Inside the Box, 6/30/09.
You can drive all the traffic in the world to your landing page, but if it doesn’t convert, you don’t make money.
My free site on landing pages can give you dozens of strategies for building your list, getting more orders, and making more money from all your squeeze pages and landing pages: www.thelandingpageguru.com
Gordon Burgett is one of the founding fathers of “how to build your information empire.” In his most recent newsletter, he published a 48-point checklist of tips and ideas on making money by writing and selling e-books online.
To get the free newsletter and read the checklist, click below now: www.gordonburgett.com/free-reports
Source: Allie Longoria, Expert Summaries, 5/5/09
Do you deliver e-books and special reports to your customers via e-mail, and worry that they’ll duplicate or pass them on to others illegally?
Here’s a service that tracks people who forward your PDF files to others, so you can catch any cheaters: www.readnotify.com
“How long should I make my e-books?” a new Internet info marketer asked me.
Answer: for an e-book selling in the $19 to $39 range, the PDF should be a minimum of 50 pages.
If it’s much shorter than 40 pages, your customers may think you are not giving them enough “meat.”
A typeset PDF page is around 300 words. So when you are writing your e-book, you know you have enough content when your Word document is around 15,000 words.
According to a survey by Net Applications, the top 6 Web browsers are:
Recommendation: make sure your Web designer optimizes your sites and landing pages for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
Source: Internet Retailer (4/09, p. 57).
I just posted a new video online. It reveals how you can make a six-figure income selling information products over the Internet ... in just 4 simple steps.
And if you are a writer — or just have a way with words — you can complete these 4 steps quickly and easily.
Watch this short video and discover the 4 steps to building a profitable online business. It’s free — and takes less than 2 1/2 minutes: www.internetmarketingforcopywriters.com
The minimum price for physical information products can be calculated using the “10:1 rule.”
This rule says the price of a physical product sold through direct marketing must be at least 10 times your product cost.
Example: A set of DVDs that cost $8 per copy should sell for a minimum of $80.
But that’s the minimum. If your information is worth more, and buyers will pay more, then charge more.
Source: Speaker Fulfillment Services, News & Notes, Vol. 15, p. 1.
In order, here are the 6 most common reasons consumers cite for their reluctance to shop online:
Source: Internet Retailer, 3/09, p. 64.