Many small business owners, health professionals or practising professionals have a lifetime of knowledge, practical and theoretical that could be very valuable to someone online.  So valuable in fact, that they would be happy to pay for this quality information.  This presents a great opportunity for them to make money selling information products online.  But, if you are time poor, this might sound easier than it actually is. 

Here is a great way to get started.

Firstly, by recognising that you have knowledge other people want, you can see a very strong possibility of being able to provide this information to those that want it most and charge them a fee.  Here is a simple way that a busy professional or small business owner or could get started today towards creating a product to be sold online. 

Now, I would suggest before getting into these steps, do a bit research.  Find out what people are looking for in your particular area expertise or market niche.   You can do this through keyword research, using tools like Wordtracker.com or Google’s External Keyword research tool.  The reason for this, is that you don’t want to go through the process of creating a product for something that either is such a hard market to crack or on the opposite scale, has no interest at all from people wanting to buy it.

So if you are physiotherapist for example, you may not want to just provide a product on physiotherapy broadly, but pick a particular area or niche market within physiotherapy to focus on – possibly
”physiotherapy for back pain or back pain sufferers”. 

So now, how do you get this happening – keeping in mind you hardly have any spare time as it is:

Step 1: Record your thoughts:  And by this I mean, write, record audio or even record video to get your ideas and thoughts, knowledge and experiences recorded.  For a busy person, a really good approach, may be buy a Dictaphone or some sort of hand held sound recording device.  Carry this with you and start to record your thoughts – in the car, while you are waiting for a train or bus, or even set aside time each week to do this. 

If you prefer to write, carry a pad of paper with you and take the same small slots of time to document your knowledge.  You could also buy a hand held video camera, and record yourself as well.  Either way, you are getting your ideas and thoughts on the topic out of your head into a form that can then be manipulated to create an online product.

Hot Tip: If you do presentations to groups of people on the topic, have this recorded either in audio or video and then continue to follow the steps below to get the same result.

Step 2: Consolidate what you have done:  Once you have recorded your knowledge, you can then start to put structure to it.  If you have an audio recording, you can send this to a service called Castingwords.com and have this transcribed into text.  You can also get someone to do this through a service called Elance.com. Same thing can happen for video, but depending on what you want to do with the video, you could have someone who has the skills, create this into a complete movie or movie series on the knowledge you have recorded.  This can be sold as online downloadable videos or even compiled into professional DVD series (particularly if you take up the hot tip above).  

If you have taken notes, start to put these into some sort of order, so that they can be created into a book and therefore converted into an EBook. 

Hot Tip: If you are not sure how to lay the content out and the headings to have, use Amazon’s look inside the book feature to see how similar books on the topic have been laid out.

Step 3: Create your product ready for sale:  Once you have consolidated what you have done, either by getting your audio transcribed or putting your existing notes into Word for example, you can once again use the services from specialists on Elance.com or Rentacoder.com to help you create your product ready for sale online.  If you have created an eBook, then get specialist on Elance.com to convert your text into a neatly formatted eBook, have a book cover designed and any images that you can use on your website to sell the eBook. 

If your product is giving people access to the online videos you have created, you can work with a specialist video editor from Elance.com or Rentacoder.com who can make these into professional looking videos.  I would recommend not loading these videos to Youtube.com to share them with those that pay for access to them.  In the next step, having you website designed, have your website designer set the videos up on your website in their own online video player. 

Remember, you are getting someone else to do all the technical stuff for you, so you are optimising your time.

Step 4: Create a website:  Once again, you can have with sales copy and a thank you page so people can download your product designed and developed by a website designer from one of the outsourcing website I have already mentioned.  Remember, you really only need a sales page, which I would recommend you get sales copy written for to increase the number of sales you produce from each visit.  And a thank you or download page, where your product is made available to those that have purchased it, to download. 

Use Clickbank.com or Paypal.com to accept payments for your product, as this will make it easy for you to accept payments, and also hide the thank you page with the download from your customer, so they cannot figure out how to get to that page without paying.  Now onto marketing & promotion.  You can register cheap domains for your website at a site called Godaddy.com.

Step 5: Start marketing the website and generating sales.  Here, there are many ways you can start to market your new website.  One of easiest and fastest ways to get traffic is to use Google Adwords.  You can either do this yourself, or once again, have someone else do this for you.  The idea is to have your advert for your website appearing in the sponsored section of Google (right hand section) when someone types in keywords relating to your product.  Then as you start to generate sales, test and measure as you go and improve what you are doing. The great thing now, is that you have created the product once and done the work once, you can continue to market this website and make money from it over and over again.

Remember, you want to automate this process as much as possible, so the more you stick to selling just downloadable information products, the easier it will be for you.

If you still don’t think you have time for these easy steps, why not get your product or eBook ghost written.  This means getting an expert writer to basically charge you for interviewing you and then compiling a book for you.  This will be more costly, but the result could be the same.  You can go to services like Elance.com to find people that can help you do this.

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Sometimes selecting an easy way to process and automate the payment of your information products online can be a bit of a mine field.  If you are looking for a simple answer to this question and a few easy ways to help you start making money from information products sooner, then read on.

You have researched your niche, developed the product, written the sales copy and put up the website.  Now, the big question, how are you going to accept payment?

Well, the great thing is, that if you are selling information products like eBooks or software, or some form of electronically downloadable product, processing money online and then providing your customer with the product for them to download can be setup very easily. 

As with so many things on the internet, there are many ways for you to achieve the same result, but here are 3 easy ways to accept money online.  They may not be the cheapest, but many people use them to make large amounts of money online, so give them a try and see whether these could be a good solution for the information products you are going to be selling off your website.

1. Clickbank.com – you may be familiar with this option, but basically, creating an account with clickbank.com will allow you to process money online from your website, using their services.  They will be able to process payments via VISA, MasterCard and PayPal and will also allow your customer to see what the value of their purchase is in their own currency. 

They will process the payment for you and hold it in your clickbank.com account for payment into your bank account or via cheque.  Once you have setup an account, you can setup your products in the products section, making sure that you provide clickbank.com with your product download or thank you page.  Simply copy and paste the thank you website address or download page into the field when requested. 

Clickbank.com will then provide you a purchase now link for the product that you have just created, which you then have your website master add to all the “order now” buttons on your website.   This is a very straight forward website link, which would look something like this : http://product#.ClicbankID.pay.clickbank.net/

You can test the link and money processing of your product is going to work, by setting the product you want to test to test mode in clickbank.com.  The other great thing about Clickbank.com, is that you can at any time login to your online account and change the prices of products that you are selling.  You can also have multiple clickbank.com accounts for various products you sell. 

Your customers account if they use MasterCard of VISA for they payment, will display “Clickbank.com” on their bank statement.  Remember too, that people can also pay via PayPal into your Clickbank.com account, so you get the best of both worlds so to speak.

Remember, that the advantage of clickbank.com is that you can also set this up for affiliates using clickbank.com to sell your products and services on your behalf.  

So you can have an army of people selling your product, with all the money from their sales and the payment to you and the affiliates being entirely managed by clickbank.com.  Pretty neat for selling information products online. 

2. PayPal for processing:  PayPal is possibly one of the biggest and most used online payment processing services on the internet today.  It is easy to setup and works in the same way as clickbank.com as far as accepting money via various payment methods and then holding this money until you are ready to transfer it to a linked bank account that you nominate.  PayPal allows you to accept more payment options, including MasterCard, VISA, Discover.

Simply setup an account, if you don’t have one already.  You will need to verify your bank account linked to the PayPal account, to make sure that they are paying the money that is going to be owed to you, into the right account.

When you are ready to setup your products in PayPal, login and then go to the Merchant Services area.   Create your product and the price you are selling it.  Remember, again you want to make sure you include the thank you or download website address for your product, so that your customers’ are sent there once the payment is accepted. 

You will be given different types of PayPal payment buttons, that will show you how your buy now button will appear on your website.   Once you have selected the button you are going to use, you can proceed.
The great thing is that PayPal will give you the exact HTML or website code to add to your website, that will display the “Buy Now” button that you selected, so there is no need for you to design this.  Do this yourself or get your web master to add this code.  The link to add this to your customers shopping cart is also already in the code as well.  Really simple and straight forward, all you have to do is watch the money come in, and then transfer it out of PayPal once the balance has reached a certain level. 

The advantage of PayPal and Clickbank.com is that the customer’s financial details are never shared with you, so the security of using such big and recognised online processing systems provides some reassurance to the customer.

3. Setup your own online merchant facility: Setting up your own merchant facility with your bank and arranging a payment gateway to process online payments is another option.  This is generally more costly up front than the above options, but basically your costs per transaction can be greatly reduced.  If you are going to go with this option, you will need to contact your bank to arrange a Merchant ID.  You will need a payment processing gateway, of which there are many.  Make sure the one you select will work with the banks systems.  Remember to check what currencies you will be able to process.   To make it easy and simple to sell information products, I would recommend online shopping cart systems like World Internet Office (1shoppingcart.com). 

This will allow you to setup and accept payments for information products, but more importantly provide your customer with the thank you or download website address once the transaction is complete, automating your online business.

Personally, I use a combination of the all 3 of these services as it really depends on what I am doing, the product that I am selling and the price point.  These are just 3 options, but I would certainly recommend, that if you are just looking for a quick and easy solution for accepting online payments and something that can be pretty much automated, I would go with PayPal or Clickbank.com.

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Every website and business owner is looking for simple and effective ways to get traffic. Now, if you are internet marketer, then I don’t need to tell you all the ways to get traffic fast, but if you are a business owner or new to internet marketing, have you considering using online video marketing to drive traffic to your website?

Some of the biggest and most content rich websites on the internet, are online video hosting sites, including Youtube.com, Yahoo Video, Myspace Video and Google Video. By putting a video up on one of these sites, you could literally have viewers from across the global watching your video. And, if you have your website address plastered across the bottom of the video, you have the perfect opportunity to send traffic to your website.

Here is how a video can rank on Google for a given keyword search:

Now, what this also means, is that because there is so much video content on these sites, these sites will very often appear in search engine results, displaying a video that is related to the keywords you have just searched for. The reason for this, is that these sites have so much video content, that very often they are seen by search engines like Google as being a valid source of information on the topic relating to the keywords you as the user have just typed into Google.

Now, I am not going to go into too much detail here on how natural search engine ranking happens, but there is a simple approach which means that you can have videos that you create and post to these video hosting sites, achieve front page ranking on major search engines, for the keywords that you select. And, if the video has your website address all over it, you will start to get increased traffic from people watching the video.

So how do we do this?

1. Create a video for an aspect of your website or business that you want to promote. This video could be an advertorial, where you feature a particular product or service. Another option is doing a “How to video” for the market you are targeting. If you are recommending someone’s product or website as an affiliate, you could do a “I recommend” video, with your affiliate link website address in the video. You can use various video software to create this, one being Sony Vegas Studio. Remember, that when you are starting out with this, the video does not need to be perfect.

As an example, you could create a video using a recording of a PowerPoint presentation, recorded off your screen by screen capture software like camstudio.org and using a mic to record the sound of the recording. The most important thing to remember, is to make sure you put your website address across the bottom of the video.

2. Do your keyword research: To get the maximum results from the video you have created, you must make sure that the keywords that you use in the title for the video are the keywords you are going to want to have your video found on in the search engine results. You can do keyword search using several tools, including Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com or Keyworddiscovery.com.

Remember, you want to focus on not just the most trafficked terms, but those keywords that will deliver you with the highest quality viewers in relation to the product, service or website you are promoting from the video. Using what is called “long tail keywords”, could deliver you the best results. For example, if you had website about massage and massage therapy, and you had a video on how to treat back and neck pain, instead of just using massage therapy or massage as the keyword in the video title, you could focus on the long tail within “massage”, like “massage for back and neck pain” or “Healing Back and Neck Pain with massage”.

When you submit your videos, you are going to build your title using the keywords you have found from this research. Use these keywords in the title, the tags for the video as well as in the description of what the video is about. A hot tip, is to start the description section of the video with your website address, that way if your video does rank on the search engines, and the person doesn’t watch it, they may just visit your website directly.

3. Submit your videos to get them distributed: Submit your videos to multiple video hosting websites, including Youtube.com, Google Video, Yahoo Video and Revver.com.

Now, obviously submitting your video to all these sites is going to be very time consuming and tedious. To speed up this process for you, I would recommend using a system called Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser will allow you to post your video to many of the big online video sites, including Youtube.com, Google Video, Revver and many more. It will also allow you to post your video to podcast directories and video blog websites. This will give your video massive distribution.

So if you have done the correct keyword targeting in the title based on step 2, and used these in the title, you should see you videos start to rank for the keywords you selected in 3-4 days. The more views you get of your video, the more traffic you are likely to generate.

Here is one of my videos that took 3-4 days to rank on the first page of Google.  This video was actually placed onto a blog.

More traffic = more leads = more sales = increased profits to you and your website or business.

You can use other video distribution software to do the same thing, but my personal recommendation is Traffic Geyser. And remember, always include your website address at the bottom of the entire video, so no matter where a viewer is at in the video, they know how to get more information. The biggest key to the success of this process will also be the correct selection of keywords, so make sure you do this properly and do not skip this step.

Check out my latest video article on the 3 Crucial Ingredients to Successful Email Marketing.

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