You can create a win-win proposition in which a buyer wants, and readily requests information from your web site, and happily pays you for it, all electronically, even while you sleep!
The information is digital, usually in the form of an electronic book (eBook). Once purchased, transfer of the information to the customer is digital (via the internet) and immediate. And the transfer of the customer's money to your bank account is also digital (via Paypal, Clickbank, and others) and immediate. The customer wins because he/she got needed information, immediately. You win because your bank account grew, immediately.
You create the information and then you own it (it's your asset). Or you can become an affiliate of someone else that owns the information and who has given you permission to promote and sell it. The production cost is mostly related to the amount of time spent at the keyboard creating the original digital product. Unlike hard, physical products like the ones you can hold in your hand (for example, a hard-bound book or a toaster), the cost to reproduce digital information is essentially zero. This is a great advantage in that identical copies of the product can be sold over and over again (your inventory is virtually unlimited) with very little expense in both production and transportation of the information. Even marketing and promotion can be done over the internet, requiring very little continued overhead and expense.
Inexpensive tools are readily available for capturing customer email addresses, creating, packaging and distributing the information product, and collecting the customer's payment. Or, you can hire out someone else to set it up for you. You decide the information product you wish to sell, you decide the approach to make it a reality, you make the rules. All you have to do is take action. And you can learn from others that have successfully done it. Here is a roadmap to get you started:
- Decide on a valuable idea that can be represented as information content. Research your idea and see if it is tangible. Use the internet to see what others have done, and to get an idea of market potential. You must have your own UNIQUE Info Product; offer your own flavor of content that the competition does not have (create your own Unique Selling Proposition).
- Create the information content using a word processor.
- Convert the content into an eBook (low-cost software tools are available on the internet for doing this conversion).
- Purchase a website URL domain name from a reputable web hosting service.
- Create the website content yourself, or contract to have it done.
- Get setup with a payment processor to accept credit cards and other online payment formats via your website.
- Get traffic to your site and capture emails of interested parties. Use an "auto responder".
- Stay focused; put passion into your work; take action!
- As you make money, continually improve and add value to your information product.
This "virtual estate" concept provides a "paradigm shift", a new perspective, for those smart enough to learn about it and apply it.
Jim McCabe