Once you’ve created your info product, the next step is to start selling it.
Assuming you did your research properly before actually creating your info product, you’ll have a good idea of your precise market and will hopefully even know where they congregate online.
You’ll also need someone to process payments unless all your potential customers are likely to be local to you, which is unlikely in the case of info products.
Payments can be taken easily with processors such as PayPal and that may well be all you need. Thanks to eBay, PayPal is widely recognised and accepted by customers.
Another alternative is to use a third party credit card acceptor such as Clickbank or 2Checkout. Technically these companies don’t accept credit cards on your behalf (that would be breaking the rules of Visa and Mastercard) and instead they “buy” your info product from you at a wholesale price and send you the agreed price.
It’s a technicality as far as I can tell and the end result is that they take credit cards on your behalf. But it does mean that their name, not yours, will appear on your customer’s credit card statement so you need to make sure that your customer knows what will show up so that disputes are minimised.
The best solution if you’re selling a large quantity of your info product is to have your own credit card merchant account. These usually cost money to set up and most of them have a variety of requirements. Especially when starting out, they may hold some or all of your balance for a period of time until their fraud department gets to grips with any potential risks – this is not a reflection on you, just a reflection on how this industry gets targetted by fraudsters.
The other component to selling your own info products online is actually getting potential customers to your sales page.
The quickest – but most expensive – way to do this is with pay per click advertising such as Google’s Adwords. There is an art to doing this but you need to make sure that you’ve researched this. That’s outside the scope of this post but check out Perry Marshall’s free course here to get a good grounding.
If it’s appropriate to your target market, you should also look at advertising on sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn.
Setting up a Facebook page for potential customers to join in and interact with you is another option for selling your info products. Once the page gets some traction it can become self generating as people “like” it and share it with like minded friends.
LinkedIn has groups where people interact with each other, so if your info product is more business orientated then that’s a good place to investigate.
The other ways of driving traffic and potential visitors are more traditional:
Writing articles and posting them on your website or article directories such as EzineArticles. Whilst article directories have lost some of their power in recent years, they are still capable of sending traffic to your site and you can also get your article picked up and used by other sites. Lists work well with article directories and have the added advantage of being easy to write.
Videos are another thing to consider. At the time of writing, YouTube is generally considered to be the second biggest search engine on the internet and videos placed on YouTube also regularly show up in the regular search results. Screencast videos are probably the easiest to make and show up well.
If your video would work without the screenshots then you can also extract the audio element and use it as a podcast.
And the slideshow element can be uploaded to sites like Scribd and SlideShare.
That list should give you plenty of ideas to promote and sell your own info product online. Keep at it – it takes time to get traction in the search engines but it’s well worth doing!