Is this the ideal business? How does this sound to you:

• The product you sell is delivered to customers. automatically
• Almost all the money you receive from a customer is profit
• This type of business will make you money even when you are sleeping!

The business I’m talking about is the publication of information…

If you’re not familiar with the term, information publishing is the business of selling information to your customers. For example:

• How to lose weight without dieting
• How to get fit – fast
• How to easily create your first website

Those are just three examples of information product themes that are selling very successfully. right now online.

Here’s why this business can be so profitable (and incredibly easy to run):

1. You can deliver the product to your customers as a downloadable ‘e-book’. The customer comes to your site, places their order, and is then automatically sent to a private page where they download the product.
2. Let’s say you’re using PayPal to receive payments for you – they charge (approximately) 5% per sale as a fee. So you keep 95%. Since the product costs nothing to deliver to the customer, that’s all profit! However, if you’re paying to drive visitors to your website through online advertising, for example, that’s obviously going to hurt your profits. But think about it: even a 40% profit per sale for almost no work isn’t exactly a bad situation, is it?

3. So once you’ve built your product, set up the website and getting visitors, plus answering customer support emails, everything else can run on autopilot! All you need to do is copy this formula to another website, then another, and amazingly quickly you could be making thousands of profits a month with worryingly small work… Example: I know of an eBook that generated over a million dollars in sales and customers only pay $40! After advertising and other expenses, the author made over $400,000 in profit!

So here are five steps you can take to get started in this incredibly profitable business:

STEP 1: The Market

You have to decide who you are selling to. Two factors to consider:

• You can go after an existing market that has sparked an interest in information products. This will make building a profitable business much easier for you, rather than trying to sell to a market that might not actually want what you are offering. The three examples above are a good starting point if you’re looking for ideas.
• The more you know about a market, the better. The product you are offering should provide solutions to the problems that people in that market have. It also greatly helps your chances of success if you understand the market and use a style of language and vocabulary that they respond to. For example, writing in dry corporate language for a consumer market won’t get you very far!

STEP 2: The Product

Once you know what market you are targeting and understand their problems and concerns, you can provide the solution to those problems.

This may require quite a bit of research, or in fact, you may already be an expert on the subject, which greatly speeds up the process. And indeed, surprisingly, you can have products written for you by freelance writers at a cheap price.

Prices for freelancers fluctuate a lot, but as an example, if we say a writer you find charges $20 for 500 words, for a 20,000 word eBook, it will cost you $800.

STEP 3: The website

A website that sells an eBook is often made up of:

• The first page is the sales letter for the product: the ‘Buy Now’ button on this page connects to the payment processor (PayPal for example)
• After a successful checkout, the customer is sent to a “Thank You” page where they can download the product

So, at the simplest level, a site that sells an ebook may only have two pages!

If you are not comfortable building a website, you can also outsource it. And you don’t even have to write your own sales copy: you can have ok sales copy created for a few hundred dollars. Now, world-class sales page writers charge upwards of $20,000…but you really don’t need to spend that much!

A few hundred to a thousand dollars will definitely get you started. But like all these things, the more you do yourself, the less it costs.

STEP 4: Marketing

Now, your website needs visitors. More importantly: targeted visitors. If you’re selling an eBook on ‘How to Build Your First Website’, website visitors looking for weight loss tips are not going to help you make sales!

Internet marketing is a very broad subject though, so I can’t really do it the justice it deserves in this article (unless this article is 200,000 words long!), but a few ways to drive traffic to your site:

• Start a blog on the site and post every day. Over time, especially if you provide good content, you’ll get traffic via Google and other sites linking to you.

• affiliate program – If other websites that send you traffic get a cut of the sales, they are much more likely to link to you! If you’re selling an eBook, ClickBank.com is a payment processor and affiliate program all in one.

• pay per click – With Google, Yahoo and other online companies with a wide reach, you can pay to drive visitors to your site. You pay per visitor (per click). So let’s say you pay 20 cents per click, your ebook sells for $30, and on average 1% of visitors convert to customers… that means for every 20 cents you spend on advertising, you’re earning 30 cents, so a 10 cent per click profit. After a LOT of clicking, this can really add up…

• Items – write useful articles and distribute them on article directories. You can also place articles on sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages (these are article directories by a different name). The quality of the items is important here, as is the quantity.

STEP 5: The money

This is where the money is counted!

Okay, I’m kidding a bit: it’s more important to keep getting more traffic and keep optimizing the site. Use Google Website Optimizer to keep testing different titles and even different prices.

It’s also important to build an email list from the site and follow up, which is something I haven’t mentioned so far – put a ‘floating popup’ on the sales page to build a list that way and follow up with a combination of useful content and links that direct them to the main offer. The more times someone sees an offer, the more likely they are to buy it.

And as mentioned above, you can copy this formula for many different markets. And also, if you’re selling an eBook for $40, why not offer a Deluxe version (more in depth, more tools…) for $100, say, to new customers?

What I’m saying is, if you can turn a one-time customer into a repeat customer, the bottom line: You’ll make a batch more money!