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How To Sell Information or Products Online!

What kind of a web site should you create to ensure it will sell information and products successfully?

Most web sites selling information and products have absolutely no idea how it should be done. This is so much true that in fact only about four percent of online businesses turn a profit. And yet it is so easy to make your site profitable from day one!

In any subject or area, there is usually one white spot on the map – something that people most widely misapply or leave out... leading to poor results. When it comes to information and products, it is a fact that very few people know what it is that SELLS.

To really understand how sales occur on the Internet, we need to take a look at why people have Internet connections – what is it that makes them pay for all those expensive gadgets and connections so that they could surf on the World Wide Web.

What people search for.

Internet is like a gigantic encyclopedia. It's an endless source of information, with an estimated THREE BILLION web pages available to anyone with an Internet connection.

The ease with which you can find information, the sheer magnitude of this limitless information with an estimated 100,000 new web pages created DAILY, has made the Internet the primary source of information on this planet.

Internet was created for distribution of information and its purpose has always been to act as a channel of information. Thus, people search the Internet forINFORMATION.

Put another way, they do NOT search for things to buy.

But, you may say – people buy billions of dollars worth every year through the Internet! Why wouldn't they go online to purchase things?

Well, the fact that people BUY stuff does not prove that they LOG ON FOR THAT PURPOSE.

In fact, people buy computers, pay for an Internet connection and their monthly fees NOT to buy things – but to search for information from the World Wide Web.

The information on the Internet is, in actuality, totally without limits. This information base expands at a rate no human could ever keep abreast with. It is impossible to familiarize yourself with 100,000 new web pages every day. So basically the Internet is limitless just like the universe around us – no matter how far you go, you never come to the end of it.

The Internet has that one thing, really – enormous, never-ending mass of information – and that is what we want... that's what makes connecting to Internet worth the costs.

For every purchase made online, there are millions of information searches without anything bought.

A web site is not a store

Internet is not the real world. It is a SYMBOL of the real world: We "travel" to distant countries in seconds, we can observe the Antarctic in real time... get images, sounds and movies through our screen, but we are not IN that world. We remain in front of our screens, perceiving all these messages – it's not the real world but the symbol of those things that are in the real world.

In the real world, you can go into a store, pick up a product they offer for sale, feel the weight of if, feel the temperature, the material, try it on for size and get a sense of it in many other ways. Online, you can only see a picture of it and read a description.

But when it comes to selling information and products online, you have to give out lots of free information.

Internet is, above all, a source of FREE information. Check it out – every great web site offers loads of information absolutely free of charge.

Free information – the gentle approach

To sell information and products, you need to GIVE free information. That is the basic truth of it. See, people "buy" the Internet connection to get FREE information. That's why the get connected to Internet. Many buy a computer for that sole purpose. They pay good money to get free information.

And there's the problem. Many web sites try to SELL their visitors istraight off, from page one... without GIVING any or little information... and it just doesn't work that way. It's too much of a hump. In fact, it's an INSTANT TURN-OFF.

To sell online, you need to start off by giving a good amount of FREE information. There are several reasons for this, but for one, it is a technique that has the correct, gentle and gradual approach that has been proven successful for selling information products.

You HELP your visitors by giving them information for free. You don't try to keep information from them – on the contrary. manual.

The Trust Factor

Internet is a jungle and there are all kinds of people out there offering solutions that turn into problems for the buyer. Both you and me know that we need to get a reasonable TRUST built with anyone offering their product before we buy.

Why would you trust anyone straight off? I wouldn't!

And this is why giving out free information is so vital for you – if you want to sell information products, that is.

Let's imagine you create a web site to sell your product or service. And then, you just SELL it straight off – you know, do the major mistake of "online store" -approach. Let's follow the thoughts of your visitors:

"Hmm...all right. This guy SAYS he has this great product or service, at a great price... but he won't give ANY SAMPLES. I'm supposed to take his word on it... but I don't know this guy – I've never even HEARD of him! Well, if he cannot give a TASTE of this great information on his web site – why would you believe that his information product would be any good either?"

Do you see where this is taking the thoughts of your visitor?

Right. Free information acts as a "sample" of what you've got. People understand that you would give out maybe five or max ten percent of your information – and even that without the best bits. But if THAT small portion is already something GREAT... can you see how it would make it much easier to risk buying your information product?

This same approach, by the way, is used by many service providers – they call it a free consultation. You know, give the prospective client a totally free hour or two and let him get the feel of it. If he likes it, if he can see that it would be useful and beneficial to him – why, HE is going to buy it... you don't have to do anything to SELL it!

In the final analysis, people only buy something because they believe it will be USEFUL to them. If it isn't, they'll return it and ask for their money to be refunded. A refund always costs a lot MORE than what you got from the sale in the first place – so you don't want to CHEAT your visitors into buying. That'll take you down faster than anything!

Instead, you want to give them an ACCURATE UNDERSTANDING of what your product or service consists of. Now, that's something you cannot do by some sales letter. No – you have to give a lot more materials than that. You have to give them the FEEL of it in form of completely FREE information.And once your visitors get that feel – and if your product IS for them – they will buy in their own good time. That's how you sell online!

The Precise Formula

To have a chance to sell, your web site needs visitors. Those visitors will be limited to a few thousands per month in the beginning. To make the most out of your traffic, you need a very good visitors-to-a-sale conversion ratio. That conversion ratio simply tells how many of your visitors BUY – or, rather, how many visitors does it take on the average to make on sale.

The average visitors-to-sale conversion ratio on the Internet is that it takes more than 700 visitors to get a sale. My sites all have a conversion ratio well under 100:1. And that's what I want to give to you – because the better your conversion ratio is, the more sales you will make from ANY number of visitors.In the beginning – when your traffic will be low – it means your site will turn a profit regardless of low traffic. And once that traffic grows into something huge... well, you do the math.

There is a very precise formula for selling online. To create a web site that truly sells information products with a good conversion ratio, you need to know how to include just the right parts in the right sequence.