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You first need to get your e-book or A/V product finished. You need to figure out how to get a shopping cart up and running. You have to draft an Internet marketing plan. Maybe you need to set up a pay-per-click search engine account with Google, or post some articles online, or start a blog, or something like that to build traffic.
Of course, you need to get a web page set up with a sales letter on it. You need to figure out how to handle incoming data, both customer-related and financial. You'll have to be ready with customer service. Maybe you'll want to set up some auto-responders. What about a toll-free number, too?
But wait! Don't overcomplicate things. Begin at the beginning, with an information product that's a sure-fire winner, and everything else will fall naturally into place.
A simple way to do that is to conduct a seminar or workshop. It can be done live and in-person at a venue near your home, or you can do it as a tele-conference using bridge-line technology. The providers of free bridge lines can arrange for up to 100 participants on your call, and they'll record for you every word that is said.
To make sure the seminar is well attended, you can offer it for free. The more participants you have, the better, but even a handful will serve the purpose. You just tell people, "Hey I'm doing a live seminar. I'm going to be teaching some great advice. It's just a couple of hours, and you're going to learn a lot. If you'd like to come, just go sign up here."
When I did this, I got 23 people to sign up for my first live seminar. It wasn't anything huge. A friend of mine borrowed a video camera to tape everything. We set up an audio tape recorder at the speaker's podium, too.
Quite honestly, my friend had never recorded a seminar with a video camera before. He just set it up in the back of the room, aimed it at me, and flipped it on. So it turned out to be just one of these "talking heads" recordings...no cool angles, or audience reaction shots, or anything like that.
But we recorded the seminar on video, and then we rented a Macintosh computer to load the footage and do the editing on. Again, my friend had never used a Macintosh computer or used any video editing software. It was kind of simple from a high-tech point of view, but the actual content was top notch. And in the end we had not one, but two information products-both audio and video versions of the seminar.
I spent quite a bit of time on packaging. That's a place you can't afford to look amateur or cheap. The way that you package your product, the way you make it look, can increase the perceived value by double, triple or sometimes even ten times.
So spend some time figuring out how to package your audio or video product, so that it appears to have maximum value. Regardless of what you may have heard about "not judging a book by its cover," people often buy things based on what they look like, not on what they contain.
Today, there are much better tools available for developing information products-and not only better, but also much cheaper. You can do all this at home if you want. It's pretty easy to make some video DVDs and MP3-quality audios using freeware off the Internet.
So my point is this: you don't need to be Steven Spielberg to create your first information product. If you've got good information that really helps customers solve problems, plus some excellent-looking packaging-Bingo! Everything else will fall into place and your info marketing business will be poised to take off.
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Neil Asher ([http://www.neilasher.com/freestuff.htm]) has built five multi-million dollar companies from zero, including one he took to $8 million in sales in under two years. He has created and sold successful franchises in England, Italy, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. Visit his web site for access to 17 FREE videos, 6 FREE books and two hours of audio training, revealing "How To Make BIG Money Selling Information Products On The Internet...Even If You Don't Have A Website And You've Never Sold Anything On The Internet Before."
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