The term ‘infoprenuer’ has been coined to describe people who sell information based products like ebooks. In order to get started selling online you need 3 things: a website that promotes your product, a method of receiving payments, and a method to deliver the product to your customer after payment.

How To Create Your Website

Your promotional website should not be a complicated site. It should be a one page HTML document that is focused on selling your product (you’ve probably encountered many of these ’salespage’ style sites on the web.) The content will consist of a headline to catch people’s attention, a short story to hook them and get them reading, a bullet list of the major benefits they will get from buying your product, testimonials from previous customers and reviewers, and a ‘call to action’ (otherwise known as the sales pitch.) Most people include a P.S. or two that summarizes the major benefits and repeats the call to action.

You don’t need any fancy software to make this page. There is an excellent free software package called Kompozer that will help you design the webpage.

In order for people to find and access your salespage, you will need a server to ‘host’ it on and a domain name. There are dozens of companies that will help you with domain name registration and hosting if you don’t already have this taken care of. The total cost should be under $10US per month. I use and recommend 2 companies: HostGator Web Hosting and 1&1 Web Hosting.

How To Accept Payments Online

Your salespage will have an order button on it for customers to click and purchase your ebook. This will link to some kind of online payment processor. Large businesses have accounts with a bank called ‘merchant accounts.’ These accounts allow them to accept credit card payments from customers.

Unfortunately, merchant accounts are expensive and can be difficult to setup for new businesses. Luckily, there is a very popular online alternative… Paypal.
A PayPal Premier or Business account can be setup easily by almost anyone. There are no monthly charges for a Premier account and PayPal charges a small transaction fee for every payment the process (merchant accounts have large monthly fees and transaction fees as well!) With a PayPal Premier or Business account, you will be able to accept credit card payments, electronic checks, and direct PayPal transfers from other members. It is the easiest way to get started accepting payments online.

PayPal includes tools on their merchant services area where you can create a ‘Buy Now’ button to place on your salespage. The form is very easy to use. Simply fill in all of the details about your product. Make sure that the ‘button encryption’ option is set to yes. If it is not, anyone with basic web skills can view the source code for your salespage and change the purchase price or simply steal the link to your download page without paying. Even worse, search engines will eventually find and index your download page.

At the bottom of the page is a link to “Add More Options.” Click this and look for the section labeled “Customize Your Buyer’s Experience.” There is an option here to enter a URL for people to be forwarded to after they make a successful payment. The link you put here is for the download page where the customer will get their product which leads us to…

How To Deliver Your Ebook

The last step in your ebook selling process is to deliver the product file to customers after they pay. The simplest approach is just to create a simple HTML page that has a short thank you message on it and a link for downloading the product. A common practice to keep people from finding this page is to give it a name that has lots of random characters in it to make it hard to guess and place it in a directory that has a similar hard to guess name. The download file should be placed in the same folder or a special sub-folder (also with a hard to guess name.)

If you choose this low-tech approach, make sure to put a blank file named ‘index.htm’ in each folder and also include ‘no-index’ tags in the header of the HTML of the download page and never link directly to the download page from anywhere online except from PayPal. These steps will reduce the chances of non-paying people downloading your product and search engines from indexing your download page and product links. But, if someone does find the page, this offers no protection from theft.

There are some more sophisticated software solutions available that will verify payment information before allowing access to download pages and files and will create a unique link to the product that hides its true location on your server and expires after a certain length of time or number of downloads. They might also include tools for running an affiliate program. DLGuard, Digital Product Guard Download System, and Download Defender XT are some of the more popular options for download protection.

These software solutions will cost you money and take some expertise (your own or someone you hire) to set everything up. But, in the long run, they will protect you as your business grows.

Using a Hosted Shopping Cart To Sell Ebooks

A third option for delivering your products is to use a hosted shopping cart program. This is the approach I use in my business.

There are a number of services at wildly different pricing structures that can handle this task. I use a company called E-junkie that is very inexpensive and offers almost every option I need to run a highly automated online business. They have a free one week trial and they don’t have any transaction fees to cut into your profits.

ClickBank, PayDotCom, and PayLoadz are other popular shopping cart options. The fee structures vary with each service.

Take Action and Get Started Now Selling Your Ebook

The most important decision you can make for your online business is to decide to start and take action. If you have to start small and cheap – do it. Use free tools and low tech solutions and take the money you earn and invest in better technology. If you wait for everything to be perfect, you will never start.

I recommend using Paypal and E-junkie to take payments and deliver products. The monthly fees are tiny and the technical skills required to deliver a secure product are low. E-junkie will make the buttons, send the thank-you emails, create the secure download pages and deliver the products. They even have tools for running an affiliate program.

Take action and have a profitable day!

Andrew Seltz is the author of “Selling Digital Goods Online with E-Junkie,” an illustrated step-by-step guide to setting up your ebook business fast.

Get Started Selling with E-Junkie Today…

Ebooks are small, so they can readily be downloaded by clients without placing excessive demands on a server. There are many services available, such as E-junkie, PayDotCom, Clickbank, and others designed to handle the order processing aspects of selling ebooks. Services like E-junkie will even deliver the file from their servers.

When delivering the ebooks from your own server, it is important to take steps to prevent people from sharing the link to your download page. Software like DL Guard will protect your download pages and your download links.

When you are just starting out, it is likely you will use PayPal to process your payments. Later you might move on to a full fledged merchant account for your business.

Services like E-junkie and PayDotCom interface with PayPal. Payments are processed there and order tracking and delivery are handled on the site.

Ebooks are easy to produce using free tools, easy to deliver on your own website or through digital product payment and delivery services, and can command a very high price. That makes them one of the best products to sell online.

Besides promoting your books assiduously online, there are several other strategies that can help you sell more books.

One is to give something away for free with your book, such as a valuable bonus item. Or bundle several E-Books under one price, which lowers the price for each E-Book if they were sold separately.

An effective technique for figuring out a price is to send out a survey to your current customers. If these customers have already bought an E-Book from you, ask for their opinion in terms of price. Do this by creating a sales page for the new book, but don’t include a price on that page. Instead, add a number of links to survey questions that ask pointed questions to aid you in assigning a price to your E-Book.

Another strategy is to test out prices by creating a number of duplicate sales pages with different prices on each page. Make sure your sales copy is exactly the same on every page, and includes your selling-handle sentence. Then figure out for each page the conversion ratio between visitors to your site and sales of your book. This will tell you what your optimum price is.

Ultimately, if you’ve written a book that solves a problem or presents a new technique, your book will bring in both traffic and profits. So be sure to write that selling-handle sentence that sums up what problem your book solves and what the benefits of your book will be to the customers who purchase it. And then watch your market come to you!

Decide if your goal is to get wide distribution and maximum exposure. This goal is aimed at drawing customers to your business or service, or to establishing the credibility of your reputation. If this is your main goal, you should aim to keep your price on the low side. Some authors have even priced their E-Books at a profit loss to draw a high number of new customers. The key is to find a price that maximizes your profits and the number of books you sell.

This is an excellent pricing strategy if you are looking to acquire long-term customers. Long-term customers are extremely likely to buy from you again and again as long as the first E-Book they buy is of exceptional quality and beneficial to the customer.

However, if your book contains valuable and more importantly NEW information, references, or techniques then you should aim to price it on the high end.

After you figure out your goal, you must figure out what your audience’s need is for your E-Book. For example, does your book solve a particular problem? If it does, and solves it in a way that hasn’t been written about in one hundred other E-Books, you will be able to achieve high sales at a high price. If your book solves a problem or answers questions in a new and unique way, you should price your book as high as you can go. You will achieve larger profits this way, but bring in fewer customers. Just make sure the question or problem that your book solves is one that is important and relevant to the majority of your market audience. If your ideas are not common knowledge, or you are presenting a brand new technique, you will be able to sell books at a high price. Just be prepared for your competition to undercut you on price as soon as they hear about your book.

Keep in mind that the above pricing strategy is temporary. Eventually, you will cease to sell books at this high price. So figure out in advance how long you plan to offer your E-Book at this high price, and when that time is up, change your pricing strategy.

If you want to see large profits over customer draw, aim for an audience that is looking for easy solutions to their problems at a low price. If your book is aimed at solving one particular problem rather than general advice, then you can charge more. Start at the highest price the market will bear to bring in the largest profits, and plan to discount the book a number of times throughout the year.

Choosing the right price for your E-Book is one of the most critical parts of the marketing process. The first rule of pricing E-Books is to never underprice. Determine the highest price your audience can afford, and then if you find your book isn’t selling, you can always reduce the price. Before you take that step, make sure you are promoting your book like crazy on the Internet and on websites. The price should be aimed at bringing in profits, but you should never forget that price is one of the factors that people use in judging the value of your E-Book ? before they buy it. So always start with the highest price, and then launch a mega-marketing campaign.

Pricing an E-Book is particularly difficult because E-Books are a fairly new commodity. Since they are digital, the value of an E-Book is as confusing as the understanding of what digital actually is to the average layperson. This means that we must look at E-Books in a different light in order to determine their actual worth in this brave, new cyber world.

Let’s look at the difference between a book in print and an E-Book. A printed book is an object you can hold in your hand, store on your bookshelf, even hand down to the next generation. It is priced on factors such as paper stock, design and production costs, and marketing.

But the fact that unites E-Books and print books is that they are composed of ideas. It is the ideas in these books that have the ability to change, or possibly transform, people’s lives.

What do you think an idea is worth when evaluated against the cost of paper and ink?

It is the IDEAS that are valuable! That is how you determine the cost of your E-Book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55L-_U8cik0