Internet marketing offers truly diverse multi-media opportunities for product creation, but the experience of most marketers is that the seven safest, most reliable products to sell online are: Ebooks, manuals and newsletters These are the classic 'digital book' information products that have underpinned many an internet marketing fortune.
These products have many advantages, including being very easy and cheap to produce, easy and free to deliver (they can be delivered automatically and instantaneously to customers by autoresponder once payment has been made) and easy to amend and update for new information.
If you don't want to write an eBook yourself, you can outsource the writing and production to authors using sites such as elance and textbroker.
Digital information products can easily be produced using a simple word processor like Word, although this risks formatting being lost during transmission to customers, which can leave your final product looking less than perfect.
It is far better to convert your Word document into a portable document format (pdf) using a program such as Adobe Acrobat or one of the free variations thereof, which will fix the document's appearance and formatting.
You can also find software specifically designed for creating ebooks, although for me, a pdf does the job perfectly.
Newsletters are among the best internet marketing products you can sell since they combine the relative ease of production of ebooks with an ongoing revenue model.
We will return to to newsletters in future articles.
To get the most from your ebooks, include links back to your website and maybe add a few affiliate links.
You can also include upsell offers.
Ebooks might be the classic information product, but these days they are just the beginning...
Audios / mp3 and podcasts Audio products are not only simple to produce but they also have a high perceived value.
In their most basic form, audio products can simply be narrations of written documents, recorded into a simple digital recorder on your PC (such as audacity).
An audio can simply comprise you talking into a microphone and it doesn't take much further work to record an interview with, for example, an expert on the subject of the audio.
You can even record telephone interviews, which make the process even easier since you and the expert wouldn't even need to be in the same time zone let alone the same place.
Videos / DVD The internet is showing clear signs of evolving from written documents to videos.
Video products are great to use as high perceived value products and as excellent means to drive traffic to your website.
Videos can be streamed on your website, for example, using Flash, they can be delivered as physical DVDs and they can be offered as MPEG downloads from your site.
Videos require a little more equipment to produce than audios, but you don't need a huge capital outlay.
A simple camcorder will do for your first videos and you can also use the webcam on your computer.
Webinars Technology has made it very easy to offer webinars to your subscribers and prospects, either as free or paid products.
You might want to offer free access to your webinar if you are looking to promote an offer through the event, or you can charge if you are planning to give out a large amount of valuable content, for instance if the event will include a contribution from a recognised expert in the field.
If you are charging for your webinar, it's a good practice to offer attendees a recording of the event.
You can even offer them a physical CD recording as an upsell for an additional fee.
Subscription (membership) websites Subscription or membership websites are amongst the best products you can create.
They represent an evolution of the newsletter or online magazine into a means of offering content to a restricted (by payment) audience through a variety of media.
Membership sites are cheap to run yet offer considerable potential for recurring income and automated cash flows.
If you build a site that creates a sense of community amongst your members, you will also build a very loyal customer base for any further products you develop or source.
At the core of a membership site is the offer of valuable information and resources to your paid subscribers.
This is content that you do not make available to the general public.
You can offer different levels of membership and can increase your subscription fees as you build the content and resources on your site.
Membership websites provide excellent economics as the costs of running them don't increase with your member numbers.
Workshops and seminars Workshops and seminars are natural, higher value progressions of webinars provided you have the confidence and expertise to justify charging fees at levels that make them economically viable.
Workshops and seminars can be excellent ways to enhance your reputation and you can involve other experts in the field to further increase the attraction of your event.
Licensing rights Licence agreements give you the right to market other people's products and are an excellent way to kick-start your business while you are developing your own products.
Licensed products should have a proven sales track record and generally come with proven sales material that you can use.
On the downside, licensed products are not your own work and may not be the most up-to-date products on the market.
In the worst cases, the market for the products might already be saturated.
If you haven't acquired an exclusive licence, you might also face competition from other licensees, although you may be allowed to repackage and improve licensed products so as to make them unique to you, which would also allow you to command a higher selling price.
Now you know the best products to sell through your internet marketing business, it's time to choose one with which you can launch your business.
Here's a suggestion: audio products can often be the easiest and quickest to produce.