William Charlwood

Looking back over a number of years of product creation and product selling, it is clear to me that the three most profitable things you can do to grow your own information-based online business are

1. Create good quality information products with a known market
2. Establish good relationships with a wide range of JV partners in those markets
3. Write effective sales pages for your products

You do need to master some of the basics of selling things online: setting up order processing systems, product delivery systems and registration systems to capture the contact details of people who are interested in or who have bought your products but this is just the plumbing of the internet and many sites exist to help you along the way.

Once you’ve sorted the plumbing out, building a portfolio of products and working with JV partners is the best thing to do. JV partners are always looking for good products to sell to their lists to make easy commission from so if you approach them with a sensible proposal that really is “win win” you’ll both win.

Of course, a poor product will destroy a JV relationship for two reasons: too many refunds will slash commission payments and at the same time will erode the standing of your partner in the eyes of his subscribers which will make it harder for him to sell anything when he next sends out an email.

So focus on good quality product creation and then take those good quality products to people with lists.

That then leads onto effective sales pages and the most productive method of sorting this out is to study pages that you know to be successful and copy their style. Then you need to test alternatives: try changing the headline, the images, the body copy, the order link, the guarantee, the font, the font colour. Everything.

But people don’t because they can’t be bothered. Yet testing is where you can make half of your money.

I’m using a testing system on my blog email alert site where I sell a video course that shows you how to send out email alerts every time you update your blog. The system tries out different combinations of the key elements in the sales page and uses conversion statistics to work out which combination is the most profitable. It then starts to show that highest profit combination more of the time.

The outcome of this is that the conversion rate for my site will increase over time. The stronger it gets, the more my JV partners will be interested in promoting my video course and the more money we will all make.