Why would anyone want to bother with physical products when you can sell instant download digital ones?

Firstly, you can usually charge more for something people can see, touch, and handle.

Secondly, they have constant reference to it. Not like the old stories of people buying stuff that then it sits gathering dust on their hard drive because they’ve forgotten it’s there, and, in any case, they just don’t come across it easily – even if they search for it.

Thirdly, they’re less likely to return it to ask for a refund. It’s more of a bother and there’s the cost of postage, especially if it’s to another country.

There are two ways round the problems of posting and packing.

First, you can pay a dropshipper to carry the product to the customer. There’s almost any product imaginable that a dropshipper will deal with.

The great advantage is that you don’t pay the dropshipper until after the customer has paid.

The one thing to be careful about is that of choosing your dropshipper carefully. You need to do some research on them as to reliability and prices.

The second way, especially for sending discs of information, is to use a service, like Kunaki(TM), which will do all the work for you.

Even with physical products, you want to have automatic systems as far as possible.

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Since you’re selling online, then digital products are the most obvious products to sell.

Customers get them instantly.

This is a great advantage. No matter what time of night or day, customers can get the products they want, and fast. Even if they have a quite slow internet access, they can still download large files of several megabytes. However, any text documents, such as ebooks, are usually only in kilobytes or small numbers of megabytes. So, an ebook, say, is indeed instant, onto their computer.

Now, this speed allows for much more flexibility in upselling and cross-selling. For example, your customer orders a $27 ebook. Before they get to the payment page, you could immediately offer an upsell, say to $37, with an audio, which they can listen to on their MP3, of the ebook read by you.

Digital products are cheap  to produce.

In effect, there are no overheads to a digital business, unless you  move into your own offices away from home. Plus, you already have computer and internet connection costs anyway.

If you’re creating a text product, you can get OpenOffice(TM) free and use their text tool, just like Word(TM). Then you can create a PDF in the same system. It’s costing you time and energy but no money. The only possible cost would be if you wanted graphics in a website header and the ebook.

Digital products can be extended off-line.

Suppose you have an ebook to sell. You could convert this in many ways to audio on disc, video on disc, bonus chapters, lists of resources, or website examples if you’re passing on the resell rights.

The discs can then be sold as off-line, physical products for more money. In fact, customers could have immediate download and physical products or a choice between them.
 
Don’t forget email…

Almost all the above can be done via email, plus running memberships.

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I’ve not posted here for a short while. Here’s why.

This blog is obviously a central focus for me and my business. I’m still wondering to ever have any ads (even any more link ads) on here.  That is, to keep it clean for pure content.

Also:

1 Been thinking about how I can now begin to develop out from the blog, or rather the best way for me to do it. I’ve always had a plan. As ever, with actual practice your perspective changes, as you learn new things. I think this is a problem everyone meets and meets at various points in business development. In effect, not only what’s the next step, but what’s the best next step, and for me and my business specifically. This is all very briefly put.

2 I’ll just say, then that part of the above is that I’m considering setting up an internet marketing membership (free as a start) or an internet marketing portal-type site or content/information site, which could still be monetized if it’s all valuable enough. I know this is vague stated in this way. I have more detailed ideas. I’d be really interested in any responses to this.

Also, I did say originally I would have a new product out this month  – obviously things have changed. Firstly, because I’m not satisfied with the resources I could provide as useful to people in a one-off stand-alone product. Secondly, because I’ve grown more ambitious (over-eager?) to get to at least my stage one I was aiming at, that is, a membership site, which would in fact have originally been the end point of a Stage One for me.

3 The vexed question of article marketing. I still need to pursue this particularly, so I need more time on it.

Lots of people have always claimed that article marketing  done by itself (bum-type marketing) will get you lots of targeted traffic. You write lots of articles and send either to lots of directories or to a few key directories.

I will only ask: is this actually, as it stands, true? Or partly true? Is it the case, which might seem a bit daft to say, it depends on your interpretation of the various factors, including the results! I won’t say anymore about this because I want to make the next point about article marketing – which I think is the real emphasis.

Article marketing is best done, perhaps needs to be done, contextually, in the context of other methods. Put simply, article marketing needs links back and forth in a mesh of links, sites, and texts. For example, rather than be stuck in a directory and left, which seems to be the general advice with slight variations, there needs to be a context of Web 2.0 sites, blog(s), ezine(s), other articles, RSS and whatever.

In other words, there needs to be a pattern of formation and interaction in the total context.

I think this is where people get confused who are trying to work out traffic methods. For, what is the best pattern? Perhaps there isn’t a “best”. There are hints and some maps here and there.

I’ve mentioned in a comment about my interest in the relationship between ezine, blog and articles. Having already questioned the role, in some sense, of articles, I think these 3 are also best in a larger pattern of relationships and links.

No wonder people get mixed up, and find traffic-getting in this way difficult.

Try mapping some patterns out yourself and you’ll see;)

Oh…and I haven’t even mentioned backlinking in all this!

Let me know your thoughts. I’d love to read them!