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By Terry Dean
Opportunities abound on
the Internet, but one opportunity stands head-and-shoulders
above all of the rest for home based entrepreneurs. That
opportunity is in digital publishing.
I have done or consulted
with many different types of businesses, including: CD sales,
web hosting, web services, search engine promotion, pet
products, content sites, network marketing companies, etc.
Throughout the various companies I have dealt with, the
one business I love the most is digital publishing.
Think about it. When you
are publishing information products, you have:
- Low Entry Costs
- Very Little Overhead
- High Margins
- An Automatic Business
You may say that those
things are true of all Internet businesses, but they are
not. If you run a web hosting company, the entry costs are
high and you have a high overhead. You need to have your
own dedicated server at minimum which can run in the thousands.
Your margins are usually
very tight as web hosting is a very competitive arena. Then,
you come to if the business is automatic or not. It definitely
is not automatic. You have to provide continuous support
to your customers and they really expect you to be working
24 hours or day...or to have staff that does!
Many other Internet businesses
will show the exact same pattern. If you provide any type
of service for example, you can only make money when you
are actually working. When you take time off, your income
does as well.
You may then respond, "Well
I'll just join an affiliate program and promote them!"
What you don't realize and most affiliate program owners
won't tell you is that the incomes from affiliate programs
are very tiny for those members who don't at least have
the first form of digital publishing in place...their own
opt-in ezine.
That's right. It is next
to impossible to earn a really good check from affiliate
programs unless you run your own opt-in ezine, which is
a form of digital publishing. People have no reason to trust
your recommendations of affiliate programs until you have
earned their trust through publishing a quality ezine.
Starting an ezine (online
magazine) is extremely low cost and will get you started
in your own publishing business. Unlike publishing an offline
newsletter which involves you dealing with printers, postal
rates, and other types of expenses, your ezine will only
cost you one low yearly fee ($100 to $400 depending on how
you publish).
So, it has a very low entry
cost, very little overhead, and is mostly automatic (as
the software does the subscribing and removes for you).
The margins are terrific. If you are selling ad space for
$10 per ad and have 10 ads per issue, you make $100 from
ads.
If you promote one affiliate
program in each issue, you could earn $200 (this is from
a small list of 1,000 or so subscribers). That would total
$300 for each issue with no expenses in sending it out and
no ad costs on your part. Once you get into the tens of
thousands of subscribers like many ezines have, those numbers
become much larger and much more profitable.
This is the reason you
see so many ezines being published out there now. With a
low cost of entry and high potential profits, everyone wants
to get in on the act. This just means that your ezine needs
to be of a higher quality than the "norm" being
published.
Write your own articles
or select articles to be published which haven't been published
everywhere else. Add in a little of your own personal flavor
to the issues. Sure, some people might not like your personality
showing through, but the average reader will feel much closer
to you...and more likely to buy from you.
Ezines which don't have
a personality to them quickly perish in the heat of competition.
Customers like to see real people. So instead of being big
Mr. Publisher, be a real person with real opinions. Don't
worry about being seen as too biased as you are supposed
to be biased. You're human!
Then, once you feel comfortable
publishing an ezine, it is time to move onto the next step
in your digital publishing career. Create your own electronic
book.
Digital publishing of your
products has additional advantages to information publishing
in general. First of all, you have no publishing cost except
for the software to create your manual in the first place.
Adobe Acrobat costs $200 and can make a digital product
which can be used on both IBM and Macintosh platforms. Compare
that to print publishing which will cost you a minimum of
$2,000 for your book.
Digital products have no
fulfillment costs and no shipping costs. Don't overlook
the cost of shipping in your business, as we have paid as
much as $150 shipping a training course to an International
customer. Just think what you would lose on that including
shipping and product costs if the order came back as credit
card fraud.
Digital products have a
final benefit that in my opinion outweighs all others. They
can be set to 100% auto-pilot. You can have the product
sales done by secure order form, processed in real-time
online, and the product instantly delivered to your customers
with ZERO involvement on your part.
You could have several
products all selling from different sites all being automatically
processed without you having to spend any time with them
whatsoever. The money would keep coming in while you work
on new projects, go on vacation, or spend time with your
family. This is the real dream business.
Yes, you do have to spend
a lot of time creating that hot product to sell and setting
up the automatic systems, but the money will just keep coming
in once they are up.
Take this as the voice
of experience. Automating your entire business is one of
the most important things you can do. Otherwise, you will
eventually find that the "Success" of your business
is to the detriment of everything else...taking up all of
your time (even if you hire employees to do the work you
will spend your time managing the employees).
When you are first starting
out, selling services seems like a good idea...until you
start having a lot of business and bringing in a lot of
money. Then, that good idea quickly turns into an overload
of work.
So...In the End...My Recommended
Opinion for Creating The Perfect Internet Business You Can
Run From Home With the Minimum of Hassles Is:
Step One: Pick a Market
and Subject You Enjoy and Love.
Step Two: Create Your Own Ezine.
Step Three: Build a Large Subscriber List and Start Profiting.
Step Four: Create Your Own Electronic Book
Step Five: Automate the Entire Process and Do it again.
Terry Dean, a 5 year veteran
of Internet marketing, will Take You By The Hand and Show
You Exact Results of All the Internet Marketing Techniques
he tests and Uses Every Single Month" Click here to
Find Out More:
http://www.alphabizweb.com/netbreakthroughs.html
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