footp.info

Digital products are everywhere you look. Even “physical” products like CDs and DVDs are, in essence, digital because the tracks and other information stored on them is in digital format. But increasingly products like books are being turned into digital products with devices like the Kindle.

Digital products have the advantage that they are cheap to deliver, costing only a few cents in bandwidth.

But if you want to create them, you need a system otherwise they will be chaotic and you won’t be likely to get repeat orders.

Here are the basic steps for your digital product creation system:

1. Make an outline

This can be in any format you want. A Word document, a spreadsheet or a mind map.

Play with each one and see which works best for you. Personally, I find spreadsheets easy to work with as each section of the product can be in a column with the subsections in the rows below it.

For more complicated products, I find a series of mind maps is also easy to use and can be more “at a glance” than a spreadsheet.

2. Decide on a format

This may sound as though I’m teaching you to suck eggs but take a step back and think how your information is best presented.

A PDF book can be good if your subject matter is fairly complicated. But in common with its physical counterpart, it tends to be the lowest retail price.

Audios are next in price value and can be convenient for your customers as they’re not locked into using their computer to listen to your product.

Videos are typically highest price and with screen capture programs such as Screencast-o-matic they’re inexpensive to produce. Or you could use your webcam or the video on your phone.

3. Create your product

Using your outline and preferred format, start creating your product.

Especially if it’s a written product, treat the writing and the editing processes as entirely separate. They use different parts of your mind and if you succomb to the temptation of editing as you go along, you’ll reduce the creativity of your product and it will run the risk of sounding more like a text book than something people want to read.

Save the sections of your product with different file names. Ideally ones that will make sense in a few months time when you go back to create an updated version!

4. Create a sales page

The complexity of your product and where you’re selling it will jointly determine how long and how “flashy” your sales letter needs to be.

There are free sites out there which will help you to create a passable sales letter without too much blood sweat and tears. There are also software programs available which will take this to a higher level. Or, if your product is likely to sell in quantity, you may prefer to use a copywriter.

Once your sales letter is written, you’ll need to upload it to your web host along with any associated images.

5. Upload your product

Use the control panel in your web host or WordPress or an FTP program to upload the files to your website host.

Depending on how paranoid you are about people stealing your product, you may or may not decide to include some form of protection for this. Remember that Hollywood have a much bigger budget than you and they can’t stop piracy so don’t put in so much protection that you annoy your purchasers.

6. Promote your newly created digital product

Promotion of your product is essential!

You can drive traffic to it in lots of different ways including articles like this one, forum posts and signatures, a Facebook page, your LinkedIn profile, pay per click advertising, affiliates and much more.

Online forums have helped many internet marketers to make real cool money with little effort on their part. Smart people all over the world make their money by providing solutions to other people’s problem, what one sees as a problem, another sees as opportunity and avenue to make money. When you make money in your venture and effort to help other people become better, I think that is a good move, it is not bad if you sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Online forums are a community of people who belong to the same discussion board to discourse common issue of mutual interest. It is a meeting place for open discussion, other names for forum include discussion group, discussion boards. You can make money from forums whether you are the one who owns it or not. A very smart member of a forum may be so good as to be able to rake in more money even than the Administrator or any of the Moderators.

Examples of forum:

Warriorforum – The greatest or largest internet business forum on planet earth. And so on, use Google search to find out more forums of your interest.

All you need to do is type your area of interest, e.g dog owners forum in the search area of Google, you will receive more result than you can handle. The first decision to make if you want to prosper through forum is to choose the forums you want to actively participate in. Register for free, most of the forums are free anyway, and start posting.

Benefits of joining a forum:
Interactivity
Establishing your expertise
Credibility
Social Community i.e becoming a member of a team
Get product ideas
Trade opportunities
Get traffic to your blog or website if you are a webmaster.

There is power in been part of a community. My best community on the internet is a forum that caters for my online business, takes care of my social interaction and so on, every member of the forum feels a sense of belonging, a spirit of oneness that is not in many other internet activities.

There are three basic internet marketing tips everyone who wants to profit from online forum must note.

1. Find a hungry market
2. Discover the major pain or interest
3. Deliver it to them

To find a hungry market, take your interest into consideration, ask yourself

What are you passionate about?
What are your area of interest?
What do you hate?

Consider your past experience, skills, job, or businesses.

Use this knowledge to help you build a solution to the hungry market, find out the solution to the market’s yearning, that’s how to make it in life.

When you join the forum the first thing is to introduce yourself, become a forum investigator immediately by watching out for what many people on the forum lack, what they need, find out what they are hungry for through questions. Use the response triggers to find out. What can I? How do I? Where can I? Are response triggers that when people answer the questions that follows, you will discover their lack, interest or pain.

Having discovered these things, find a good solution to the problem and deliver it to them, pure and simple.

Action plan:

Pick your area of interest today
Decide on the forums to join
Let the forums be in the area of your interest.

Establishing a forum:

I was highly honored when I was called upon by the Administrator of a forum to take up the responsibility of moderating one of the discussion boards. It was a responsibility that exposed me to study and find out the skills of running a forum, and administering it successfully. Thank God for the opportunity, I am able to share with you how to set up your own forum because I allowed the guru to teach me by experience.

Advantages of having your own forum:

You will be seen as an expert, and be consulted for advise, your products will be highly sought after, and that means more money for you.

You can easily build your own list of responsible people member will naturally come back to your forum giving you better chances of earning AdSense revenue. You get quality service from search engines.

What you need to start your own forum:

- Choose a niche for example, marriage, health, football, relationship, politics,…
- Register a domain name that reflect the niche e.g menshealthforum.com
- Buy a hosting package of at least 100MB
- Install your forum with fantastico

How to monetise your own forum:

- Sell your own products and services e.g e-books, audo/video files. It is pretty easy to make audio files, simply go over to Google.com, type audacity in the search box and click search, you will need a headset with a microphone to record your voice.
- Sell other people’s products relating to your niche by joining good affiliate program that gives you reasonable commission.
- Place Google AdSense on your forum to monetise better
- Put text link adverts, go to Google to find out more.

Steps To Installing Your Own Forum:

Type your registered domain name having hosted it with at least 100MB e.g menshealthforum.com/cpanel. In the browser, you will be required to type in your username and password. Your hosting company would have provided you with all these. When the username and password is correctly in place you will be connected instantly to your cpanel.

- Look out for fantastico, you need this to install your forum, and it comes with most of these hosting rights. – Click on the fantastico button
- Click on install discussion board, use simple machine form (smf) board, or any other one of your choice.
- Click on smf under discussion board
- Click on new installation
- Install in a directory called forum, do not install it on the main domain

Administrator name will be your name e.g Adenuga Sunday Joseph, and you choose a password. Click install smf, then click on finish installation.

To create Categories, just go to login, then put in your username and password

For communications category, go to news and newsletters from admin, then create categories from sub-menu boards, go to create new category – let it be closely related to your forum team e.g men’s diet, physical exercise, etc.