Over the past few days I’ve been talking about how huge the online learning market is and the importance of educating your potential or actual customers. Potential customers need to be ‘pre-sold’ before they buy and content is great for the search engines. Actual customers will pay for educational material via online courses, videos, DVDs, books, etc.

When selling other people’s products via affiliate programs, I use a variety of methods to educate my readers such as articles, blog posts, videos, diagrams, twitter/facebook posts and so on. But I also create educational content for sale, also known as information products. I’ve chosen for the time being to sell information products that are completely digital – in other words the content is fully online. This is for a variety of reasons such as no physical delivery to worry about, and I can improve the content over time based on feedback from my customers. It’s also great for the customers because they get instant access to the content.

Information products could be e-books (I do PDF files), audio files (mp3s), videos, or web pages. I create my content in Microsoft Word and ‘print to PDF’ using a free PDF driver. For video I use a Logitech Webcam Pro 9000. I also bought 3 point lighting and a background with support frame to make the videos more professional. You can attach these files to an email or send the customer an email with a link to a web page. I’ve automated this process using a service called 1ShoppingCart. When someone buys a product, 1Shoppingcart handles the payment and sends the customer an email with the product location (either attached or via a link). The beauty of digital delivery is that it is automated and the link expires after 24 hours so that it can’t be shared with others.

It’s great to sell information products but it will be challenging to find an ever increasing number of customers. If you know the Pareto Principle, 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your clients. This is because a small number of customers will buy from you again and again. This means you either need to have a large number of products offerings or you can set up what is called a membership site, members-area, or continuity program. I’ve set this up myself over at Online Guitar Coaching for learning how to play guitar.

The idea is that you create a protected, members only area that houses all your content, in whatever format you choose. I prefer to protect a series of web pages that contains the content such as videos, PDF files, etc rather than just a directory of files. I’ve actually created 7 courses which are a hierarchy of pages in a structured format. You can also ‘drip’ content over time, where you might deliver a module of content once a month, week, etc.

To get this working I now use WordPress (free), hosted on a HostGator Server, with the Wishlist Member plugin. It’s actually pretty easy to set up. Let me know if you have any questions.