As you prepare to start an online business, it may be helpful to you to see how others have done it. What steps did they take that led to their success?

When I was starting out in information marketing, there weren’t many models around. I kind of invented it as I went along. But you don’t have to rely on trial and error. Let me take you through the process of how I built my business. I think it will be instructive.

What I’ve done is broken the process up into three phases. I’ll take you through each of them, one by one. After you’ve read all three phases, you can use this as a model for how to get to the next level of building your own information product business.

Now Phase One of my business was actually the simplest part, even though in many ways it was the hardest, too. Getting started on anything means you need to overcome your own inertia. It’s so easy to just keep doing whatever it is you are doing. It takes energy and motivation and commitment to actually get up off your bum and get started.

Let me begin by reminding you that I didn’t have any experience building web sites or doing any kind of Internet marketing. I’d never written a book. I’d never published an e-zine. Google’s pay-per-click advertising didn’t even exist when I got started. I was able to find a couple of really basic pay-per-click marketing services, but they weren’t nearly as sophisticated back in those days.

So Phase One was just me at my computer, selling an e-book I had written by using pay-per-click marketing. Even though that’s how I got started several years ago, I think that it’s still a great idea to start an online business right that way now.

Now what I am going to tell you next may seem like a counter-intuitive thing to do, especially if you know what a big fan I am today of free-line content, landing pages, continuity and the like. I recommend that when you start out, you use just pay-per-click advertising and direct your prospects straight to a sales letter page, where you sell your product.

That’s right. No opt-in, no landing page, no list building, no auto-responders…none of that stuff. Now, why would I recommend that you do something like that? Quite simply, it’s the best way I know of to see whether or not people want to buy your information product.

You don’t have to learn about all those other pieces of technology. You don’t have to get into all that stuff. You can just send people to your web site. Tell them about the benefits of what you are selling and ask them if they want to buy it and download it, right now. See what results you get.

Then you can test different appeals. You can test different offers. You can figure out whether or not you’re even warm in terms of information marketing in the niche you’ve chose, because if you’re not, it’s really not worth the time and trouble to go do all that other stuff. You’ve got to hard test the market first, before you put in all the extra effort to build in additional Internet marketing techniques.

On the other hand, if you get some bites, you will know you are on the right track. In the beginning, you may not be making enough to recover your investment on the front end, but if it looks like people are interested, and it looks like you’ve got something that can potentially be grown into a successful business, that’s when you want to go set up a landing page. That’s when you want to set up the auto-responders. That’s when you want to set up all the e-mail communications, and offer free-line content, and start relationship building.

So, I recommend that you start an online business the way I did. Start out with one solid information product, by publishing an e-book, or an audio download, or a video download. Do some pay-per-click advertising. Send people to a sales page and see if they want to buy it.

Phase One is simple, and it’s hard. But before you know it, you’ll have a business that can make money online.

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