To oversimplify things, there are what I call 2 types of product:

those that I call “zero-sum” products and those that aren’t.

By “zero-sum” I mean there will be 1 “winner” only, and 1 or more series of “losers”. The potential customer will in all likelihood just buy one product in that niche at this moment in time.

For example…..

Suppose you are looking to buy a new laptop for yourself. You look at the specifications, price, bundled deals, different shops etc. You have now narrowed it down to a choice of 3 laptops – let’s call them Laptop A, Laptop B and Laptop C. You aren’t going to buy all 3 are you?! If you buy Laptop A then that is the “winner” in this “zero-sum” game, and Laptops B and C are the “losers”.

When I was running my offline business, virtually ALL of my products were “zero-sum” products. I was selling into a highly competitive market. Our brand was relatively unknown and expensive. Retailers were certainly not falling over themselves to buy my products; they were already stocking comparable products to MOST of what I was selling.

For virtually every sale I had to “persuade” customers to buy my product as opposed to someone else’s. There would be one winner (hopefully me) and several losers. Nobody was going to buy my product AND someone else’s.

If I had done what all the so-called marketing experts (I’m talking offline here, not online) advised which was to do a full “competitor and market analysis” I would never have got started.

The market was saturated, I was too expensive, people only buy known brands etc etc. The usual nonsense from people who have “studied” marketing at university and can’t see beyond “brand awareness” and “focus groups” – ever wondered why these people who “know so much about marketing” never take their own advice and launch their own product?

Anyway I didn’t listen to the advice, I as good as ignored what my competitors were doing and found my own angle, my own niche. There is ALWAYS a way in. Instead of looking to REPLACE my competition, I sold my products as being IN ADDITION to them, i.e. complimentary. (I did a few other things as well but let’s leave this post on topic).

Within a few years I had about a 45% share of the market – by focussing on what I could offer to the market, NOT by worrying what the competition were doing. And this was a whole series of “zero-sum” products – almost 10,000 of them!

What does this have to do with you or I?

Well, the reason we are here is that we want to make money on the internet, right? And making an educated guess, most of us here want to do that by selling “info products”.

Here’s the great thing about info products – they are most emphatically NOT “zero-sum” type products! This is why…..

You probably found my blog or Ray Johnson’s blog in the first place because you were looking for information about making money on the internet, right? Maybe you’ve bought one of Ray’s products?

Let me ask you a question – if YOU have ever bought a “make money” type product have you only ever bought just the ONE product? Unlikely. Ray Johnson isn’t really competing against John Thornhill or Robert Black or Mike Filsaime or Andrew Reynolds or anyone else selling this information.

You and I have in all likelihood bought several information products from different marketers. If people are searching for information they WILL buy different products from different sources. This is equally true for “non-IM niches” and equally true for offline businesses.

I’ll give you an example from my own experience. Back in 1998 I moved into a brand new house, the reason I bought that particular house was that it came with a relatively large garden. The garden was only turfed – no landscaping, no plants, nothing else just lots and lots of grass!

At that time I had suddenly developed an interest in gardening and I wanted to design and create my own garden from scratch. I had virtually no experience of gardening, and certainly none of landscaping or garden design – just a burning desire to create my own garden. So what did I do?

I bought gardening books – lots and lots of them, over 50 in total! I wanted ideas on a subject I knew NOTHING about, and for me this was the way of finding out. Much of the content was duplicated (sound familiar to IM products?!) but it didn’t matter. To the untrained eye those gardening books were competing against each other (“zero-sum”) but actually they weren’t – I bought ALL of them.

Over the following 2-3 years I designed and created my garden – complete with stream, waterfall, pond, patio and a summer house – great fun!

About 12 months ago I sold that house. Whilst going through all my stuff I found the 50 plus gardening books – I hadn’t even opened them in about 8 years; in fact I’d forgotten that I had so many. I’d spent a lot of money acquiring the information I needed, did the job I wanted to do and then never referred to them again.

So – the lesson from all of this is….

If you are selling information products, or if you want to start selling information products then congratulations – you are in a “non zero-sum” market. Just because your customer bought a similar product from what you THINK is your competitor last week, doesn’t mean that they have stopped looking for information on that product. They are just as likely to now buy from you.

Get started TODAY – and focus on what YOU can do differently instead of worrying about the competition!

So how is money made online?

Essentially it is no different to making money offline, in the so-called “real world”. Come up with a product or service, make your offer to the world, and make potential buyers aware of your offer. That’s it in a nutshell. So to really narrow things down, to succeed online you need 2 things – a product or service, and a way of letting potential buyers know that you have that product or service.

I tried various different methods – this is my first attempt at a web site:

www.blood-pressure-reviews.com

This site is in the format of a Blog (like this site you are now on), the idea was I wrote review articles on various drugs for reducing blood pressure with a link at the bottom of each article to buy that particular drug. If the customer bought I got paid 25% commission. It didn’t work, for various reasons although I make a few dollars a month in Adsense earnings. But I did learn a lot from that experience.

I suspect the biggest problem that most “newbies” have, certainly this happened to me, is that while it is not too difficult to come up with an idea for a product or service to sell – the biggest question is how on earth do I get people to find my product offer? In other words, how do I get traffic?

That is a whole subject in itself and you can buy various training programs priced from a few dollars right up to several thousand dollars, only on this particular topic. As far as I can tell there are 3 main ways to get traffic to your site:

1) Buy it via advertising on other people’s sites, Google Pay Per Click etc
2) Redirect other people’s traffic to your site eg Forum Posts, Blog Comments etc
3) Get it free through so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

I actually used the 3rd method above – what this means is through various means to get your site listed high up in the Search Engine Rankings. Again, a very involved and sometimes specialist process. I’m not going to go into the various ways of SEO, because there is a HUGE amount of information on this subject – from free to VERY expensive. I actually spent a lot of time trying to use SEO to get traffic to my Blood Pressure site above, and by and large I failed. I had to make a decision as to how I was going to try and make money online; I was very busy getting nowhere.

Then it hit me. Over the years, like most people, I have collected a large amount of ebooks with resale rights on my computer. I never did anything with them, they were just collecting “virtual dust” on my laptop. I noticed that a number of people were selling these ebooks on eBay, the famous auction site and thought to myself “I could do that!”

The beauty of eBay, and a lot of people overlook this, is that it gets a MASSIVE amount of traffic to it. Ebay is consistently in the Top 5 of most visited web sites which is a phenomenal achievement. What this means is that it is possible to use the traffic that eBay are already getting (literally MILLIONS of hits every day – and these are people who are ACTIVELY looking to spend money, not searching for free information).

So I made the decision to start selling a few ebooks on eBay, and then at the end of March 2008 disaster struck! Ebay without warning suddenly banned all products sold via digital download, meaning it was no longer possible for a customer to order an ebook and you could fulfill that order by sending them a link to a download page.

About 95% of the ebook sellers on eBay disappeared overnight – mostly never to return. I was quite upset about this myself, I had been on the verge of launching a business and thanks to a change of policy at eBay it was over before it started. I was back to the drawing board.

And then…..I saw the opportunity that almost all of the established ebook sellers had missed. More on this tomorrow….

But there’s also plenty of “one man band” success stories, names no-one had ever come across before, suddenly making $500,000 in a few months. Of course, for every success there’s probably at least 100 failures. I think the major problem that the newbie such as myself is confronted with is

Where on earth do you start?!

OK, there’s supposedly lots of people making their fortunes online. Sure, as with everything else there’s no shortage of scammers, but the likes of Joel Comm, Mike Filsaime, Armand Morrin, Marlon Sanders etc etc are earning a LOT of money with their online businesses. That really isn’t in dispute. The “problem” is there isn’t really 1 easy blueprint for the newbie to follow. I say “problem”, OK on a certain level it is a great advantage that there are so many different methods of making money online, so there is “something for everyone” so to speak. That’s fine for someone who already has a clearly defined plan of what they want to do. But how about the guy or gal who just “wants to start earning earning money online”, who has no prior experience?

Off the top of my head (literally), these are all the different ways I can think of making money online, that are being actively promoted by the “gurus”:

• Google Adsense
• Pay Per Click
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creation
• Private Label Rights
• Blogging
• Auctions
• Web 2.0/Social Networking
• Video Sites
• Graphic Design
• Article Marketing
• Ebook Marketing
• Viral Marketing

I doubt the above list has even scratched the surface, and I’m sure I’ll think of many additions before I’ve even finished writing this post! But, I hope the point is made. So, once you’ve decided which of the above you are going to follow, the next problem is the web site. If you’ve never created a web site before, this is a list of things you are going to have to learn about:

• How to use a HTML editor (if you don’t know what that is then you have another thing to learn!)
• How to construct a web page
• Graphic design
• Writing a sales letter
• Promoting your site
• Setting up an autoresponder
• Driving traffic to your site
• Search engine optimisation

And that list is just for starters! It’s not as easy as you thought it was going to be, this idea of making money on the internet is it? Certainly not as straightforward as some of the “gurus” would have you believe!

Actually to be fair, it isn’t that difficult – the problem is “information overload”. We are bombarded with all sorts of ways of making money online, each one promising to be easier, quicker and more profitable than the last. What you and I need to do is filter out the rubbish from the good stuff, break each method down, learn what we need to learn and work to a plan. We’ll have a look at that in greater detail the next time!

I am sure that whole books have been written, web sites created about how the internet has revolutionised the business world. For me personally, the attraction is simply the one that has now virtually become a cliche – take your laptop with you to anywhere in the world, plug it in to the internet and, hopefully, earn money. The business owner is immediately connected to a worldwide market. Contrast this with a traditional type business where the entrepreneur must be located close to his potential market.

I love travelling; even as a small child growing up in the 1970′s I could spend hours just looking at maps from around the world, visualising what those places might look like, what sort of people lived there, how they might live and so on. Most of my free time in the 1980′s was spent travelling, first of all by rail around Europe, and then further afield to the Far East, Africa and South America. I actually met my future wife on a train in Turkey whilst backpacking around that country, but that’s a story for another day.

Many times I had the thought “what if I could travel and earn money at the same time”, not so much with the idea of making my fortune, but to travel for a few weeks until the money ran out, then find a job to finance another few weeks of travelling and so on. I met many people who did this kind of thing; working in bars, teaching English, picking fruit etc. Because I had my own full time business to run back home I could never afford to go travelling for more than 3-4 weeks at a time, otherwise I would have come back to a business with no customers. I physically had to be in a certain location at a certain time to see my customers in order to earn a living.

All that has changed with the internet. We can order probably just about any “physical” item we need 24 hours a day. Many products which used to be sold in a physical format and therefore we either had to go to a store to buy them, or have them shipped to us are now instantly downloadable straight to our computers at any time of the day or night. I’m thinking of ebooks, computer software, plane tickets amongst many others. Fifteen years ago buying a plane ticket involved a lot of time and quite often frustration. Today I can sit at my laptop in the middle of the night, compare prices between different airlines, get out my credit card and pay. I don’t even have to wait for a physical ticket these days, now I get an eTicket. Fantastic – one less thing to forget when setting off for the airport!

So, there is no doubt the opportunities are there – the question is what can you or I do to get our share of this lifestyle? Well why not come back here tomorrow and we’ll have a look at this in more detail.