The most important and difficult decision entrepreneurs need to make is what online home business they should have. Sometimes the online home business never gets off the ground because the would-be-entrepreneurs don’t know what they can sell and profit from. This article will explain the steps on how to decide what business to be in.

Here are three things you need to understand:

1. The product or service you’re selling, needs to solve a problem for your market.

2. The product or service does not have to be original. Copy what is already selling well and try to add something extra to it.

3. Have a passion and interest in your online home business.

Whatever you’re selling online, you need to make sure that it is a good offer. Something that solves a problem and improve people’s lives.

For example, selling an ebook on how to trouble shoot a PC is a good one. It is a clear offer and people are willing to pay to learn how to troubleshoot their own computer.

For your product or service, don’t force yourself to think of something that is unique. This is very important because it is much easier to make money by selling things which are already a success. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel.

If you see there are already a lot of ebooks or services on teaching people how to do furnish their homes, then you know that it’s a profitable market. Otherwise there won’t be that many people in the business.

Coming up with a original product or service is very hard. Plus it doesn’t mean that it will sell. The chances of failing with an original idea are high.

Try to think of something extra to add to your product. Either by offering free telephone support, free gifts, or email support with the purchase. Or add an additional 2 weeks training when a customer purchases your ebook.

You can come up with many ideas to make your offer stand out. After that it depends on how effective your marketing is in promoting your business.

The third and most important element to consider for your online home business is to choose a business that you have a passion and interest in. If your business is something which you love and have an insatiable desire to learn, you’ll have a much better chance of succeeding with the business.

Here’s a real life situation of 2 people who purchased an online home business package, ghostwritten for their business. The package contains everything they need to start their online home business which includes an ebook, website design and sales copy.

The first client wanted to create an ebook about the real estate and how to stop foreclosure. He didn’t have an interest or any knowledge about real estate but knew there was lots of money to be made in this industry.

The second client had an online home business ghostwritten for him on the law of attraction. He had read several books on the law of attraction, how to access the subconscious mind and self improvement. He was passionate with the subject.

After several months of running their website, the first client reported that he hardly got any sales. The reason was because he didn’t do much to promote it. He thought that visitors would miraculously find his website and start buying his ebook.

He was advised to write articles and create short reports to build traffic to his website. However, he couldn’t and didn’t want to. He had no knowledge on the subject, didn’t know what to write about and was not really motivated in promoting something he had no interest in.

His home business bombed because of his lack of knowledge and interest in his business.

The second customer did a lot better. He reported steady, growing sales and is expected to sell more copies in the coming months due to word of mouth and increased marketing.

He had a lot of knowledge with his own business and had a passion for it. Right after his website was online, he continuously promoted it by writing articles, posting on forums, commenting on blogs and offering to do interviews with experts.

He didn’t think it was work. He enjoyed doing it.

This is the reason why you need to choose a business that you have a passion in. It will affect how you go about promoting and growing it.

If you decide to hire freelance writers or a ghostwriting company to develop your online home business, make sure that it is a business which you are passionate about and has existing competition. By following the 3 elements to making a decision on your business, you’ll have a much better chance of making money.

Information product creation is a simple task once you have two or more products under your belt.

But when you first start out with creating your first ebook or physical product, expect a lot of obstacles and frustration. Especially when the damn thing doesn’t sell.

What a lot of people don’t understand is how to approach creating an information product.

Once you have an idea to create an information product, you should immediately start building a targeted list. Collect these leads that are interested in your product and ask them what sort of information they want to read about. Here are the steps on how to achieve this.

1. Free Report

Create a free report that is related to the product you’re selling. If you have an idea to create an information product on how to market a printing company, create a report discussing the mistakes printing company owners make with their marketing.

The readers of this report will be targeted to owners in the printing industry. If you’re in the food industry, you won’t be interested. The objective of the report is to capture the attention of the printing company owners and have them trust you by educating them and showing your expertize.

2. Professional Squeeze Page

Create the best looking squeeze page you can and offer your free report as a gift for people to sign up for your newsletter. Get a graphic designer to create this squeeze page. There should be no other links on this squeeze page apart from a subscribe button to download the free report and sign up to your list.

3. Following Up

Next create several messages which should be sent to your subscribers every 2 or 3 days using an autoresponder account. The first email should be sent immediately thanking them for joining your list and offering the free report for them to download.

Your other messages should all contain good tips which your subscribers can use. It is best to offer one easy to use tip per email.

With some of the emails, tell them a little about yourself and try to build a relationship. Your objective is to get them to know you, trust your advice and read all the emails you send them. It’s critical therefore you don’t make a mistake and spam them with unrelated offers or being rude to them. Treat them like your most valuable customers.

4. Survey

After a few weeks of providing good tips to your subscribers, start to tell them about an idea for an ebook that you want to write about. Tell them the topic and what you want to cover. This is the information product which you were thinking of creating before you started creating the free report and squeeze page.

Now wait for your subscribers’ response. Depending on your relationship with them, you should receive quite a few responses. If you find that the response is not so good, offer them something free as a bribe to give you feedback.

The best way to do this is to offer a free review copy of the ebook for the first 20 subscribers who reply. This normally gets the feedback coming in.

For the feedback, make sure you ask useful questions such as are they interested in the topics, what other topics would they like you to write about, would they purchase such an ebook and how much would they pay for it.

These 4 steps are your first task before you start creating your information product. Creating the free report (about 5 pages) and writing the follow up emails should not take too much of your time. But with the feedback, you should know if it’s worth pursuing with the information product creation. If the figures look poor, then ban your information product idea. You would have saved yourself lots of hard work with nothing to show for it.

To read more on how to start an information products business, download the free report at
http://www.eliteghostwriters.com/report.html

Here’s an article which I wrote a few weeks ago and is on the Ezine Articles as the one of the most viewed in the last 90 days.

You can check out the link here ==> Create A Profitable Business Using Ghostwriters

Below is the actual article I wrote.

How to Create a Profitable Business Using Ghostwriters
By Alan Cheng, Elite Ghostwriters

Create information products to solve people’s problems is one of the most profitable and easiest online business to be in. It’s much cheaper than setting up a traditional brick and mortar business. A digital information product doesn’t need you to keep an inventory and you profit the full 100% for every product you sell. Here’s a business plan of how to start this business.

1. What Information Products To Sell?

The best type of information products to sell is ebooks, where the content is delivered in a PDF format. However, instead of creating information products to sell in different niches, you need to focus on one niche. Make this decision on what niche you want to focus on before proceeding further.

For example, in the self-help niche, you can create information products on public speaking, self confidence, anxiety, anger control, build better relationships etc…

2. Getting Ideas

Since this is a business you’re running, you need to be serious. You need to study the niche and become an expert. Go to fourms and understand what problems people have. Read magazines and see what topics are related to your niche. Read newspapers and see what relates to your business.

If you do this, you will should have no problem coming up with ideas on what information products to create. Make a list of ideas regularly and choose the best one to start working on when it’s time to create a new information product.

3. Create The Information Product

Your next step is to create your information product. If you haven’t written an ebook before, go and buy an ebook from your competitors and see how they layout the ebook and the content that’s inside.

Do some research online and write your own information product. Make it something you’re proud to sell. Start off by writing your own information product first. You can hire a ghostwriter to do this task for you later on when you see how the business works.

Alternatively, hire a ghostwriter right away if you absolutely hate writing or you don’t have the time for it.

4. Packaging

This is what makes your information product sell. People will want to buy your product if the packaging is good. This means the design of the website needs to look professional and your sales copy needs to be convincing.

If you have no experience in writing sales copy and if you are not good at creating graphics, get them outsourced. This is a must!

As I said, it is the packaging that will make prospects buy from you. Some ghostwriters are experienced in creating information products online. Try to find one that will deliver a complete service including the sales letter and website design as well as ghostwriting the ebook.

5. Getting Traffic

Once your product is ready, it is time to drive traffic to it. Here are 3 ways how you can drive traffic to your website to test the response.

1. Write articles

Write about 10 good articles on your niche that is related to your information product. Again, if you don’t like writing, you can outsource this to your ghostwriter. Submit these articles to article directories and ezines.

The articles will get you backlinks to rank your website higher in the search engines and get visitor to your website. Articles are excellent in increasing your exposure.

2. Blog and Forum Commenting

Make a list of blogs and forums which have good traffic and are related to your niche. Take time to comment on them regularly with a link to your website.

Offer valuable advice and don’t advertise your information product otherwise people will think you’re a spammer. Just have a link to your website. This will enable you to “steal” some of the traffic from other websites.

3. Pay Per Click

Use pay per click advertising such as Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN. Create some ads and drive traffic to your website. Monitor how well your information product sells.

6. Create an Affiliate Program

Create an affiliate program for your information product either by submitting it to Clickbank or use PayDotCom. Let people know they can promote your information product for commissions of 50% or more.

7. Collect Your Contacts

Always collect email addresses with everyone who comes in contact with you – Your visitors, your affiliates and your customers.

8. Repeat

Now you can just repeat the whole process with a new information product that focuses on the same niche.

However, once you’ve created the information product, you can email to the list which you have. The prospects and customers may buy this product from you if the previous one was good. Affiliates will want to promote your new product since they will earn more commissions.

The more information products you create, the bigger your 3 lists will get. After several information products you may have several thousand people on your list. Sending an email to them about your new product could produce thousands of dollars without doing any promotion of your own.

Following the business model above, if you sold an information product for $37 and 1,000 members of your list bought from you, that’s $37,000 in sales instantly. Don’t forget that your product will continue to sell as long as your website is there. The critical success factor is the professional ghostwriter you hired to create your information products.

About the author
Download the report How To Build Your Own Information Products Business at create information products. If you want to outsource your information product creation, visit hire a ghostwriter – Alan Cheng, CEO of Elite Ghostwriters