Trying to making money online by selling information products, memberships or other things can be hugely discouraging at times. We see the ‘gurus’ making millions of dollars, know that billions of dollars are spent online every year and yet it always seems to be out of our grasp. So maybe we give up, or go back to our ‘day jobs’.

Once I joined the Info Marketers Zone by Jeff Smith, it was both exciting and humbling to realize the huge mistakes I’ve been making when it comes to selling products online. I had been taking lots of action with blogging, tweeting, creating content, but not seeing many results.

Some of the most fundamental errors that I have made are:

Not sending enough offers to my email list
If I sold something of mine or an affiliate on occasion I would be really happy not realizing that when we buy, we tend to buy a lot of other products in the same niche. You might buy lots of books, go to lots of seminars, and so on. So I started finding lots of affiliate offers on networks such as paydotcom, clickbank, commision junction, etc. You might not be into affiliate marketing but if you only have a few products you need a way to offer them more – this could be higher ticket items of yours, or affiliate products of others that you recommend.

Not building an email list properly in each niche
Collecting emails is often an afterthought, thrown up on a sidebar of your website. You need to convince people to sign up just like buying, by offering a free product of value to your customer. Create squeeze pages and send traffic to these pages. Get rid of any distracting menus, sidebars, etc. You need to focus the visitor on the action you want them to take.

Not researching keywords and competitors
Many of us have a passion and so we start creating content, writing blogs and articles about our topic. But we need to think about the keywords that will bring us the most profit (that lead to sales) by testing with Google adwords. Then we use these keywords in all of our content. By researching competitors (using spytools like compete.com) we can get lots of great keyword ideas (that bring traffic to them) and since the popular sites in our niche are popular for a reason, we can learn a lot from analyzing their sites.

Not focusing on benefits or the end result
We tend to emphasize the features and not the emotional benefits and desire that a customer has. I still do it unconsciously unless I edit my writing. So go over your website, make sure the call to action is clear, the benefits are clear and that you answer any possible objections your visitor might have.

One thing that was helpful is to go into your various accounts (paypal, affiliate networks, etc) and print off the reports for the month. Even if you only made $1 you should be proud that you made money online! And that this can be repeated and expanded with the right efforts.

Go here for the hottest 10 Tips On Starting a Subscription Site

Often times you may want to sell individual products as well as offer a membership site to your customers. I was recently told by one of my customers that they didn’t have time to absorb the material each month and didn’t want to pay on an ongoing basis each month. They preferred to have something they can work with at their own pace. This means you can repurpose your content into a downloadable course, or DVD for example.

As I’ve mentioned I use Extreme Member (aff) since it offers fully integrated membership site services. According to their support documentation you can also sell non-recurring products such as an eBook or CD. There are basically 3 options outlined in the documentation. Use Extreme Member memberships to sell products, use your own shopping cart and add an Extreme Member mailing list, or use a shopping cart and also have affiliate integration.

I decided to go with the first option, using Extreme Member to sell my products. However, there are a few problems with that approach. You are actually creating a membership so this has many implications. When a customer goes to Paypal it will say ‘Subscription’ and also something like ‘$7 for 5 years’ which is the longest subscription you can have at Paypal. If you change your product’s subscription length to 24 hours you’ll get ‘$7 for 1 day’. This might confuse customers as it is a one time purchase and not a subscription. They also get lots of emails from both Paypal and Extreme Member telling them about their subscription. They also get a password sent to them from Extreme Member which might also be confusing (ie. what is it for?).

A subscription is different in that you need a Paypal account (it’s not really a one time payment although you are just paying once for ‘lifetime’ subscription or whatever length you decide) rather than just using a credit card. This is because subscriptions need to recur so you need a Paypal account for that (even though this is a one time payment it’s still a subscription!).

A better approach might be to use your own shopping cart (such as Paypal) and send them to a thank you page (through the Paypal button creation page) where you get them to sign up to an email list back at your membership site. This gets them in your email marketing system and allows you to deliver the product (if it’s digital) and follow up with them over time. The problem with this is that the page could technically be found by Google searches (unless you block the robots), shared by others and so on. The suggestion made was to change the thank you page URL every week or so – this would require recreating the buttons in Paypal as well, since they contain the URL. In other words, these aren’t fully integrated services.

Go here for the hottest 10 Tips On Starting a Membership Site