Information Products - The One Thing You Must Develop For Your Business To Thrive

In order for your business to thrive, you must develop a backend system. In other words, you need to have more than one product or more than one version of your product to sell. The backend is simply any sale that is made after the initial sale. It could be your products or products you promote of other people's or a combination of both.

Trying to make a living selling only one front-end product is next to impossible. You spend all your time, effort and money driving new traffic to your site, having them buy one thing from you, then attracting the next customer. That is not the way to run a successful online business. You must develop a backend.

Before we continue, I want to clarify what I'm talking about when I use the terms front-end and backend. A front-end product is a free or low-priced product like a report, ebook or newsletter designed to generate a lead. It is NOT designed to generate wealth. Selling more of these front-end products is only useful if they lead to a backend product.

A backend product is a higher-end, higher-priced product. This would be something priced at $1,000 or more. This is where the real money is made and should account for about 80% of your profits. The front-end, however, is extremely important. This is the first product your customer will buy. If he doesn't consider it valuable, he won't buy anything else from you.

Nevertheless, making that first sale is the toughest sale you will have to make. Think about your own experience. Isn't it much easier to resist a sales offer than it is to take a risk on something new? For instance, if you've never had any ice cream, you would find it easy to resist eating some offered to you. After you've taken that first bite, though, you're hooked. You want another bite and another. Then you want to try more flavors. Buying becomes easier and easier.

When it comes to the sales process in your own business, first you have to find the prospects. As if that weren't challenging enough, you then have to overcome their skepticism, distrust and objections to persuade them to try your products. It could potentially take weeks, months or years to make that happen. And after all that time and work, your prospect might trust you enough to buy your front-end $19 ebook.

Factor in marketing costs and the necessary online expenses of web site maintenance, hosting, shopping carts, merchant accounts, copywriting, etc., you'll be doing good to break even from those ebook sales. But breaking even is worth it if you have a system you plug your customers into once they become your customers.

Of course you must deliver value with your ebook, more value than the customer expects. That's how you gain their trust. That trust is a precious thing and the lifeblood of your business. So you want the book to be well-written, and that takes time. The knowledge you share also establishes your expertise on the subject, so it's only natural that you want to put in as much--or more--time promoting it as you did writing it.

That book is your treasure and what you want to sell to your customers. Which is why it's easy to focus on your front-end product to the exclusion of the backend. But ignoring the backend is why so many businesses suffer and fail. They have limited vision and are so busy trying to promote their ebooks that they lose sight of the profit potential of the backend.