Why Digital Publishing Is the Ultimate Internet Business

By Terry Dean

Opportunities abound on the Internet, but one opportunity stands head-and-shoulders above all of the rest for home based entrepreneurs. That opportunity is in digital publishing.

I have done or consulted with many different types of businesses, including: CD sales, web hosting, web services, search engine promotion, pet products, content sites, network marketing companies, etc. Throughout the various companies I have dealt with, the one business I love the most is digital publishing.

Think about it. When you are publishing information products, you have:

You may say that those things are true of all Internet businesses, but they are not. If you run a web hosting company, the entry costs are high and you have a high overhead. You need to have your own dedicated server at minimum which can run in the thousands.

Your margins are usually very tight as web hosting is a very competitive arena. Then, you come to if the business is automatic or not. It definitely is not automatic. You have to provide continuous support to your customers and they really expect you to be working 24 hours or day...or to have staff that does!

Many other Internet businesses will show the exact same pattern. If you provide any type of service for example, you can only make money when you are actually working. When you take time off, your income does as well.

You may then respond, "Well I'll just join an affiliate program and promote them!" What you don't realize and most affiliate program owners won't tell you is that the incomes from affiliate programs are very tiny for those members who don't at least have the first form of digital publishing in place...their own opt-in ezine.

That's right. It is next to impossible to earn a really good check from affiliate programs unless you run your own opt-in ezine, which is a form of digital publishing. People have no reason to trust your recommendations of affiliate programs until you have earned their trust through publishing a quality ezine.

Starting an ezine (online magazine) is extremely low cost and will get you started in your own publishing business. Unlike publishing an offline newsletter which involves you dealing with printers, postal rates, and other types of expenses, your ezine will only cost you one low yearly fee ($100 to $400 depending on how you publish).

So, it has a very low entry cost, very little overhead, and is mostly automatic (as the software does the subscribing and removes for you). The margins are terrific. If you are selling ad space for $10 per ad and have 10 ads per issue, you make $100 from ads.

If you promote one affiliate program in each issue, you could earn $200 (this is from a small list of 1,000 or so subscribers). That would total $300 for each issue with no expenses in sending it out and no ad costs on your part. Once you get into the tens of thousands of subscribers like many ezines have, those numbers become much larger and much more profitable.

This is the reason you see so many ezines being published out there now. With a low cost of entry and high potential profits, everyone wants to get in on the act. This just means that your ezine needs to be of a higher quality than the "norm" being published.

Write your own articles or select articles to be published which haven't been published everywhere else. Add in a little of your own personal flavor to the issues. Sure, some people might not like your personality showing through, but the average reader will feel much closer to you...and more likely to buy from you.

Ezines which don't have a personality to them quickly perish in the heat of competition. Customers like to see real people. So instead of being big Mr. Publisher, be a real person with real opinions. Don't worry about being seen as too biased as you are supposed to be biased. You're human!

Then, once you feel comfortable publishing an ezine, it is time to move onto the next step in your digital publishing career. Create your own electronic book.

Digital publishing of your products has additional advantages to information publishing in general. First of all, you have no publishing cost except for the software to create your manual in the first place. Adobe Acrobat costs $200 and can make a digital product which can be used on both IBM and Macintosh platforms. Compare that to print publishing which will cost you a minimum of $2,000 for your book.

Digital products have no fulfillment costs and no shipping costs. Don't overlook the cost of shipping in your business, as we have paid as much as $150 shipping a training course to an International customer. Just think what you would lose on that including shipping and product costs if the order came back as credit card fraud.

Digital products have a final benefit that in my opinion outweighs all others. They can be set to 100% auto-pilot. You can have the product sales done by secure order form, processed in real-time online, and the product instantly delivered to your customers with ZERO involvement on your part.

You could have several products all selling from different sites all being automatically processed without you having to spend any time with them whatsoever. The money would keep coming in while you work on new projects, go on vacation, or spend time with your family. This is the real dream business.

Yes, you do have to spend a lot of time creating that hot product to sell and setting up the automatic systems, but the money will just keep coming in once they are up.

Take this as the voice of experience. Automating your entire business is one of the most important things you can do. Otherwise, you will eventually find that the "Success" of your business is to the detriment of everything else...taking up all of your time (even if you hire employees to do the work you will spend your time managing the employees).

When you are first starting out, selling services seems like a good idea...until you start having a lot of business and bringing in a lot of money. Then, that good idea quickly turns into an overload of work.

So...In the End...My Recommended Opinion for Creating The Perfect Internet Business You Can Run From Home With the Minimum of Hassles Is:

Step One: Pick a Market and Subject You Enjoy and Love.
Step Two: Create Your Own Ezine.
Step Three: Build a Large Subscriber List and Start Profiting.
Step Four: Create Your Own Electronic Book
Step Five: Automate the Entire Process and Do it again.