When your selling soft goods you can use the same techniques used for hard goods. The only thing is that you should push is an instant purchase (subscription) type of method. This would be like a credit card or my favorite Pay Pal.
When your selling a soft good, you have your customer already locked in. They are ready to view your content or get your information NOW. People by general nature are very impulse orientated. Even in standard stores impulse sales make up for a greater sale and EVERYONE falls for it. Just ask yourself how many times you went into a store after a particular item and walked out with other things. The other things you bought on an impulse.
Soft goods are by nature very much impulse sales. People have found your site and now they want to buy, not tomorrow, not in an hour, they want to Buy NOW and you have to be able to take advantage of that. The only real way to accomplish the sale is to have some sort of method that they can pay and get access right now. This means using and instant payment method be involved, along with instant access to the product.
Pay Pal is one of the best ways to do this. People can click the link fill in their info and instantly have access to the content through what Pay Pal uses as a re-direct after the purchase back to your site. This way you get the sale right away and they get what their impulse at the moment says they want.
Selling soft goods and getting paid for them is just as easy as selling hard goods.
Sparky
You do not need to have hard goods to sell or make money off the internet. There are what I like to call soft goods, which are not physical objects. What your looking at now is what I call a soft good. Blogs, Podcasts, Pictures, anything that can be transmitted in an electronic format is a soft good.
So what do you have that would be of interest to people that they might be willing to pay for in one form or another? There are so many directions you can go here it boggels the mind. From something like an advice site about what ever you can offer advice, an online community of people, a blog about your thoughts about the day, you would be surprised the kinds of soft goods that are making people lots of money off the internet. Actually there was a person who had a site that sold PIXELS… (pixels are the little tiny dots that make up the stuff you see on your computer screen). For a Buck a pixel you could buy pixels on his page. Now you have to realize that on the average computer there are 1024 pixels wide and 760 pixels tall. That comes out to 778,000 + pixels at $1 each. 3/4′s of a million dollars were available on his page. Most pictures are better than 200 pixels wide by around 200 tall, that is 4o,000 pixels or $40,000. Company’s were paying to place their logo on the site as an advertising expense. The person made lots of money as they got exposure on the network news and became rich.
Nothing is TOO STUPID, STRANGE, OR IDIOTIC that you will not find an audience. Many blogs thrive on doing the insane. Take a look at the Onion. They make money making up stuff, same for the Inquirer and other Rag Mags as I call them. YOU CAN DO THE SAME if that is what you want to do.
If your going to go with soft goods then you need to be knowledgable in a particular subject or not. Look at the popularity of Poltical Blogs. Do any of these people have any special training in politics? Some yea, most no but they all have readers that come there day after day to read what it is the person has to say. They either are their because they agree with you, or they want to see what kind of crazy nonsense you might be spouting today. People on the net find it entertaining and also for information, if you can do one or the other you can have a soft goods site, like this one.
As with all sites soft goods sites need to have CONTENT (have I mentioned how Content is KING? yea I think so), and if your lucky you might find through the market research you do that you might have few competitors out there or millions in any case there is always room for one more.
The way you turn that into money is through the use of google, yahoo, msn, or other types of pay per click or pay per show ads. Some sites like this one, use ads generated by the content on the page. You may notice that ads are different on different pages, that is how those kinds of ads work and we will discuss that in more advanced parts of this site. The other kinds of ads are ones that people or companies pay to have on your site. These can be just a simple link to graphic images and much more. If you go to a site where you see ads at the top, that is why the site is free. Someone somewhere is paying the bills.
Sparky