If you are an Internet information marketer or aspire to be one, here are some rules that can help you maximize your online revenues this year:

1—Do not produce information products on widely diverse topics. Instead, pick a narrow niche. Then make sure every information product you produce is related to this niche.

2—Build a large opt-in e-list. Market your information products by sending e-mail promotions to this “house” list.

3—When selling e-books and other downloadable info products, tell customers they can keep the product even if they request a refund. Saying that can boost your orders up to 21%.

4—Choose domain names that are easy for you and others to remember. Example: for an e-book on writing, producing, and marketing your first e-book, I chose www.myveryfirstebook.com.

5—To get more people to join your e-list, offer prospects a subscription to a free online newsletter on your central topic (e.g., gardening, relationships, or whatever your info niche is).

6—You can also build a list with a one-shot free offer, such as a special report or e-book. But a free online newsletter is better, because it creates an expectation on the part of the subscriber that they will get e-mails from you on a regular basis.

7—Offer multiple payment options for your customers: American Express, Discover, MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and for electronic products, ClickBank.

8—Charge a shipping and handling fee equal to the actual cost of shipping and handling. Do not add a mark-up or try to make money on the shipping and handling fee.

9—Even if you sell a physical information product, have a downloadable component the buyer can get immediately. Today’s online buyers crave instant gratification.

10—Have a separate micro-site or landing page for each information product you sell. This is essentially a long-copy sales letter posted at its own URL.

11—Adding short online video clips to your product landing pages can increase orders 10% to 20% or more. (For instructions on how to create and post short videos online, visit www.addvideo2yoursite.com.)

12—Write books for traditional NYC publishers (www.gettingyourbookpublished.com) to build your reputation as an expert in your subject matter. Online information buyers prefer to buy info products from those they consider gurus in their fields, and they put book authors in this category.

13—The easiest and most profitable info product to create and sell online is an e-book. Start with a 50-page e-book (about 15,000 words) on your core topic. Sell it as a downloadable PDF for $19 to $29 or so.

14—The quickest info product to create and sell online is a one-hour audio CD. You simple interview an expert in your subject over a conference line for 60 minutes, then duplicate it on CD and sell it for $29 to $39.

15—Write articles to promote yourself as an expert in your field. Get them published in the appropriate trade journals, consumer magazines, newspapers, and e-newsletters read by your target market. Retain all rights to your articles by typing “first rights only” in the upper left corner of page one of your manuscript.

16—Compile collections of your published articles (6 to 10 articles per collection) in PDF documents. Offer these “special reports” as free bonus gifts when selling your paid information products. Online buyers love to get free bonuses.

17—Develop a line of related information products in your niche topic in three price ranges: low ($50 and below), medium ($50 to $300), and high (above $300).

18—Make sure the information products in your product line appeal to all 4 modes of learning: reading (e-books, reports), listening (audio), watching (video), and experiential learning (live workshops and seminars).

19—When a customer asks for a refund, give it immediately and without argument even if you disagree with their criticism of your product. If you spot an individual who continually orders and then requests refunds on every item, block their IP address from your shopping cart and remove them from your e-list.

20—Run your Internet marketing business with a software product that gives you all the functions you need (e.g., shopping cart, auto-responder, reporting) in one integrated system rather than require you to buy and integrate separate software packages for each function (see www.automateyouronlinebusinessnow.com).

21—Know how much money the average name on your e-list spends with you per year; e.g., if you gross $500,000 a year and have 50,000 total online subscribers, your average revenue is $10 per name per year.

22—When you advertise to add new names to your list, do not pay more to acquire a new name than that new subscriber is likely to spend with you during the next 4 months. Therefore, if each subscriber is worth on average $10 in sales per year, you want to pay no more than $3 or $4 to add a new name to your e-list.

23—Find successful Internet marketers who sell to the same niche market you do. Reach out to them and cultivate a relationship. The goal is to build a small list of top affiliates with the potential to sell respectable amounts of your products to their lists.

24—Offer a standard commission of 50% of gross revenues to all your affiliates. The smaller the commission, the less interested other marketers will be in promoting your products to their lists.

25—To determine whether there is sufficient interest on the Internet for you to publish an information product on a topic, use www.spacky.com to see how many times per month key words related to that topic are searched on Yahoo/Overture. If there are fewer than 10,000 searches per month on Yahoo/Overture for your topic’s key words, the market may not be large enough to justify producing the product.

26—When you are in a used bookstore, look for old books on your niche topic published in 1923 or earlier. The copyright on these books has almost certainly expired, which means you can repackage and republish the content as an information product, without payment to the author or even his permission.

27—Become a lifelong student of your information niche and acquire as many credentials in the topic as you can; e.g., if you sell information products on real estate investing, take the test for and acquire a real estate license in your state.

Do you agree with the items in this list? Are there any you can add?