Phase One was about developing your first information product and using Internet marketing to test it. You use pay-per-click advertising to start sending traffic to a sales page. You want to see if you can get some people interested enough to buy something.

Supposing you succeed in getting some customers and sales, you're ready for Phase Two. Again, I'm using how I grew my own business as a model.

As soon as I started selling some of my e-books, I put up a landing page and I set up some auto-responders. I created an e-mail newsletter. These three steps took me from just selling information products to building relationships with people. This is part of what I call the conversion pillar of my business.

Now believe me, it's much harder to build a relationship with people than it is to just sell them something. You've to put some thought into it. You want to come up with ways of adding a lot of value to your contacts' lives.

You are going to give them a lot of stuff. But it's not a bunch of junk they don't need; you're going to give them information products that they really want. And you're also going to give them a broad exposure to your knowledge.

By giving away free-line content, you're giving them some experience in using your information products. You're going to get them interested in everything you offer. You're going to show them how deep you can go in providing things they're interested in. And that's when they'll realize, "Wow! I think I should get this. It's like investing in myself. I should start buying more of this great stuff."

As part of the Phase Two conversion process, I also set up my own affiliate program. This was huge because it allowed other people to sell my stuff for me. All I had to do was pay them a commission. It cost me nothing until I got results.

By this point, I was beginning to discover—as you will, too—that having help makes it so much more easy to make money online. Gong in, you may think you can do it all alone, but if you really want to succeed and grow, you are going to have to involve others in your business.

That's why another important thing that I did in Phase Two of my business was to hire a virtual assistant. You see, once you start making a little bit of money, all of a sudden, people are contacting you. Every once in a while you've got to do a refund. You have to do an update of your technology. You've got to reconcile things. There are all kinds of demands on your attention.

Well, thanks to the Internet and web sites like Elance.com. you can go out and hire someone to assist you for literally a fraction of what it used to cost. They can work from home, maybe even in another country, so you get a much higher efficiency.

So I hired a virtual assist. I outsourced a lot of my "busy work," like the customer service and the other kinds of administration that needed to happen inside my business. I used the time I saved not doing those things to keep myself focused on information marketing, the money-making stuff.

So Phase Two is when your business starts to expand. You work on conversion. You start building relationships. You set up your affiliate program. You get a continuity program up and running to make money online on the back end. Then, you hire a virtual assistant, so you can concentrate on the core activities of information marketing. All those activities combined took my business to the next level, which led to where we are right now.

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Neil Asher (http://www.neilasher.com/freestuff.htm) has built five multi-million dollar companies from zero, including one he took to $8 million in sales in under two years. He has created and sold successful franchises in England, Italy, Ireland, Australia and South Africa. Visit his web site for access to 17 FREE videos, 6 FREE books and two hours of audio training, revealing "How To Make BIG Money Selling Information Products On The Internet...Even If You Don't Have A Website And You've Never Sold Anything On The Internet Before."

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