The first place you want to start, when it comes to marketing your information products, is actually at the root of it all - your website. If your website isn't ready to spectacularly showcase your wares and move customers from visit to checkout, you will have a hard time converting prospects to customers regardless of how much marketing you do.

Your website should be simple, straight forward and contain a minimal number of links so as to not confuse your prospect. In Gerry McGovern's book, "The Stranger's Long Neck", he talks about how most visitors spend most of their time doing three-four top tasks. When someone lands on your website, regardless of how many options and content you have built into the site, they really will only act upon three to four things. It is your goal, as a website owner, to make those top activities the strongest they can be.

Before you start the marketing process, you want to spend some time at the home base (the website) and you want to gather some data from unbiased website visitors. By doing this, you will be able to find out what people are really visiting your website for and how you can improve the current tasks to see more results.

A few of the things that you will want to look at include:

• Is the solution that you provide to your customers clear and concise and on the home page of your website?

• If someone came to your website and had never been there before, would the choices they were presented with make sense or would it overwhelm them?

• Are your products and services named in a way that is clear or have you created names for your products and services that may confuse your prospects?

• Do you currently have a way to build your list built into your site and if so, is the offering something that your ideal client would want?

Ideally, you want each of the areas of your website to flow together in an easy to follow manner and you want those top tasks presented in a way that makes sense. A simple way to test this is to have a friend or family member, that doesn't know much about your business, sit down in front of your website and try to explain what it is that you do, how you do it and what main product or service they could buy from your site. If they have a difficult time doing so, you should take some notes and improve those specific areas.

Another thing to remember is that people who are coming to your website are not always familiar with you, your service offerings or your expertise. They might have stumbled onto your website just because of a blog post you wrote or an article that you had posted. If this is the case, you need to quickly present this prospect with the reasons why you can solve their problem. You need to tap into their biggest painpoint.