One thing that is important to remember is that your web business will not be able to stay the same forever. If you come up with a really unique idea and it takes off, be assured that someone will offer something similar, and eventually you won't be able to sell as much of it.

You must be willing to change when things stop working. You may need to create new products, improve the ones you have, or make changes to your web site.

Creating Additional Products

As you grow, you will want to create additional products. One of the biggest sources of sales for your additional products will be that of your existing customers. They already like and trust you, and will often buy your new products without as much thought because they trust you. One thing that is important here: you must keep the quality of your products high, and never misrepresent a product in your sales letter.

Although your customers may have bought 10 different items from you and been happy with every single one, if they get just one product that doesn't live up to the sales letter, they will no longer trust you. So just keep your quality high, and always be honest in your sales letters.

Adding Affiliate Programs

Once you have created or sold a product, and you are building a list of customers, you might want to consider adding an affiliate product in to your sales process. You see, your customers might need a product that a competitor has and you do not, and you might find it easier to just recommend the competitors' product, and take a commission on it, rather than creating your own. There is oftentimes no sense in creating another product that works exactly like a competitors' product, especially if you can arrange a decent commission, like 60 or 70%. It might just make more sense to refer the competitors' product.

Cross-Selling, Upselling, Reverse Selling

Once you have decided to add products of your own, or affiliate products, you can get creative about when to offer them. You can offer them to your customers immediately after they make a purchase of one of your products. Oftentimes, they still have their credit card in their hand when they go to your download page. Imagine if you were to offer them another product at that point, especially one that complements the one they just bought.

You can also offer customers the option of buying two levels of something. For example, you may have one price for a basic version, but for an additional $20, they can get the deluxe version. If you present it correctly, many of your buyers will upgrade to the advanced or deluxe version.

Once you have several products, you can also reverse sell some of them. So for example, you have product a and product b. You have two sales campaigns, one for product a and another for product b. Once someone buys product a, you can send them to the sales page for product b, and vice versa, sending a customer or product b to the sales page for product a. Always be looking for additional sales opportunities, especially to your own customers.

Additional Streams of Income

In addition to selling related products to your list and existing customers, from time to time you might come across unrelated products or services that might be of a general interest. Used very sparingly, this approach can create additional streams of income. Just don't email your existing customers a lot of unrelated product emails, or they will become frustrated and opt out of your lists.

Creating a Sales Funnel

One highly popular and extremely effective method of creating additional products and offering them to your existing customers is that of the sales funnel. The theory behind this is that once a customer has received or purchased something from you, their trust level goes up, and they are willing to spend a greater amount of money the next time they purchase from you.

One example of this sales funnel approach would be to offer a free product as an incentive to subscribe to your list and get to know the quality of your work. It is important that although this is a free product, that the quality of the product (not necessarily the size or length of the product, but the quality of the content) is just as high as a paid product you might offer. You see, people will evaluate the quality of your paid products by the quality of the free one. By the way, I think most people would rather receive a 5-page ebook that is full of good information, than a 100 page ebook that is mostly fluff. Do not write extra stuff just for the purpose of making an ebook a certain length. Focus on creating quality, and your customers will be happy, no matter the length of the product.