How can an average person profit from this audio book trend, not having to set up a new store from the ground, spending a lot of money?

Basically there are three things you can do:

1. Convert your books or e-books to audio books

If you have written a book or e-book, and you are having trouble selling it, or want to generate a new stream of income, you can create an audio version of it.

Unless you have a great voice, you should look for some professional voices to do it for you. There are web sites where you can post projects to be done by free lancers where you can have quality work done without having to pay too much.

After you have your book converted as an audio book, you will be able to promote it on the web, or offer it to some of the existing audio book stores.

2. Affiliate Programs ? Direct way

You can sign-up as an affiliate in one or more of the mentioned audio book stores. Almost every web site selling audio books has an affiliate program, as it is an excellent way for them to increase sales.

Depending on the store, you will have access to different tools to promote the audio books:

a. Whole Store

You are given access to the whole audio book store, with all the titles available. This is usually done giving you a URL like : http://www.nameofthestore.com/?aff=31231, being 31231 your affiliate number.

All sales made through this link will automatically be attributed to you.

b. Links You are given ways to generate links to individual audio books or group of audio books, either textual of graphical.

The particularity of these links is that they send the customers to the main audio book store to make the purchase.

c. Related Content You have access to web pages generators, which can generate unique content based on audio book titles or categories. The generated pages usually contain links to audio book titles.

You can use these pages to create targeted web sites or blogs and drive traffic to them, as search engines love new, fresh content.

d. Special Links

Advanced stores can allow you to generate links or buttons which allow the transaction to happen in the affiliate site.

This is very important as it greatly reduces shopping cart abandonment (being a single-site process)

e. Coupon Codes Another tool the store can give their affiliates is the ability to use coupon codes offering discounts and different promotions to their customers.

You can use one of these tools, or perhaps combine two or more to generate the greatest number of sales possible.

One may think that the whole store would be the best choice, but maybe you already own a niche web site where some audio book titles fit so only getting the links to that audio books can be a better choice.

Your existing web site is hopefully already getting a good amount of traffic. On the other hand, if you are given a new URL, you should start again generating traffic to a new web site.

3. Affiliate Programs ? Indirect way

This involves using the tools mentioned before, but the initial purpose is not to sell audio books, is to build a subscriber list.

Why would you need to build a subscriber list ? It's simple. Experts say that it takes from 7 to 10 visits for a potential client to make his first purchase. If you are only sending traffic to your web site and not adding that potential customers' names and e-mails to your list, you are loosing sales.

For example, you can give a coupon code with a 10% discount in the first purchase as a gift to people who subscribes to your list. Or create a free-report with reviews of the most sold audio books in certain categories, which you can send every week.

This will allow you to build a large subscriber list, allowing you to send offers to them and earn more money than if they simply buy once from your links or affiliate store.

These are three ways an average person with zero investment can build an online business in the hottest new trend which is getting ready to explode: downloadable audio books.