In this article, I'll explain how you can make even more money come flying your way by writing and selling your own ebooks.

There are a number of benefits to doing this, and lots of different ways you can do it too, limited only by your imagination. I'll make a few suggestions to get you started, but once you get in the right frame of mind, you'll find yourself coming up with all sorts of creative ideas.

When starting something like this, you should always consider the viral factor. By that I mean you want your ebook to spread virally across eBay and hopefully for it to turn up in other ebook collections and offers as a bonus.

And you should also consider something even more important, and that's called the WIIFM - What's In It For Me?

In everything you do, you should carefully think about the motivation. What would get other people to a state where they REALLY want to resell your ebook? You have to imagine you're them, and then think about the WIIFM.

So what would strongly motivate you to resell someone else's ebook? Well, you're in this business to make a profit, so I guess the number one answer for most people is "money". In second place would be to build a mailing list.

(For me, the number one answer is build a mailing list, the money will follow.)

There will probably also be a number of minor reasons you'd resell a particular ebook, but the biggest WIIFM for most people is money.

If you accept that, then you have to set up a system where the reseller can make a nice amount of money on the back end after selling your ebook. The more the better, for both of you.

Let's look at how YOU can make money first though, and then we'll look at how we can adapt things so that the reseller makes money too.

Before you even write your ebook, you have to do a bit of market research. This is huge topic in its own right, and I'm not going to cover it in this article.

Let's assume you've done your research and you've found something you CAN write about, you WANT to write about, and that it's also a hot topic.

The first part in this process is to write your ebook. How you write it is another big topic I'm not going to cover in this short article.

(You may even want to write TWO ebooks. The first is a short 10-20 page report on your subject, and the second would be a longer, more detailed and juicy version. I'll discuss why later on.)

Once you have your first draft and you've checked it for typos, the next step is the first real part of the monetising process for you.

What you're going to do is put links to similar, relevant products throughout your ebook. These links will be your affiliate links to those other products, so if someone clicks one and buys, you'll get paid a commission.

It's a lovely feeling getting checks (cheques) for selling products, and you've no idea where they came from because you can't remember.

Example: You write an ebook on golf, and now you want to promote some golfing products within your ebook. You could go searching on Google for golf affiliate programs which can take some time, but the easiest way is to go to ClickBank and search their market place for golf related products.

Typically, you'll find products on there with 50% commission, and sometimes as high as 75%.

Choose the products you want to promote carefully. Again this is food for another article, but I'll briefly say here that you should check out each of the sales pages of the products you like the look of, and ask yourself if YOU would buy that product.

After you've chosen the products you want to promote, rewrite parts of your ebook and work in a mention of those products together with your affiliate link. Use a link cloaker such as Smart Link Cloaker to hide the fact that it's an affiliate link. (For whatever reason, some people don't like to click links if they think you're going to make some money out of it.)

And somewhere in there, you want an invitation to a page where people can sign up to your mailing list…

Finally, do another rewrite of your ebook and "juice it up" a little. What I mean by this is, make it a little more interesting to read. Dry facts are okay, but it's always better if you can work in for instance a bit of controversy.

Don't go over the top.

Yet again, juicing up an ebook is another article I'll have to write at some time - there are a number of ways you can do it, using controversy is just one of them. Watch this space.

And really finally, make it look good and easy to read if you haven't already done so. Use pictures and plenty of white space to break up the text.

Okay so now you have your ebook full of your affiliate links. Your next step is to start listing it on eBay for $1.99 with master resale rights (MRR). To get people to buy it, you'll have to do a good job on your sales page, which should also be part of the package. After all you want it to be as easy as possible to get a listing up for the average ebook reseller.

(And this is yet another article topic that's too large to include in this one.)

After a month of listing it (it may take longer), if you've done an all round good job of everything, you'll have ebook resellers buying it and listing it themselves. From that point it will spread virally across and outside eBay.

Now you have a source of free advertising. You don't need to list it on eBay any more as plenty of other people are doing it for you. And all the people that buy it and read it will be clicking on your affiliate links, and some will buy.

And you'll be getting checks from ClickBank while doing nothing. And as I said in my last article, your job as an affiliate is to connect the buyer with the seller and take your cut. Win-win-win.

Better still, some people will be signing up to your mailing list if your offer is good enough.

Isn't that cool?

Here's a slight variation on that just to finish off, but like I said earlier this is only limited by your imagination.

You write TWO ebooks on the same subject.

One is a short 10-20 page report with MRR. The other is the larger more valuable ebook that you're either going to charge more money for, or you're going to use as a "bribe" to get someone to sign up to your mailing list.

You start selling the report on eBay and wait until it's picked up by other resellers. Inside the report, you make it clear there's a better version that can be obtained just by going to your web site, and there you make your offer. They get the better ebook in return for their first name and their email address, and you then have them on your mailing list.

And for a slightly different scenario…

You could sell the larger ebook with a commission paid out to the ebook reseller who has signed up to your affiliate scheme and then rebranded the small report with their affiliate link.

The best ebook rebranding tool is ViralPDF by Sean Kelly. He's such a nice guy and his support is excellent. You should go get it if you don't already have it.

It's important you always think about the WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) when you do any of the above. And by that I mean you to think about the WIIFM for your affiliate and not so much for you.

You may want to build a mailing list as your main priority, and forego any money made on the larger ebook. So you could give 100% commission to the affiliate and make your larger ebook $17.00 or more.

Now THERE's a good incentive for affiliates to resell your ebook. They're going to

a) make money on the upsell, and
b) get a chance to build their own mailing list too if they use SmartDD.

Especially with the follow up email 24 hours later to make an offer of their own.

In yet another article, I'll explain how you can set up a series of autoresponders for each niche, and then forget about it.

When I've written all the articles, then I'll write the really big juicy ebook that ties all the articles together and fills in all the gaps.

With Master Resale Rights of course…

For my next article, I think I'll cover the topic of market research, although if YOU have another suggestion, please leave it below.

And…

How am I doing? Is this useful? Got a question? Got a suggestion for the next article?

Let me know by leaving a comment below.

And from comments I receive, there's a lot of misconceptions.

The biggest one I'm going to address in this blog post is that the profit is made from selling the ebook.

WRONG!

If you take a look on eBay, then there are hundreds if not thousands of ebook sellers, all selling their ebooks for $1.99.

There's no money in that, once you take out your listing fees and the time you've taken to put the listing up in the first place, then it's all gone, and I'm going to prove it to you now.

Go to eBay, and look up one of the big ebook resellers. View their items (not the store view) and see how many they have running at any one time. Then on the left hand side in the yellow box out, you'll see some check boxes.

Check the one that says "Completed listings" click submit, and count them for a single day. And then work out how much money they've made from selling them.

Next, check to see how many listings they submit each day, my guess is somewhere between 1-4 an hour.

Finally work out how much it's cost to list ALL of the other items for that day.

Hmm, a bit of a discrepancy? Have they only just reached break even or maybe they've even lost a little money on the deal?

But if you check their feedback, you'll see they've been listing items and getting feedback for months or years.

So WHY do so many of the larger resellers sell other peoples ebooks consistently on eBay if they're losing money on the deal?

Well, there are two main reasons.

1) They have a "back end" product or products (or service or membership), together with an "irresistible offer" that fuels their efforts and makes it all worthwhile.

2) They're using eBay as an email list building tool, and funneling their buyers into individual niche oriented mailing lists.

Let's take a look at both of those in a little more detail.

#1 - They list an ebook on eBay which sells for $1.99. As part of the delivery process (probably using SmartDD), their customer receives an invitation to an "upgrade" for a limited time only at a knock down price.

It's made clear that the item normally sells for $47.00 (or $67.00), and this is a special offer for only $27.00, but only if they buy now.

Enough people will pay the $27.00 to get the second item, to make the eBay listings worthwhile.

#2 - My personal favourite. During the delivery process, they're offered the "upgrade" of the $47.00 item for free if they just sign up to a mailing list by entering their name and email address and clicking "Submit".

Once people are on the mailing list, then niche relevant offers can be made to them over time and so bring in enough income to make the eBay listings worthwhile.

These are the two main ways of making money by reselling ebooks on eBay, I realise there's not a lot of detail there, and that it can get very clever and very complicated. And there are plenty of little things that you can do that make a big difference.

There are plenty of ebooks out there that "sort of" cover this, sometimes. But in most cases, they don't make it clear enough in BIG BOLD LETTERS.

It's also worth noting that there are a few little traps that can be sprung on you by bigger ebook resellers taking advantage of your inexperience.

"To save your bandwidth if you're only just starting, you can redirect people to my download page. It's okay, I don't mind, you can keep all the profit from selling the ebook. I want to HELP you."

Yeah right. Or variations on this…

"To save your bandwidth if you're only just starting, you can use the zip file on my server instead of your own. It's okay, I don't mind, you can keep all the profit from selling the ebook. I want to HELP you."

and…

"If you're only just starting, and you don't understand how to set up a download page or a link to a zip file, you can use the zip file on my server instead of your own. It's okay, I don't mind, you can keep all the profit from selling the ebook. I want to HELP you."

In all of these and similar examples, it's a case of you paying for their traffic. And to make it worse, they get YOUR visitors to THEIR upsell page, or even get them to sign up to their mailing list.

In the zip files examples above, you'll find that they have a great big README.PDF or similar (such as UNADVERTISED_BONUSES.PDF) with an offer in there for some free ebooks on a similar niche in return for your customer signing up to their mailing list.

Now that you've read (and hopefully understand) about #1 and #2 above, they're not really helping you out at all are they? And the worst part of it is, they're making themselves out to be heroes by letting you use their web pages and zip files.

Okay that's enough for today.

In another blog post, I'll detail out how you can make more money on your own ebooks, and the considerations you should make before writing an ebook at all.

The simple answer to that is "no" - as well as ebook delivery (both pdf ebook delivery and exe ebook delivery), SmartDD will also do software delivery, doc file delivery, zip file delivery…

In fact you name it and as long as it's a file, SmartDD will deliver it securely.

But as well as delivering links to secure digital downloads, SmartDD will also deliver links to web pages.  By default these are not secured, and this is ideal if you're marketing on eBay and don't mind your download pages being indexed by the search engines.

For example you may be giving away a free ebook with your affiliate links embedded in it, and the more people get a hold of a copy, the better.

If you've purchased the full version rather than the free version, you can also edit the MIME types to add new ones.  Although SmartDD handles all the most used ones, you may have something additional you want to deliver securely that isn't a normal part of SmartDD's set up.

This is because we wanted to make it as open and as flexible as possible.

So yes, secure ebook delivery is on the menu, but you can also deliver a range of other files securely too (or insecurely if that's what you want).

First the question:-

"Ok, if I uploaded a zip file I want to sell, and use SmartDD, wouldn't that file, that is on my server, be indexed anyway?

I mean the buyer wants to know the location but the search engine looks at the entire site, or do zip files not get indexed by search engines?  I read you can search for a pdf file."

And my response… 

Files only get indexed if someone tells the search engines where they are.  So for instance if you had a file called abc.zip and you put it in the root of your web site (and there was an index.html file there), nobody would ever know it was there except for you.

However, if you then put a link to that file on a web page, you've now increased the risk of it being indexed.  But again, if you don't tell anybody about that web page, you're still safe.

The moment you create a link to that page from another page is when your problems begin.  Even though it may be a page that only a paid customer could get to see, they may use http://del.icio.us to bookmark it.  That happens a lot.

When it gets publicly bookmarked, then it gets indexed by the search engines.  If someone posts the link to that page on a forum, again the search engines will sooner or later index it.

As long as a file is created and sits on its own with no links to it, it will never get indexed, and so it's effectively invisible.  The same is true of any file including PDFs, but excluding index.html, index.htm or any other kind of index file.

SmartDD works to secure files in one of two (or both) ways.  If your hosting allows it, you can store the files outside or above the web root.  cPanel hosting such as provided by Hostgator lets you do that.

When a customer buys she then gets access to the purchased file provided through a special download page and special link which streams the file to her PC.  There's no way the file can be accessed directly by a browser as it's outside the web root and she can't physically navigate to it.  Because she can't navigate to it with a web browser, it can't be indexed by the search engines.

Also, the link itself can be set to allow only a certain amount of downloads to that customer, e.g. 3, and it then expires.

The special download page presented by SmartDD works to dissuade people from sharing it by displaying their full name and email address.  That's not really something anybody is going to do, even for a friend, as friends can sometime share things with other friends, and they share with other friends…

The second way that you can use SmartDD to secure your files is by using the "Display Name" feature.

If you have a host that doesn't allow you to place files outside the web root, then you can set SmartDD to deliver a file using a different name.  So for example, if you have a file called abc.zip, you can deliver it to your customer as xyz.zip.

Again, that would be impossible to index if there were no public links to the directory.  With SmartDD, the customer never gets to see the actual directory that the file is located as the files are streamed to your customers PC through special code.

So by using one or the other method above (or both), and in conjunction with the streaming delivery method, plus the "social engineering" of placing your customers name and email address on the download page, you can completely secure any file.

eBay allow you to place links to third party services or tools that you use to assist you within your listings.  Just take a look at a random set of listings on eBay - you may even have some some of these links on your listings already:-

Auctiva.com, Vendio.com, Turbo Lister (yeah I know that's eBay's own), Spoonfeeder.com and so on.

Some of them automatically embed links back to their sites, you don't have any choice in the matter.

And NONE OF THEM are running affiliate schemes - you make NOTHING by having those links there.

That's not very fair is it?  You're advertising for them, and receiving nothing in return.

The eBay policy on third party acknowledgements can be found here:-

http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-links-credits.html

Here's a snippet.

"eBay allows discrete identification or credit for third parties that provide services or products directly connected with the particular listing as long as they meet specific requirements…"

So why not put YOUR affiliate link back to SmartDD.com in EVERY LISTING, and make 50% of the sale price in commission payments? 

It's okay, eBay allow it.

To you (as the listing submitter), SmartDD is a third party tool just like the ones I mentioned above, and you're using it in your listing to provide delivery.

So take advantage of it right now.

This is how to get your personal pre-made affiliate link to SmartDD - it will take you 60 seconds of your time to get it.

1. Login to the www.SmartDD.com site using your email address and password you registered with.
2. Click on the Promo Tools link.
3. Scroll down to "Step#5 - Banners And Images".
4. Copy the code in the box for "eBay Image Number 1" - your affiliate link is *automatically* embedded in the code for you, you don't need to change anything.
5. Paste the code into all your eBay listings.

Now when any buyer sees your listing, they'll also see your affiliate link to the SmartDD.com site.

You'll get 50% of the current sale price of SmartDD for every person that buys through your link.

The reason I gave you the stats at the top is because SmartDD is something that ebook sellers genuinely want.  All you have to do is let people know about it with your affiliate link.

And here's what I've noticed.

When I've checked my web server logs, many of the new members to the site are coming as a direct result of people clicking affiliate links *within emails*.

Relatively few are coming as a result of people clicking links on *web pages*.

You already know that when SmartDD sends out an email for you with a download link inside it, it will automatically embed your affiliate link within the email. 

But by spending a few minutes with your listings, you dramatically improve your chances of income from even a 99c listing.

Think about it.  People are going to leave your listing one way or another, why not put a link they can leave on that can bring you in some extra cash?   

What a good idea!

So here's how to do it…

Create a success email message saying something like "Thank you for the beer fellow warrior", but don't enter a download link. ie, don't insert the %FILE_LOCATION% tag into the email.   Then create a dummy product, and add a new item with a title of "WarriorForum - Buy Me A Beer".

Link the item to the dummy product, and also add the success email you just created, and leave the follow-up message blank.

Hey presto!  Whenever anyone buys you a beer, SmartDD automatically sends them a thank you note.

Nice one Jason! 

Think of flat packed furniture or children's toys, we've probably all had trouble somewhere along the line.

We also live in a fast paced society and don't always want to wait to build things.  We want everything yesterday. 

 Maybe we think we can do without instructions.

The problem is worse when you buy goods that are come under the heading digital delivery.  We can have them straight away which satisfies our impatience, but you can't ask questions quickly of anyone any more.

Instead you quite often have to raise a ticket and just wait for someone to get back to you.

In reality when you make, design or produce something, it shouldn't be an arduous task to provide a 'how to' guide.

Especially when good documentation can prevent support issues before they happen.

As the developers of  SmartDD, we (Frank Haywood and Paul Freedman) have done just that.  Getting the automated digital delivery of your goods right is important to us and that's why you will find a comprehensive set of instructions to guide and support you through installing and using the software.

We've tried to think of everything and in addition we normally answer our emails within 2 - 3 hours of receiving them - quite often sooner.  And we always listen to our customers - if you think something needs more explanation we'll look at it for you.

And you might be thinking "what's the point of this post?"

Well, it's the fact that it's something we knew, we'd forgotten, and have re-learned again.  And it's that good and comprehensive documentation is a must.

In our initial eagerness to get the first version of SmartDD out, we cut some corners on the documentation front.  Our intention was to go back and fix it soon after release.  However, things don't always work out the way you plan!

The result?  A slew of minor support issues which of course took a lot of time to answer.  All of this could have been avoided if our documentation was better at first release.

We're now really happy to say that with the documentation we're supplying here and in the download area in the form of pdfs and videos, virtually all of the minor support questions from new customers have disappeared.

Enjoy!