In all the emails I get from people, one of the recent recurring themes is how to turn selling ebooks on eBay into profit.

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.

This post was actually my reply to an email, but I felt it cleared up a few things that weren't completely clear.  It's sort of anti-SEO.

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.

 

Here's how you can improve your eBay income really easily, this is *so* simple to do.

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?   

I don't know if you knew this, but my developer is also my business partner.  We've found that it's a good partnership as he can concentrate on the code while I do everything else.

 

Paul is one of the best coders I've ever met, and we often chat about what we're going to do with SmartDD (and other software he's working on), and of course we have some of our own plans for additional features in SmartDD, but what we quickly realised is, that what you really want are features that you come up with yourself.

So, please tell us.

We've already had a couple of suggestions, and there's one particular idea we want to do for ourselves, so here's a few of the features we intend to put in the next version.

Is there anything in particular you'd like added to the list that isn't mentioned above?

We often see good software with just those few little details missing that stop it from being truly great.  Maybe we're missing something from SmartDD that you think should be added?

Also on a similar vein, is there another item of software that you really want?  You know, that one program that you need above all else?  It might be software that already exists, or a completely new idea.

Or it may even be some knowledge you're missing about earning money online…

If you leave us a suggestion below as a comment, and we use it, we'll give you a free copy when it's done.

Frustrating isn't it?  You buy a product and there's either no instructions on how to use it or they are impossibly difficult, even wrong in some cases.

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.

I Want To Install on Several Domains

The licence for SmartDD allows you to install it on as many domains as you personally own. 

As you've probably realised when you've updated the PayPal IPN setting, you can only set a single static IPN. So you might be thinking there's no point in installing SmartDD on more than one domain.

And if you're selling on eBay, then one domain is probably all you need.  But if you also have a few websites where you sell goods by PayPal, you may be perplexed as to how you can get SmartDD to work in several places.

Well don't worry, because you can install SmartDD on a domain, and then use the built in PayPal button generator to generate the button code, decription and price widgets.  When your customer pays for an item after clicking the button, they're returned back to your website.

The email is sent from that same domain, and when your customer clicks the link, they're taken back to that domain to download their purchase.

It works because SmartDD uses a dynamic IPN string which it sends to PayPal, and which overrides the static one.  This is the same principle at work if you have other web applications running on other sites which use PayPal to accept payment.

 

The Licence Won't Work

The licence generator we use is a 3rd party bit of software called ionCube Encoder.  It can cause problems sometimes when trying to recognise the domain.

Normally, you would generate a licence in the format of www.domain.com, but sometimes, depending on the configuration of your web server, it may require a licence to be generated as domain.com instead.

We've also found that if you use cPanel's "Add-on Domains" feature to add a domain to your hosting account, then the licencing software has problems with that too.  It seems to find the main domain rather than the add-on domain you'd expect it to find.  Then because it doesn't match the domain licence, it fails.

You can fix this by generating a licence in the format of www.add-on-domain.maindomain.com OR add-on-domain.maindomain.com (without the www in front).

It should then recognise the licence as being valid. 

UPDATE: A customer of SmartDD has pointed out to us that you can generate a licence using the IP address of the server your domain instead.  We've found that so far this has worked in 5 out of 6 cases, so it looks like a good tip to include here.

To get your IP address, open up a command prompt (also known as an MSDOS box), and type:-

ping www.yourdomainhere.com

and you'll then see the IP address appear as the domain is pinged.  It will appear as a "dotted quad" - e.g. 128.45.65.89.  Enter that IP address into the licence generator instead and download the new licence.

 

Emails Aren't Being Sent Out

Check the transaction screen, and check the email log.  Carefully.  If SmartDD says the emails have been queued, then there were no errors and SmartDD has done its part.

You can check that SmartDD is working by resending the emails, but sending them to yourself instead.  If you get them within a minute or two (often immediately), you can be certain that it's working okay.

The only reasons your customers aren't getting their emails are they're either using spam filters or there is a problem with your host.  Try using webmail and sending yourself a test email to your ISP email address rather than your domain email address.

Again, if you receive it okay, then you know SmartDD is working as it uses the same method to send as webmail.

 

Customers Aren't Getting Emails

If you know SmartDD is sending the emails out okay (see above), then it's likely that it's your customers spam filters putting your emails in their bulk or spam folders.  All you can do is educate them, and ask them to whitelist your email address.  Once enough users of a particular ISP whitelist you, then you should find that all your emails get through okay without being filtered.

I know it's a pain, but we all have the spammers to thank for this problem. 

 

Getting "Order Failed" Emails

The primary reason you're getting order failures is because SmartDD can't find the item you're selling on eBay (usually) in its database.  Check that the title on eBay EXACTLY matches the title in your Items panel.

If there's even a single space or character different, then the order will fail.

You'll also get order failures if your inventory product doesn't point to the download file correctly - look out for typos as being the cause of this problem!  Or  maybe you've forgotten to upload the file.

We've also found a case where eBay is mangling the pound symbol (£) and sending it across as £50 for instance instead of £50. After going through PayPal as well, it arrives as just a single question mark (?).  There's not a lot we can do about this unless eBay decides to sort it out at their end (they're using ASCII - so no £ symbol) which we think may be unlikely.

The work round for this is either don't use the £ symbol at all, good practice would be not to use any special symbols such as $*?/@"+£ and just stick to letters and numbers instead, as it's key words that people look for when doing a search.  OR, you can create a copy of the item you're selling in your database but for instance use ?50 instead of £50.

But even then you may get intermittent results depending on what eBay and PayPal do.  It's best just to avoid special symbols altogether.

The only other reason you may be getting order failures is because you're also selling physical goods on eBay, but again you probably wouldn't want to have physical goods loaded…

 

Selling Physical Goods

You CAN use SmartDD when selling physical goods.  Or at least, what you can do is use SmartDD to coax your customers onto your mailing list.

After your customer has purchased the physical item, say a CD for instance, and if that item is loaded into SmartDD, you can send a customised email out to your customer.  In that email you can thank them for their purchase and offer to give them a digital download of some other useful related digital item in return for signing up to your 3rd party auto-responder / mailing list.

The follow-up email can be set to remind them to do the same thing 24 hours later.

Then you would set up your 3rd party auto-responder, e.g. Aweber, to send out a link to the download in the first email it sends after they've double-opted in to your list.  It shouldn't bother you too much that it won't be protected by SmartDD.  After all, you now have them on your mailing list and you can sell to them again in the future.

You should always try to get every customer onto your mailing list.  If they've bought from you once and were happy with their purchase, then why not sell them something similar at a later date?

It takes a little bit of effort to set up initially, but once you've done it, it can bring you great rewards as you now have a captive audience and can sell them goods from your website instead of through eBay.

Remember, it's between 5-12 times harder to sell to a new customer as it is to an existing one.

DON'T LET YOUR CUSTOMERS BECOME EX-CUSTOMERS.

 

Building A Mailing List

I mentioned above about how important it is to get people to sign up to your mailing list.

Well, some people sell ebooks on eBay for one reason only.  And that's to build their mailing list.  That's why you see so many ebooks being sold for $1.99, it just about covers the auction expenses.

In fact, if you can get things set up correctly, using a combination of SmartDD, eBay's Turbo Lister and Selling Manager Pro, you can build your mailing list on autopilot.  The trick is to break even while building your list.  i.e. you want to bring in at least enough money to pay for your listing fees.

Some people aren't even bothered about that, because they know that once they have someone on their list, they can sell to them over and over again.

Let's put it another way.  For every person you have on your list, you can expect to earn between $0.50c and $1.00 per month per person.  That's if you send them details of carefully selected offers that match what they were interested in when they bought your ebook.

If you "spray and pray" then you'll get much lower returns than that.

So think very carefully about what you've just read.

If you know your metrics, and you know how much you can expect to earn per person on your list, i.e. you know their lifetime customer value, then you can afford to pay half that and still make a profit.

For example, if you have a good set of offers you can make directly to each person.  And you know that you'll get a total return of an average $25.00 per head, and it only costs you $5.00 or less to get them on your mailing list, then you're $20.00 in profit per person on your list.

There are an increasing number of marketers that have become clued up to this, and are now working eBay to build their list.  Don't worry about it becoming too overcrowded, eBay is HUGE, but if you aren't using eBay to build your list today, then you should seriously stop to think about it.

If you want to learn more about this, then I strongly suggest you try out EPA and learn all about how it's done by a professional marketer.

Or you could just ask me and I'll see if I can put something together.

 

Pending Payments

SmartDD is unique in that it will handle PayPal echecks.  These show as a "Pending" payment, and your customer will receive an email telling them they'll get a further email when the echeck clears.  You will also get an email to tell you the purchase is pending.

A few days later when the echeck clears, PayPal sends a further mesage to SmartDD to let it know that the transaction has now completed.  SmartDD will then send out an email to your customer with the download link, and you'll also get one to let you know the payment has cleared.

If the payment doesn't clear, then both you and your customer will get an order failed email.

 

Don't Use Your Personal Email Address To Run Your Business With

As you have a domain to install SmartDD on, then use it properly! 

It looks very unprofessional to your customers to receive email from a personal or free email address.  It's very easy to set yourself up an email address that runs off your domain, such as sales@domain.com.

 

Use IMAP Instead Of POP3

Once you've created an email account on your web server, then I suggest you use IMAP to fetch your email - most hosts support IMAP as well as POP3.  If you have a hosting account that uses cPanel (such as my favourite - Hostgator), then you can definitely use IMAP.

Why?  Well, IMAP leaves your emails on the server.

Imagine what would happen if your hard drive crashed, and you're using POP3.  All your emails are gone forever, and you have absolutely no record of any of your transactions or conversations with customers.

It's happened to a LOT of people…

With IMAP, your PC will only read and copy the emails from the server.  They don't get removed after download.  So if your PCs hard drive ever did go bye-byes, it doesn't matter, you still have all your emails safe on the web server!

Other nice things about IMAP are you can share an email account across several PCs.  For instance, my wife and I both have local copies of emails on our PCs.  And my developer partner Paul lives over a hundred miles away but sees all the same emails that I do.

If either of us respond to an email, IMAP saves the response in the Sent Items folder on the web server, so we can both see it.  If one of us saves a draft email, the other can see it in the drafts folder.  If one of us flags an email, the other one gets to see it too.

It's really cool, and keeps us both synchronised!

And if you use Windows and Outlook Express (OE), there's another bonus too.  If you use IMAP, then OE creates completely separate accounts and folders.  So you get an Inbox, Sent Items and Drafts folders for every account, keeping everything separate instead of all jumbled up in the one Inbox etc.

Believe it or not, here's a tiny picture of some of my different email accounts.  I have over 30 set up in OE, all with their own folders.  With IMAP they're very easy to manage.

You can see the usual local folders, plus the IMAP accounts and folders underneath.  As an additional benefit, it makes it easy to copy and move emails between accounts too!  My second PC also has all the same email accounts too as a local backup!

 

And Finally…

That's it!

If you've followed these instructions, then SmartDD is now all set up to start delivering your digital goods.

© 2006, 2007 Frank Haywood and Paul Freedman.

 

How To Use SmartDD For All Your Digital Delivery

On the following pages, you'll find all the usage documents for SmartDD - Instant Digital Delivery.  You'll soon find out how to deliver digital goods the easy and instant way.

If you have any questions, then please contact us - either Frank Haywood or Paul Freedman. 

Legal Stuff

SmartDD is copyright Frank Haywood and Paul Freedman.

Please don't hurt us by copying SmartDD without asking first.  We're a (very) small business and this is nearly our livelihood.

We've both put a lot of time and effort into putting this together to help you and your business.  We're sure you know what we mean.

Thank you sincerely,

Frank and Paul.
© 2007

DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY

The software is provided under this license on an as is basis, without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including, without limitation, warranties that the covered software is free of defects, merchantable, fit for a particular purpose or non-infringing. The entire risk as to the quality and performance of the covered software is with you.

Once you have SmartDD installed, there are just a handful of things you need to do to get it delivering and protecting for you.

The Short Version

1) Go to the emails section and edit the emails to your personal taste
2) Upload a product file by FTP to your server e.g. valuable_ebook.zip.  Then create a product in the inventory section that's linked to that file.
3) Create a saleable item in the items section, and select the inventory product you just created (in step 2) from the drop down. Make sure you select the correct currency and set a minimum price you're willing to accept for the item.

That's it!  As long as your eBay or website item has the same title as the saleable item in step 3, AND the price and currency check is okay, SmartDD will deliver it.

Note the title on eBay or in the PayPal button must match EXACTLY the title in the SmartDD database, even one extra  space will mean a mismatch.

So it's best if you always use the built in PayPal Button generator when creating buttons for your website.  More on that later…

Click the following links to download the help docs as PDF files - right click and choose "Save as".

SmartDD Installation Instructions
SmartDD Usage Instructions

You'll need Adobe Acrobat reader to view them - it's likely you already have it but there's a link below to the Adobe site. 

The following two links both open in new windows, so if you use a popup stopper, you may need to suppress it (usually by holding the Ctrl key down) when you click them. 

SmartDD Help Videos

Adobe Acrobat Reader

The online help is now available.  This blog format will mean we can keep the documents up to date more easily, as well as add interesting tips and articles every now and then.

Enjoy!