In my last article, I sketched out how to make money with resale rights ebooks on eBay.

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.

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.

I've just had an email asking me if SmartDD will only do ebook delivery.

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).

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 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.