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.