If you’ve surfed the internet for a while lately, you might have
noticed the incredible amount of hype generated around e-books,
information products, resale rights and similar stuff. Indeed,
it is a popular subject since it promises a way to generate
passive income, like real estate or wall-street shares, with a
minimal amount of effort.
Truth is, many
internet marketers are now using all this hype to their own
interest, by selling poor-quality informational products at very
high prices, or promising blatantly ridiculous incomes: don’t
get caught in the marketing trap!!
I’m
Albert Z. and I’ve been selling e-books for a while on the
internet: I own the site Culture-Books
> and can tell you a couple of REAL things about selling
e-books online!!
What you might have been
taught up to now is that:
- selling e-books requires no effort
- you can make very high incomes every month (>
2000$/month) - selling e-books requires
no skills - there is no investment to be
made - it works on
autopilot
Now, check those
statings with the truth:
for setting up your activity
make low incomes (100s), unless you write yourself a very good
piece of text, which is time-consuming
copywriting skills (for most of your sales), a sense of
marketing and lots of organization
increase your activity over time you will HAVE to devote some
time to it!
hosting, and provided you don’t spend any money on designing,
seo tools etc, initial goods for selling, you will end up
spending about 50-100$, provided you’re a savvy money-saver!
As you can see, selling
e-books is not very different from any other real-life activity:
it requires work and skills, lots of time (at least initially)
and a little bit of overhead to set up everything!! But it does
indeed have some advantages:
- overhead costs are very low if compared with other
activities - once set up, it requires
very little maintenance time - it’s fun
(which is very important
), watch the style of an e-book
store here , doesn’t
it look fun? - it earns quite good
money for the low amount of effort required
So, how do you go about selling ebooks?? There
are mainly 3 ways: eBay, ClickBank, or your own website. The
route I chose was eBay + personal website, because they are
sinergic (they help each other): having a site makes it so much
easier to upload your images, to have a professional look etc;
plus you get webspace and you can just send out emails with a
link for downloading your product (instead of attaching your
product with the mail, which incurs in many problems with spam
filters or filled email boxes!!). eBay on the other hand brings
good free, relevant traffic on your site and gives you some
extra exposure which may never hurt. It’s common to offer a
product for 1.50$ on ebay, but selling it for 1.30$ on your
site. This is a legal and intelligent way to
"redirect" eBay watchers to your own site without
spending a dime!!
Bear in mind however
that eBay and PayPal (your everyday staple when selling ebooks)
charge pretty high "default" fees that will quickly
cut your revenues on low-cost ebooks (for instance, if you sell
a 1.50$ ebook on ebay with paypal, you might only get 0.50
revenue, which sucks big time!!) so you’re better off selling
products with a higher cost, in the range of 5-10$ (so even if
you lose that 1$ in fees, you’ll still keep a good % of your
money)!
What are the tools you will need
for your activity?? The ones I feel a MUST are:
24/7 you just really need Outlook Express with an autoreply
filter set up, if you wish to turn off you pc then you need a
cgi quality autoresponder: you find out more about both of them
here), this is ESSENTIAL for the automation of your
activity
cheapness (3.96$ a month with 500mb space and 20gb bandwidth,
enough for a small business)
many free ones, just check on google!)
editor (for the design of your site), i recommend the GIMP, an
open source (free) software that rivals photoshop!
shopping cart system (i use osCommerce, but i’ve heard good
rumors about zencart too!)
If you’d
like to find out some software or information about internet
businesses, drop by my
site , I’ll be glad to help!! Also if you’re interested in
exchanging opinions or partnering, I am always very friendly
I hope this article was useful for you,
have a nice day!!
