 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$/month)
- selling e-books
requires no skills
- there is no
investment to be made
- it works on
autopilot
Now, check those statements with
the truth:
- selling e-books
requires some months for setting up your activity
- you will make low
incomes (100s), unless you write yourself a very good
piece of text, which is time-consuming
- selling e-books
requires designing skills, copywriting skills (for
most of your sales), a sense of marketing and lots of
organization
- indeed it does
work on autopilot! but if you want to increase your
activity over time you will HAVE to devote some time
to it!
- you will need a
website, hosting, and provided you don't spend any
money on designing, seo tools etc, initial goods for
selling, you will end up spending about 50-100$,
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:
- an autoresponder
(if you keep your pc on 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
- a domain and a
host, I use godaddy for it's cheapness (3.96$ a month
with 500mb space and 20gb bandwidth, enough for a
small business)
- an html editor
(there are many free ones, just check on google!)
- a free image
editor (for the design of your site), i recommend the
GIMP, an open source (free) software that rivals
photoshop!
- a 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!!
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