If you have a few minutes to spare, go and have a look for e-books on eBay. You’re guaranteed to get thousands of results coming back. E-books are seriously big business on eBay, but one thing you are bound to notice if you look through the completed listings is that the vast majority of e-book sales are for less than a dollar.
Now I want to toss in one more catch here, and that is that eBay no longer allows the sale of downloadable digital products. That’s ok though because now your ebook products will relly have a much higher “perceived value” more on that later!
But from this point forward when we speak about ebooks just know that what I mean is that you will be burning your ebooks onto a cheap 19 cent CD and shipping them to your customer.
I will not be mentioning that again each time I bring up ebooks so please know that this is what I mean in all future talk about ebooks.
The great thing about this is that you will also be collecting your customers physical shipping address to be able to market to later, not just your customers email address.
Also before I go too much further I want to mention a resource you should check out that can help with this auction listing and shipping process and that’s www.auctionmagick.com
Ok so back to what happens when we are only selling a product for one dollar…
Which begs the question – how are these sellers making any money? It’s true that you haven’t got any delivery costs or stock to pay for – they just send a copy of the appropriate download to everyone who buys from them. But once you’ve taken their eBay fees into consideration and perhaps the fees for their eBay store if they have one, that doesn’t leave much – if any – room for profit.
Well here’s the secret. Most of these sellers aren’t selling e-books on eBay for a dollar, or less than a dollar, or even a cent or two, to make money. They are selling them to generate a customer base which they can then transfer over to their own website. Many e-book sellers have feedback stretching far into the thousands; if just a quarter of those people went on to sign up to their newsletter, or take a look at their website, or buy another more expensive e-book directly from the seller after reading one of their emails, that’s a lot of cash that’s been generated from that initial two cent sale on eBay.
Making the initial sale is always the hardest part in any business. Gaining new customers is much more time consuming and more expensive than the costs involved with keeping existing ones. The more barriers you can break down between you and your potential customers, the more likely it is that they will take a chance on buying something from you – and then spending more money with you in the future.
WHAT KIND OF E-BOOKS SHOULD YOU BE SELLING?
If you are now sold on the idea of using cheap e-books to snag new customers from eBay, you should now be thinking of which ones to sell. It’s vital to remember that “cheap” should never mean “nasty” – every single e-book you offer for sale should be of top quality regardless of the price, otherwise the buyer is unlikely to come back and spend more money with you.
Think about your business as a whole. You want to find more customers for that business, so your e-books should have titles and content that will appeal to those people.
Let’s look at some examples to see how this could work for you:
- If you sell bar equipment and related items you could sell an e-book revealing 101 recipes for mixing your own cocktails
- If you sell home brew kits you could offer an e-book describing how to make the perfect beer or wine for half the price of a store bought one
- If you sell toys you could offer an e-book giving ideas on how to create the perfect party bags for kids at budget prices
- If you sell sewing supplies and kits you could promote an e-book on how to design your own cards and other gift items
- If you have a website which offers a paid membership giving access to exclusive internet marketing advice every month, you could sell an e-book revealing 101 strategies for making more money online
- If you have a website which sells wholesale items to trade customers, you could sell an e-book revealing how to make money on eBay by buying stock to resell
Do you get the picture? No matter what business you run, or what the focus of your business or website is, you will almost certainly be able to come up with several ideas for e-books that will appeal to your customer base.
SOURCING YOUR E-BOOKS
You have two options available to you when you know what subject you want your e-book to cover. You can either find a previously published e-book online (maybe even on eBay itself) that you can buy with resale rights and sell it on yourself, or you can write your own.
Each option has its own benefits and drawbacks. It’s generally a lot quicker to find a previously published book you can sell on, because once you’ve found it it’s just a question of setting up a listing on eBay and starting it. The downside is that there could be lots of other people selling the same book, so you have no exclusivity to it.
Writing your own e-book has the downside of needing your investment of time to actually sit down and churn it out, and if you’re not a good writer this can present a problem. You can pay someone else to write it, but whichever method you choose it will be at least a few days before you can get the e-book live and for sale on eBay. Incidentally the next chapter goes into how to write an e-book to build your email list and promote your own website; you may find writing your own isn’t as hard as you might think.
The good side to creating your own e-book far outweighs the time involved in doing it, and that’s the fact that no one else will be selling it. If you pick a good subject and create a good listing title that will easily be found by the very people it will appeal to, you are likely to sell plenty of copies, and each one will get you a brand new customer.
Another incredible resource to get ebooks that you can rebrand as your own without writing a word are PLR ebooks form a site like www.NakedPLR.com and www.SourceCodeGoldMine.com You can use this content as is or rebrand and rename it to fit your niche.
Remember these are lead generators you are looking for here and PLR content like this will work great!
AUCTION OR BUY IT NOW?
Once again, there are pros and cons to each of these methods. Auction listings are better for exposure as you know they will run for the full duration of the listing. That means you’ll get more potential for people to click through to your About Me page or visit your website, as well as encouraging bids on your listing and possibly selling your e-book for slightly more than the minimum price.
Buy It Now items tend to capture those people who want an item now, instead of having to wait seven or ten days to get access to it. Because e-books are delivered digitally, you can be reading one within minutes of buying and paying for it. That benefit is taken away if you have to bid on an auction – unless of course it’s near the end. That’s why a lot of bids won’t happen until the last hours or minutes of an auction.
Some sellers put each e-book on auction and then put copies of the same title in their eBay shop to be bought immediately. This covers both options, encourages people to visit your shop and possibly buy more than one thing, and also gives them all the options. So you might have a title on auction starting at a cent, while that same title could be available in your eBay shop for ninety nine cents to buy immediately.
Only testing will reveal what works best for you, but if you cover all the bases you’ll get the best results.
SENDING THE WINNING BUYER THEIR E-BOOK
After each successful sale, you have a chance to make a real impression with the buyer. To begin with you might want to email each e-book out manually, but you’d be better off to automate everything by purchasing a program such as My Digital Dispatch, or another similar item on the market. You can also use something like Microsoft Outlook to deliver them but it won’t check up on whether the payment made to you is correct; it will just recognise that you have received a payment and send the appropriate book accordingly.
But it’s not so much the delivery of the e-book that we are interested in here – it’s the email that will accompany it. This is your golden chance to start developing a relationship with your customer; one that could last for a long time if it’s handled correctly.
Start by thanking them for their valued purchase, and then give them the details of where to access their e-book. You can provide it as an attachment but many people are quite rightly nervous of opening these, so provide a link to your website instead where the e-book can be stored. This link should not be accessible from any other page on your website; the only way people can get to it is if they are given the link itself.
The most important part of this standard email sent out to all winning bidders and purchasers will be to invite them to sign up for your free newsletter on the very subject they have just bought an e-book on. You should find you can get a very high take up rate on this offer – after all it’s a freebie, and it’s on a subject they clearly want information on.
Just this one act will boost the numbers on your email marketing list enormously. As long as you use the double opt-in method to keep yourself safe from any possibility of spam accusations, you can quickly and easily build a healthy email list that will be your key to internet profits for a long time to come.
No remember eBay no longer allows digital products on their site so this digital version you will be shipping will just be so that the user can get instant access to your content, but what they are actually bidding on and what you will deliver on top of this digital version will be a copy of the ebook on CD shipped to their address.
You can tell them they will be getting a instant digital copy sent to them but that what they are bidding on is the ebook CD that will be shipped.
BONUSES AND FREEBIES
You can also make your customers’ purchases even more valuable by offering them a chance to grab another freebie or two from you, as a thank you for buying one of your e-books in the first place.
This can be of a higher value than the e-books you are offering on eBay, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be in e-book form. You could link to an affiliate site if you wish, but there are more advantages in getting them familiar with your own website.
Why not set up a page on your website that has a specific item or selection of items for sale? That way you are offering another good deal for your customers. The key is not to stray off the beaten track; keep in mind what your customers are interested in, and make sure you serve those interests. If you can do that efficiently and with products that are of excellent quality, you’ll make more sales and build a bigger email list than you ever thought possible.
BEFORE YOU GO…
Have you ever read that one before? You know the kind of thing – you click on the link to accept your free email course on your favorite subject, or receive your free package of e-books, and up comes a page telling you it’s the only chance you’ll have to say yes to this offer.
What follows is a huge package of e-books and downloads that are offered for sale at a hugely discounted price. These pages are popular with sellers for one reason – they work. Internet marketers use them because a high percentage of people take up the offer and pay for the additional package.
Once you have enough downloadable products to make up a package like this, it’s definitely in your best interests to offer one. They’re a good impulse buy, because people don’t like to think they’re going to miss out on anything.
YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE
Another simple but effective way to market your website and generate extra traffic for free is to make sure you include a signature in all your outgoing emails. This applies right across the board, but you should definitely have a good signature in the emails you send out to your winning buyers on eBay.
Simply create a one or two line signature which arouses that old favorite, human curiosity, and contains a clickable link to your website for your customers to follow. Again, if it’s related to the subject of the e-book/s you are selling you’ll be able to achieve a high volume of traffic quite easily.
Although e-books are by far the most popular and easiest of ways to market low priced items to your customer base through the power of eBay, there are several other ideas you could use to penetrate that same market. These will be explored fully in chapter five, but for now let’s continue on and have a look at the potential that the content of your self written e-book has to promote your website and build your email list for months – if not years – to come, long after the initial sale has been made.
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