A trend I’ve seen growing is that of the marketer who’s giving away his stuff on CD for a measly $7.95 or so to cover the postage for the big box of stuff he’s going to send you. There’s probably a “trial” subscription to their expensive newsletter that you need to agree to in order to get the big box of stuff. No objections from me on doing that, as long as it’s very, very clear on the sales page.

What leads me to write today are a few emails I’ve received about the latest greatest launch where the marketer tells me how he’s gotten this very special deal for me. One even hinted that he’d spent his own money to secure this incredible offer for his subscribers. Huh? I’ve already had a jillion emails telling me about this offer, including one from the guru himself, and I know it’s an affiliate attempt at sales. Why lie to me?

I know I’m not the only person who subscribes to lots of IM mail lists. In fact, many of the big marketers tell newbies to do exactly that so we can see what the big guys are up to and learn from their methods. Not one of them, however, says to lie to your list members.

The marketers who lie to me lose me as a member. Even if they have previously provided value in their information or products, it just brings me up short that they’d lie over something so inconsequential. Is this just a lack of good judgment or is it habitual behavior? Don’t know, don’t care. Either way, I just don’t trust them anymore. I’m outta here!

Harsh? Probably. Particularly for such a minor infraction. But my time is too valuable to me to spend it reading their stuff and wondering what little deception of half-truth or inappropriate advice I might be getting.

And here’s another thing. I’ve been looking at and researching and doing internet marketing for a couple of years now. I also have a lot of life/business experience that gives me a perspective on how I want to run things in an ethical way. How about the young newbie who looks at this kind of behavior as a role model? How does that help him? How does that help the world of internet marketing, already looked at by some as scammy?

If you take a close look at the really big, hugely successful marketers, both online and off, the folks who have been around for a long time, you see that they’ve built their businesses honestly and ethically. You don’t need to scam someone - or shade the truth a bit - to make massive amounts of money. The less than honest folks are eventually found out and their businesses crash - or in extreme cases are closed by the government.

Is it worth it to make a few bucks now and jeopardize your future?

Stay well, stay honest, make some money!

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

For me, it’s an “oh my” time as I see I’ve managed to fritter away a bunch of time. It’s going to be really hard to hit my goals for this year. Then again, maybe this is finally the push in the behind to put on that full court press to GET STUFF DONE. We’ll see.

Although I’m behind in the number of books listed at eBay, that pace is starting to pick up. And I had enough listed and sold to do a bit better each month - and that in July and August, slow months for any marketer.

One thing, finally, is that I’m working hard at monetizing my sales. I’m trying to focus more on digging through all the private label rights products I have, branding them, and adding affiliate products that I think enhance the material. I’ve also changed around the offer on my delivered CD product, offering inexpensive PLR and MRR packages. Roughly half of my customers buy books related to eBay or internet marketing, so I think they may want access to these digital products, either to sell themselves or to learn from. Since I just figured this out (a DOH moment), we’ll see.

If you’re interested in inexpensive rights packages, check my offers here.

Speaking of PLR, I found a product today that I’m very excited about. It’s just a little software program that’s very inexpensive, but I think using it is going to be very helpful in managing some of the stuff collecting digital dust - and to make me some money.

I’ve talked before about all the ebooks I’ve managed to collect. Just going through them is a major pain (self-inflicted, of course, since I am the one who let them just sit there for so long). One frustration is finding a great product with private label rights, but that has been given to me in pdf format without the source doc file. Now what? I can either sell it as is, without being able to take advantage of the plr aspect of the product, or I can retype it into a word program myself. Depending on my mood, some were put into a “get back to it later” file, and some of them were just tossed.

Today, I found my solution. It’s a little program called Tiger PDF Convertor, and that’s exactly what it does. You open it, click on the convertor button to load the pdf you want changed, click another button, wait a couple seconds for it to do its thing, then save the generated text file. Sure, you still have some work to do with the text file, but that’s sooo much easier than typing everything just so you can begin the format! Take a look here. The suggested price for it is $17.00, but I’m passing along my good deal and only charging $5. It’s also a resale product, so it comes with images and a sales page. You have to do your own thankyou/download page, and truthfully the sales page can use some work, but it’s a great product at a great price.

And another note about rights. If you get this tool, please remember that you can’t just start tearing apart all the pdfs you have and redoing them. Check the rights of the product before you start mucking around. If you don’t have rights that specifically state you can remake the product or tear it apart for articles, etc., or that you can claim ownership, don’t do it. You might think you won’t be found out because there’s so much out there on the web. And maybe you won’t. Then again, you might. I recently read a post by a fellow who found out the hard way. His mistake was inadvertent, but the original author decided to be a jerk about the whole thing. Some lawyers made a lot of money; the fellow who made the mistake lost a lot of time and money and lived a very stressful life for awhile.

eBay Cheater Update: After a couple more seemingly nowhere messages from eBay, I checked on the seller I’d found doing a booming digital delivery ebook business, and he’s not there anymore. Finally! I have seen other listings that are suspect, but until eBay works out their reporting systems for this, I don’t think I’m going to wade in any more. I did have an interesting exchange with one seller, though. She blatently listed a cookbook as being delivered by email, and she was charging a $.25 delivery fee. I asked why. She told me it was to cover paypal fees and that since she was selling her book for $.99, what with eBay fees, she really wasn’t making any money. Huh? Her sales are mainly hard goods, so I don’t understand why she’d jeopardize her account for this. Funny world. I’m not going to try to report her, but someone else might…

I think that’s enough for today. Be well.

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

http://JohnTheGeek.com/WPUpgrade/Refer.asp

If you’re like me, you’ve been hearing from the gurus that you have to be very, very careful when you upgrade your wordpress blog - that is, unless you buy their book. While I am learning a lot of techy stuff, I was sufficiently intimidated that I figured I didn’t really need to bother with an upgrade… Well, wrong. The upgrades have security aspects that really shouldn’t be ignored. Even if your old version blog works just fine, you should upgrade. And with John’s guide, it will take only a few minutes. So pick it up, then stay subscribed for a while, check out his blog, and see if this isn’t just a tremendous resource. Oh, and did I tell you it’s free??

I have another eBay update, too. Well, actually, two of them. First, if you haven’t seen it talked about, eBay has done a 180 on their previous announcement that they’d absolutely, positively not be allowing links off your pages anymore. They’ve decided to leave everything as is for the time being. So, if you have an opt-in on your About Me page, it’s apparently still okay.

And on my saga with them to try to get just one non-complying seller to play by the rules, well, not such good news. I did get another email from some support person who actually, at least for the first paragraph, seemed to have read my email. Then we got lost again. I was told I should visit the support center (and given the generic link, so I had to click around there for awhile.) They wanted to have a specific complaint about a specific item, but then won’t accept a complaint relating to the item because it’s not an active item. It’s been sold. Well, DUH! That’s my point. I bought it, I was given a download link, and that’s why I’m complaining. HELLO?? Bad enough that none of the complaint categories really fits the digital delivery ban, but I’m supposed to complain about a listing that I can’t prove is non-complying. It’s just nuts! And further proof that their interest in dealing with folks at my level is miniscule, at best.

So, that’s all the energy I’m putting into that mess. I’ll just keep posting my little CDs, keep encouraging folks to visit my website through the CD delivery, and work on growing a many-faceted web biz. Which is what we’re all supposed to be doing anyway.

Stay well.

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

Specific case this time is an email I sent asking that they take a look at an ebook seller who is delivering his goods digitally, although his auctions say they’re on CD.

I know I’m kind of reverting to that 12 year old: “you can’t do that, it’s against the rules!” But it’s frustrating to have gone through all the changes, working hard to comply, and then see someone breaking those rules.

Anyway, I bought a couple of items to make sure, and then I asked eBay to look into it and do something. The first email included dispute resolution policies, suggesting I contact the seller to work things out. Um, no, not going to happen. The last one quoted the digital delivery rules. Hello? I know the rules, that’s why I wrote, and I did explain exactly - again - what the problem is. Don’t know how they’re ever going to take action when they can’t take a minute to read the entire email. Oh well.

On another note, business is picking up for my ebooks on CD business. The beginning of July was dismal, but there seem to be more buyers lately. And I’ve had some lovely emails from happy customers. Always helps keep me motivated!

This isn’t a leaps and bounds growth by any means. My sales are only about $20 more this month than last, but I haven’t listed as many new titles as I’d hoped, either. It does mean that I’m paying all my fees out of earnings, so definitely life is good! And it’s pretty cool how a few sales can motivate me to get more done.

I’m going back to my listings now. Just wanted to share the latest bit of eBay nonsense.

Be well.

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

I’ve been concerned about the quality of some of the information being put out there on the eBay changes. The eBay rules about links from anywhere on an eBay page - their classified ads, sales pages, about me pages, any page you have on eBay - are now crystal clear. As of July 1 you CANNOT include a link off of eBay to your web page, nor can you have an opt-in box for your newsletter. You can’t even show your web site URL information with no link. One fellow in a forum related how he’d had his listings pulled because the picture of the CD he was selling had his website address on it.

Be very clear. eBay wants no promotion of any business but eBay to appear on their site. Your business promotion to your customers will have to be through included material you send to your buyer.

So, if you see a product being promoted that promises secrets and tips for classified ads, approach with caution. If there’s any mention of placing a link or opt-in box or even paypal button, you know the writer didn’t do any homework. Actually, I’ve unsubscribed to a few lists because of these kinds of product offers. How could I possibly trust their information on other subjects? One promoter got quite snippy with me when I pointed out that the product she was promoting was clearly giving information that would get an eBay seller in trouble. After waiting through several issues of her newsletter to see a correction (which didn’t come) I unsubscribed. I think that’s incredibly irresponsible marketing.

There was another package being heavily promoted through teaser videos. In the first video, this guy bragged on how he was able to increase the price of a training package being offered on eBay by $20, simply because of the perceived added value of a physical product. No problem there. He lost me, however, when he also bragged that he was able to add a $6 handling fee. I think that’s going to get him into trouble with eBay, as one of the things they are harping on with the changes is to clamp down on folks overcharging on postage and handling. Again, very bad information to be promoting. On top of that, his course on how to do this was being sold for a whopping $1,500!

There have been a couple of new products offered to help in the transition to getting your products onto CDs, but the focus seems to be on using a packaging/mailing service.  If you’re selling a whoop-e-do package, I can see where you’d want the spiffy jewel case and label. And the cost of $1.75 for processing and additional postage charges would certainly be justified. But I’m not selling those, and I want the control of doing the mailing myself. So I was delighted when John Thornhill, through my Mentorship Monthly subscription, set out a very clear and beautifully put together package for producing my own professional-looking CD package. It includes a great header that I easily modified to include the SmilingPartners name, files and pages that take little editing, a place to put a bonus or two, and even a great upsell offer. This package alone is worth many times the $10 a month subscription.

I spent some time yesterday reading blog posts from attendees of eBay’s gathering in Chicago. Not a pretty picture. There is a great deal of concern about the new feedback rules, especially the detailed seller rating system. eBay admits there’s some work to be done, but the attitude seemed to very much be “this is our sandbox, we make the rules.” Not quite to the point of telling sellers to take their toys and go home, but the presenters didn’t seem to be overly involved with the concerns. Search YouTube for eBay Live videos for some interesting moments.

I’m back to my listing chores. I have something like 50 items in my store and/or auctions, and my goal is to at least double that this week.

Be well - and look out for those eBay gurus who don’t know what they’re doing!

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

How does this relate to us?

I’m sure you’ve seen  products offered that made you feel a little uncomfortable. Systems that sound too good to be true or that carry information you know is borderline, if not plain wrong. I’m not necessarily talking about the products that advertise themselves as “black hat,” although I tend to discard those immediately. I don’t think a marketing method that’s built to convince me I’m going to “get away with something” is a good idea. It may be on the up and up, but I’ll never know because of the presentation.

However, I have seen offers for products that fly in the face of what I believe is ethical. Perhaps they’re even illegal. I don’t pretend to know all the relevant current computer/internet law, but I do know when something smells bad.

I have a friend who’s getting started in internet marketing who is always sending me stuff about how to bend the rules. I’ve tried to tell him that I am extremely not interested, but he continues. I think one of these days he’s going to find himself out of business or in court, probably both. And I don’t think the few dollars he’s making by skirting ethics and regulations will help him very much when he gets a judgment against him.

There are plenty of ways to make money on the internet, but they require work. Listen to the gurus who tell you about the years of effort it took for them to get to the level they enjoy today. Even their offers of helping you cut corners, so you don’t make their mistakes, don’t diminish the need for your attention and diligence in building your business.

I tend to be an optimistic person - except when it comes to breaking rules. I am absolutely convinced that if I try something shady, I am going to get caught. So, I can’t say that it’s a high sense of morality that keeps me on the straight and narrow, so much as it is fear. However it works for you, internalize the thought that taking the low road will offer you a path to trouble.

Enough of the preaching. I’m back to watching extremely high paid drug company executives get their come-uppance.

Be well.

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

Well, I got slapped up the side of my head with a reminder of that today when I went to eBay to see what one of my favorite sellers was doing about getting digital products online to sell.  Turns out, as of today, he has 188 items listed, all ebooks on CD, and he’s sold more than 50! So while I’ve been diddling, worrying about trying to put packages together, worried that buyers wouldn’t see value in buying just one book on a CD, he’s been making money. (Check out seller PlanetSMS with the advanced search option).

Once again, that quest for perfection bit me in the behind! I need Nike’s slogan “just do it” tattooed somewhere!

This also points up the fact that there just aren’t that many ebook sellers who have made the transition to physically delivered products. Now, John is a PowerSeller, and has great feedback, so I’m sure that plays a part in the number of sales he’s making. But more importantly, he took the new eBay regulations in stride, figured out how to make them work for him, and he’s off and running.

So, I’m going to pull myself together and get these things going. I only have three listings in my store, two of them compilation packages, which I’m going to pull. I finally realized that I have all the listing stuff saved and will just have to do a bit of tweaking to get them slapped into TurboLister and posted in my store and for auction.

What a dope I am! Almost two full months of stewing, considering, investigating, yadda yadda yadda. No more! I’m off to get those darn things up and selling for me.

Stay well.

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

All the installation and utilization information is posted on a blog, and as I was reading the posts, I was reminded of just how scary I found working with programs and HTML was when I first started working on the web. The thing is, no matter how great wysiwyg html editors are, you really need to buck up and learn at least the rudimentaries of coding. By that I mean, try to figure out how things work. You don’t have to know coding itself, but at least take a look at html versions of what you’re working on.

I use Nvu as my editor, and it has the capability of showing the code for what I’m doing by way of a button at the bottom of the working page. I would imagine that most editors have this. So, take a look at what’s going on and how things are structured. Highlight a part of what you’re working on and see where it fits in your page in the code view. You probably want to save your document, then “save as” document 2 so you can play around.

If you have a program you’ve downloaded, you most likely had to unzip it to start using it, as I did with the blog program. That means, no matter how badly I mess up the unzipped one, I still have the original to go back to. Simply delete the one you screwed up, unzip the original again, and start all over.

There are lots of free books out there that will tell you about html, but I found them intimidating. Much easier just to get in and muck around to see how stuff works. That may not suit your style, and the books may be very helpful for you. The point is just that you need to get over being afraid and let yourself learn. You might find the same great sense of satisfaction that I did in figuring out something and having it work!

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

Anyway, this looked like it could work for me, so I signed up on Monday, nearly two full weeks until the event opened. Plenty of time to put together a book and get all my ducks in a row (I’ll tell you about the ducks are in a minute).  Then the gods said “Hah!” My 18-year old nephew, who’s been using our second car, got distracted (by the two young women riding with him - don’t get me started!), misjudged a red light, and totalled the car. Luckily, no one had any serious injuries, but if you’ve been through this, you know how it takes over your life for a few days. We’re well insured with a company that provided great service - but still…

So, the last few days have been a scramble! These are the ducks: 1) write, edit, rewrite book (topic eBay’s new rules about digital delivery and how to work with them); 2) set up sign-up page (sign up for my newsletter so you can get the book); 3) set up autoresponder for confirmed, or double, opt-in; 4) figure out what the upsell is going to be (since my book’s about eBay, I decided to put together an all-eBay package); 5) build the download page; 6) put together the sales material for the ebook package (gather and resize the ecover images and then list all the books - all 45 of them); 7) package the books for download - 4 zipped packs of books so the download isn’t too burdensome;  8) upload; 9) test, test, and test some more to be sure everything works. Phewww!

Got it done last night, and the giveaway started this morning. 9 signups already!

Click here to take a look at the giveaway. I did a spot check on it and there seems to be a lot of new stuff, of course mixed in with the old. There’s a staggering 51 pages to look through, so I’m going back when I have a couple of free hours. It can be tedious - you’ll have to give up your name and email address to get the gifts - but it’s also a great resource for collecting good information and books to sell.

Now, about my new bookstore. I’ve been struggling to put a store together, mostly in taking the time to do all the picky things you need to do to get stuff online (listings, download/thank you pages, payment buttons, etc.), so when I got email from John Thornhill that his ebook store price was going to go up, I decided I’d go ahead and buy a store from someone I knew as reputable and successful. This, of course, the middle of dealing with insurance and trying to get my giveaway stuff done. I downloaded the store and played around with it a bit, but figured out that I’d best wait until this weekend to actually get it uploaded. But this time, the gods had good news for me. John just released his new store, and it’s amazing!

I don’t know how many books are on it, ’cause I haven’t looked all the way through it. It has a nice look, and I know there are quality books that should sell. But the really amazing thing is how spot-on dead-easy it is to install. You upload everything (takes awhile because of the tons of books), then you go to an admin panel that is astounding at what it includes and how easy it is to use. Click a button on the side panel, enter your information (paypal, google adsense, clickbank, an audio bookstore affiliation, and more) and everything’s done for you. In fact, I worked through all the steps while I was watching Grey’s Anatomy last night.

The store has to be in a root directory, not in a folder (www.yourdomain.com, not www.yourdomain.com/bookstore). I’m not ready to buy more hosting and more domain names, and I really didn’t want to mess with what I’ve already done at www.smilingpartners.com, so instead I went for a subdomain: www.ebooks.smilingpartners.com. My hosting account allows a bunch of subdomains, and since I’m not off putting up a bunch of niche/adsense sites, it just makes a lot of sense to use the subdomains. The EBook Market link on the side of www.smilingpartners.com, then goes to the subdomain.

Go take a look at the bookstore. If you think it’s as great a deal as I do, look at the right column, in the members log-in box, and click to join up (it will take you to the ebook store sales page). Or you can go here to be taken directly. John’s raising the price on Tuesday, May 20, so before then it’s a terrific bargain! The increased price is actually more in keeping with the worth of this great product.

Be well, and have a great weekend!

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.

As you know if you’ve been reading for anytime at all, my biggest thing is research. To a fault, actually, because I’m often stuck in the research mode and forget to move onto the actual doing mode. However, this time I jumped directly into the doing before the research. What a dope!

It started when I picked up a public domain tool. Public domain, if you don’t know, is information available to be used without limitation because copyrights and patents have expired, whether because of time passed or no action taken by the rights holder. It’s a tremendous resource for anyone interested in information marketing. One very famous use of public domain material is that of the The Secret. Rhonda Byrne built a billion-dollar empire that started with a reworking of the 1910 book, The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles. So you can see the power of this.

Anyway, I got the tool and was looking around the Project Gutenberg site. Their mission is to make all the public domain material they can available on the web. It’s an amazing collection, and it’s growing daily. I was looking at the top 100 downloads and came across The Encyclopedia of Needlework, and I was stunned. It’s over 600 pages of information, and it has more than 800 illustrations to go with it. Wow! I decided that I needed this, and that I would organize it and sell it.

I downloaded everything, spent a few days on formatting and getting a table of contents with links, to avoid the need to scroll through all of that to get where you wanted in the book. It’s beautiful and I love it and nobody seems to want to buy it at eBay.

In my own defense, I did do a little research on eBay. There are physical copies of the book that do sell, but apparently the sales have more to do with buying an antique book than with getting the information. I did not do any research outside of eBay. I still haven’t, to tell the truth, but I’m thinking I won’t find a lot of demand for the product. Oh well…

One thing that was reaffirmed in doing this work was how much I love OpenOffice. It’s an alternative to Microsoft Word, and is a free program. I’d used it before, but it’s a huge program and I had to remove it from my old computer. Now that I don’t have a problem with disc space, I’m using it as my word program. But the really incredible thing is how easy it is to use to write books. A number of the features mimic those of a wysiwyg html editor: I can insert images and have them stay put, links are easy to add, and it’s just generally fun to use. The help section can be a little funny (a geek’s take on the problem doesn’t always match the way I’m searching for an answer, but so far I’ve been able to find what I need). It’s certainly no more difficult to work through than Microsoft. The crowning feature is that you can save your work to .pdf with a click of a button, and all your stuff stays where it’s supposed to stay (pictures, boxes, links, etc.).

Oh, and did I mention it’s free? Completely free! I’m using it instead of Word and haven’t found a single thing lacking, certainly not for my needs.

All right. Moral of the story is that you really do need to research your ideas to see if there’s anyone out there willing to pay money for what you want to share. And try Open Office.

Enough for today. Be well.

©2008 www.judimehrens.com. All Rights Reserved.