Taking Care of Business

I’ve spent the last two days going through my files to find the books I want to start listing on eBay.  In doing that, I’ve discovered an entire area that I’ve not seen addressed yet.

It should make sense to us to check each ebook and package we download to be sure it includes what it says it includes, but I had no idea that I’d find such a mess in my files! I found quite a few files that didn’t include the book the title of the file indicated, files that had requirements that I register my copy of the product before I could resell it, and files that were simply sales pages for the books.

I do know that when I began collecting this stuff as a newbie, I didn’t know even what I was supposed to be looking for. And, when presented with a huge number of products being given away, I’d just left-click and download away. My bad. However, I thought I’d been more discriminating of late. Wrong.

I think it’s important that we make sure each product offers some value. Even if you’re doing penny auctions, your customers have a right to get what they think they’re getting. We want to be sure they see us as sellers with honesty and integrity. As we move along, you’ll see that one our primary goals is to get our buyers to sign up for our newsletter or other products. Giving them a bad first product will guarantee they quickly unsubscribe from that newsletter or make sure they never buy from us. There is one pretty well-known marketer from whom I’ll never buy again because of bad/non-existent help with his product when I found it wasn’t what I expected.

Along this line, I removed a resource from the last post because all the products I downloaded from the site had a problem. I will be contacting them about those problems, but for now I certainly couldn’t recommend the site. Even though the products were offered for free, I have to wonder what kind of care they put into their purchase offerings.

So, the going is slow in my review of the books I’m going to try to put onto eBay. At least I can be somewhat confident that customers will get what they expect (knowing full well that there is always the possibility of dissatisfaction when dealing with the public).

One other thing: a number of the products I have came with the option to be rebranded. This means that I could put links to my web page inside the book, and/or I could put an affiliate code in it, so that I might make some money should my buyer then buy something from the original writer of the book. As nearly as I could tell, most of these books came to me from someone other than the author, and so marketers missed out on the opportunity to brand them themselves before giving them to me. I think they missed out because they didn’t fully review what they had. A few affiliate sales will more than make up for the time I’m spending looking at these products.

Next up, I’ll tell you about finally getting these ebooks listed, and we’ll see what kind of adventures that brings.