Why Ebooks on Ebay?

Yikes, it’s been a busy week. Already I’ve fallen behind on my intention to post to this every one or two days. Oh well. Always room for improvement, right?

Over the past year I’ve been reading about internet marketing, subscribing to newsletters, collecting electronic books, article packs, software, shortcuts, tips, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  Because I’m working on a 6 year old laptop, I bought an external drive just so I’d be able to store all this stuff.  If you’ve spent any time at all in the pursuit of internet riches, you understand what I’m talking about. A lot of the stuff I have, I got from marketing “giveaways,” an opportunity for me to get ebooks and software. The marketers get my email address in return, and that generally means I’m added to a new mailing list and presented with more offers, both for free stuff and items for sale.

I have seen many of the items I received for free offered for sale on other sites. That is a big factor in my decision to focus on selling ebooks on ebay. Other reasons are that I can set up an ebay store and get started while I work on building a web site.

Throughout this year of research and procrastination, I’ve looked at a number of different ways that money is being made on the internet. Let me tell you about them.

Affiliate markting was probably the first method I researched after the ebay fiasco I told you about last time. My friend had purchased Rosalind Gardner’s The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People’s Stuff Online. Pretty heady stuff. I went through making notes, noting pages, determined to learn it all. I signed up at Clickbank and came face-to-face with indecision. There are thousands of products to choose from to promote, and I was overwhelmed. Then came the realization that I would need to put up a website, figure out advertising, and build a list. Okay, so maybe there’s something else out there that can start me out a little simpler…

I think Google Adword marketing was the next concept. Hmm, spend a couple of nickles to place an ad, send eager buyers to somebody else’s web site, and get paid. Still an affiliate method, but no website. Then another friend told me of her experience with adwords.

She bought a highly-touted how-to book, and then was convinced by the seller to upgrade to a ready-made website selling this same product. She already knew it was going to be a very popular product (all the gurus said so), and all she had to do was follow the instructions in the book and she’d soon be on her way to wealth. She got her domain name, and her site was installed for her on the seller’s recommended server, she signed up with google and placed her ads, and she was ready for business. Long story short, she made one sale, spent a bunch on adwords (the marketer hadn’t told her that she should stick to just having her ads on the search pages, not on individual advertiser’s pages. It turned into a very expensive lesson for her, and she could get no help from the marketer. Lucky for me, she shared the experience, and I have to admit that I’m a little afraid of adwords now. Best move on to something else.

The other side of adwords is adsense. These are the ads that appear on individual pages. The person who owns the website gets paid from google for putting the ads up, and google charges the advertiser for placing the ad on appropriate pages. The web owner must be sure to put useful content on her pages to get folks to visit the site. Nobody knows, but Google, exactly how much they pay for these ads. While I was gaining some knowledge and starting to feel like it might be time to learn this website building stuff, it was apparent that in order to make any significant money doing this, one would have to have a lot of sites going. I just wasn’t ready to commit to buying a whole bunch of domain names and hosting accounts to get started with this business model.

Along the way, in my search, I found a number of other schemes and methods. The problem is that they all come down to getting traffic to your site. An offer of a free, loaded with product web business already built for me does not good if I can’t get people to come to the site and buy stuff.

So here I am, back to ebay. I’m sorting through the ebooks I’ve accumulated, picking out a few to get listed. I need to start an ebay store and figure out the best delivery method for getting the books to the folks who buy them. And, as I said above, I am finally building a web site.

So off I go for today. I’ve downloaded a new free website builder, and my next task is to watch the videos showing me how to use the thing. Actually, I’m excited about this product. It’s from Ewen Chia, one of the top internet marketers. You can look at it here. He does have an offer for sale (that’s called the up-sell), but you don’t have to pay anything for the website builder itself. And it comes with a few bonuses.