So, in the middle of April 2008 I took my plunge and created my very first information product on CD-ROM and listed it on eBay for the princely sum of £7.95. This was a product about how to go about getting more dates, which seemed to be a fairly hot topic. I actually created this product myself, using a combination of resale rights products already out there. The product finished up as a series of 3 “mini products” combining together into 1 overall product.
The first part of the product was a general one about how to “chat up” and get dates with women, the 2nd part was about how to use online dating services – the do’s and don’ts, and the 3rd part was a nice little product with 12 different ideas for dates. It took me about a week from start to finish to put the product together, I did everything myself including the graphics.
So I then sat back and waited for the orders to come rolling in. My initial target was to have 20 products listed on eBay, all unique to me, all reasonably high value ones i.e. not the £2.00 ebooks on CD-ROM that were appearing. The second product was also in the “Relationship” niche but this one was about overcoming marriage problems. Again the same format – I used 3 resale rights ebooks and played around with them to create a “super product”. This took about 5 days to create.
At about this point it hit me that if I wanted to achieve my target of 20 listings on eBay that it would take me a good few months. It would be a long time before I saw any real results, and more importantly, this wasn’t going to be a method I could teach other people to copy. Who wants to wait several months for their internet business to start earning money? I certainly didn’t so I couldn’t really expect anyone else to!
Two weeks had now passed since I had created my first listing and there were still no orders. I was starting to get a little worried. Perhaps eBay had killed off the eBook market with their digital download ban? Don’t think I was ready to quit, but I did start to wonder what I could do to change things.
I realised that although I had an eBay shop set up, there were only 2 products in there. Not much reason for people to stay long in the shop and browse. So rather than spending the next few months creating more “unique to me” products I decided to list several ebooks exactly as I had them. Instead of each listing taking nearly a week, these now took me about 20 minutes. Aha!
By the end of April I had 33 products listed.
Exactly 17 days after my first listing I got my first sale! “Date and Pick up Any Woman” finally sold for £7.95 plus postage and packing. Bestmultimediaguides, the experiment into selling ebooks on eBay without digital download, was finally under way.
And the answer to the question in the title? A combination of the 2 – I needed my own unique products to differentiate myself from everyone else but…………I also needed lots of the standard £2 ebooks that buyers were already searching for.