My first internet product was going to be about “How to make money selling ebooks on eBay via digital download”. Obviously after eBay’s banning of digital products in March 2008, that idea was out of the window. Whilst most ebook sellers left eBay never to return, one or two switched on marketers had different ideas – why not put the ebooks onto a CD-ROM, post that out to the customer, and hey presto, you’ve complied with eBay’s new policy. Overall I am very sceptical of the so-called internet marketing “gurus” but there are 2 guys out there that made sense to me – Ray Johnson and John Thornhill. Out of the very few people online that I trust, Ray and John would be at the top of the list.
In their blogs they actually gave some very good advice as to how this ban could be overcome. Some of the things they were writing had already occurred to me, other ideas were new to me. Originally I had intended to just change a few chapters in my ebook “How to make money selling ebooks on eBay via digital download” so that I could rename it “How to make money selling ebooks on eBay via CD-ROM”. I had previously sold a lot of film type DVDs on eBay so the process wan’t going to be that different.
However….it occurred to me that everyone was in uncharted territory here. Even those who had successfully sold a huge amount of ebooks under the digital download system couldn’t be 100% sure that simply selling them on a CD-ROM would work in the same way.
This was an opportunity to get in on the ground floor! Rather than just write yet another book about “How to make money selling ebooks on eBay” – and be yet another internet marketer who makes money telling people “how to make money” but without actually applying their own good advice themselves – I decided to “walk the walk and talk the talk”.
I was going to be one of the first to test out the new way of selling ebooks on eBay – find out what worked, what didn’t work and then, and only then, pass on that information to others.
So, as 95% of the successful ebook sellers closed their eBay accounts and their businesses, never to be seen again, I headed in the opposite direction. In April 2008, I opened my “digital products” store on eBay – Bestmultimediaguides.
Why did I choose the name Bestmultimediaguides?
Well, if I’m honest the name is hardly short and snappy. However I wanted a name which left people in no doubt as to what I was selling – thanks to eBay’s digital download ban the ebook had evolved to a multimedia guide on a CD-ROM. From the feedback I’ve had from customers the name is certainly memorable, so that’s pretty pleasing.
So – how long did it take for me to get my first order? How many mistakes did I make? When did I know Bestmultimediaguides had succeeded?
All the answers and much more in the next post…coming soon