I have probably spent more time and money than most people into researching this. When I think how many weeks, months and even years I wasted – never mind the money – jumping from one idea to the next I could cry. At least I had one advantage; I was running a very successful business so I had the money to invest in internet marketing ideas, and I also had quite a bit of time to do this at quieter times of the business year. Without going through the whole myriad of different ways you can start an online business I’m going to give you my four letter recommendation right here, right now:

Ebay

Yes, eBay – the auction site that at times is infuriating to deal with, that will suspend you for no apparent reason without telling you why (happened to me), that will change their policies at a moment’s notice, and who resolutely refuse to answer your customer service queries. The same eBay where many of the buyers seem to have only just learned how to switch on a computer and can only communicate in txtspk, rather than English. The one where the scammers all come together to fleece the unsuspecting and naive seller and the very same site where you as a seller are absolutely 100% guaranteed to get the worst possible price for your product.

There – I’ve said it.

So why do it?

Well, if you fit any of the following criteria:

1. You have NO previous business experience
2. You have NO IDEA what products or services you want to sell on the internet to start your online career
3. You have NO technical knowledge of creating web sites, graphics, search engine optimisation, how to get traffic etc, etc
4. You don’t know where to get started and you’re suffering from “information overload”

Here are 4 good reasons why (in my very humble opinion) eBay is the best place on the internet for you to start earning money online

1. You don’t need to worry about how to create a web site, or shop front for your product – eBay do it for you. Sure, there’s all sorts of tools you can use to improve the look of your listing but you can learn those “on the job”
2. How do you get traffic to your site? With eBay consistently being in the Top 5 sites in the world you don’t have to worry about people finding your product – eBay have driven the traffic there for you
3. You WILL get sales on eBay – I am constantly amazed by what people will buy on there, and also what they will sometimes pay. Getting sales, making your first few pounds or dollars online will give you incredible confidence to want more!
4. Selling on eBay lets you learn as you go along but…..you will still get sales and earn money whilst you are “studying”. Sure in time you will want to create your own web site, which is where the real money is, but eBay is a great “apprenticeship”.

And since eBay banned the sales of digital downloadable products such as ebooks just over a year ago there is a whole new opportunity to make money from info products. It was thanks to this decision that I was able to put together my own product, a definitive guide to making money on eBay from PHYSICAL info products.

If you are serious about getting started selling info products via eBay then you must read my report by clicking below:

www.easyauctioncashsystem.com

If I’d had a package like that 15 months ago I wouldn’t have wasted a few thousand dollars on trying to get started on eBay and I would have saved myself several weeks if not months. Try it now.

The basic idea was this:

You added someone who paid a few cents for your eBook on say, Dog Training, to your customer list. A few days later you followed the sale up by selling them a more expensive product. All the money was in the so-called ‘back end’ rather than the ‘front end’. Someone paid 50 cents for “The Basic Dog Training Guide”, you then added that person to your customer list.

Maybe a week later, because that person had bought from you, he or she was more receptive to buying from you again. You were a familiar name rather than some business they had never heard of. Still with me? So you sent them an email with an offer for, say “The Expert’s Guide to Dog Training – set of 4 DVDs” selling for $37. A percentage of people who had bought your original “50 cent basic eBook” then bought your “$37 advanced package”.

That’s standard marketing that works all over the world, on the internet or off it – large companies and small companies.
However…..
The system of selling 50 cent eBooks via eBay depended on one very important thing to make it profitable – “automated digital downloads”. That ‘mouthful’ just means that it was possible to set up your eBay account to AUTOMATICALLY email your customer the link to the eBook as soon as they paid.
Your costs of processing the order were ZERO (no cost in materials or postage), your time spent in processing the order was ZERO because all this happened automatically. So the eBay part of your business ran on auto pilot and this system worked pretty well for a lot of people.

That is until the fateful day at the end of March 2008 when, without warning or discussion, eBay suddenly changed the rules….and the hundreds, even thousands of ebook sellers shrank to just a handful.

With the above business model there was no thought of trying to get get “front end” profits out of eBay. Many sellers sold their products at a loss but they felt it was worthwhile because they would make their profits on the back end. Fair enough.

However, I soon discovered that with the new system of selling actual physical CD-ROMS that you could charge far higher prices and that customers were prepared to pay higher prices.

The profile of the “ebook” buyer also changed, from someone who was basically buying cheap feedback without any interest in the product to someone who wanted to resell the ebook to someone else. And they were happy to pay a premium for this. In short the “quality”, if that’s the right word, of someone buying an ebook off eBay improved.

A final thought about making profits on front end sales – every single product I have listed on eBay makes me a profit….not just the back end but also the front end.

I actually measured the decline of eBay ebook sellers over this period – virtually 95%. Sure, one or two of the “old hands” published information on their blog about how to change your business model. This advice really boiled down to “put your ebook onto a CD-ROM” and sell that instead. Which was all fine and logical however……even those advising doing this couldn’t be sure it would succeed because they hadn’t tried it.

• Would buyers used to instant digital download be prepared to wait a few days to receive their CD-ROM in the post? Remember most buyers of ebooks via digital download were only interested in “buying” feedback
• How to present the CD-ROM? Did I need nice graphics? Should I use an “expensive” CD case or something cheaper?
• What price to sell at?
• Would buyers used to paying literally pennies for ebooks be prepared to pay pounds for the same thing?
• Would the profile of the buyer remain the same?

There were about 4 or 5 other serious sellers of ebooks, all far more experienced than me who were also getting to grips with the new system. I did something I would very strongly recommend to anyone entering any online business – I bought products from them. Not because I wanted or needed those products to sell myself or indeed because I had any interest in them.

No – I wanted to check their order and sales processes. I wanted to see how they were presenting their CDs. The outcome was actually quite interesting. One of the most successful ones was selling at prices 3 times higher than the others, the CD itself was simply put inside a plastic sleeve without a label and without a case. I’m not sure I would have trusted the British postal system to deliver my CDs without breaking them….

Another was using a high quality DVD case, yet another was using a cheap CD case. Some put graphics labels on their CDs, some didn’t. I guess everyone was like me – they were testing different methods to see which worked. Initially I used high quality DVD cases, when I switched to cheaper CD cases for my cheaper £1.97 products I didn’t notice a drop in sales, or in positive feedback.

I came to the conclusion that I could get away with a cheaper case for the cheaper products but it was better to use a DVD case with good graphics for the higher priced items. One thing I did notice – most of the other ebook sellers seemed to price everything at one price, whereas I included quite a few higher priced items up to £20. Given that the original digital download ebook sellers ONLY sold their ebooks to build their customer lists (their profit came with follow up sales) I guess they continued with the “list building only” mentality with the CD-ROMs.

That’s fine, I’d be the last person to criticise that, after all that was a successful business model. However what I noticed was that NO-ONE and I mean no-one ever mentioned that you could actually make a good profit from FRONT end sales. Search the blogs of the eBay “gurus” – you won’t find that mentioned there, have a look at their eBay shops and you’ll find virtually all their listings at the same low price.

Hmmm…..were the “gurus” missing a trick here? We’ll have a look at that in more detail tomorrow.

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.

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

I had actually intended to release my first self-created information product on this very subject – “How To Make Money Selling Digital Download Products On eBay”. Everything was ready to go – I’d spent a huge amount of time researching the subject and spent quite a lot of money as well. Then came the announcement from eBay; I had created a product for which there was no longer any demand!

So you can imagine how deflated I felt at that point. I did the same as a lot of other people – went onto eBay and Internet Marketing forums, checked out the blogs of some of the bigger eBay sellers, just to try and get some information, to see if anybody had any idea what to do next. Quite frankly there was carnage on the blogs and forums. Ebay Power Sellers were complaining that eBay had taken away their livelihood without any prior warning – there were people on there making 5 figures a month from selling eBooks who were now closing down their businesses.

Many people made the comment “I’m going to have to go back to getting a real job”!

I personally couldn’t believe it, so many people were just willing to quit, no-one seemed to have any ideas as to how to overcome this. Then someone mentioned the idea of actually burning each eBook onto a CD-ROM so that a physical product could be sent out to the buyers. This would be in compliance with eBay policy.

Interestingly enough that suggestion was generally met with a lot of scepticism. I suspect many eBook sellers had got used to the easy life with their orders being automatically fulfilled, instead of actually having to do some work. A lot of these people had probably never burned a CD-ROM in their lives, and judging by the comments most of them had never sold a physical product before on eBay. The idea of creating a physical product, packaging it and posting it to a customer was a novel one to sellers who had got used to the “automated delivery” lifestyle.

About 95% of them left overnight, never to be seen again. By the way, this isn’t just a figure plucked out of the air, along the lines of “88.6% of statistics are made up on the spot”
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March 2008 – 27.475 ebooks listed on eBay UK alone

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October 2008 – 542 only and over half of those were mine….
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Instead of eBay having killed off eBooks, they actually offered up a fantastic new opportunity which most of the previous sellers simply overlooked.

A week later, having got over the fact that I had wasted several weeks researching and writing a product that no-one was ever going to buy I decided to start all over again and conduct my own research – How To Sell Ebooks On Ebay Without Digital Downloads.

And so, at the beginning of April 2008, the idea of BestMultimediaGuides was born……