Read this post very very carefully – there is valuable information in here that NO-ONE else is telling you. If you act on it, it could be worth a lot of money to you. Initially I was going to “pad this out” into a short 16 page report and charge maybe $20 for it but I’ve decided to give this away for free…so read it carefully!
When I started listing CD-ROMs on eBay I thought most of my customers would be one-off purchases. These would be people either looking to boost their own feedback by buying a relatively cheap item, or people who bought because they were interested in that subject but were unlikely to buy products on other subjects. I was completely wrong! Whilst during the first few weeks that was certainly true, most were one-off purchases I noticed an interesting pattern from July 2008 onwards – I was getting repeat business AND multiple purchases.
Then the emails started to come in – “I’m interested in buying 10/20/50 of your products to use on my web site, any chance of a discount?”. So I created bespoke listings for these people on eBay, put all the products on 1 CD-ROM and shipped them out. This was happening at least once a week. I have had 3 sales where buyers have bought my whole shop – ALL 400 items in one go!
So what does this tell us? Well it told me that by the summer of 2008 the profile of the eBay ebook buyer had totally changed in about 3 months. Up until March 2008 when eBay were still allowing digital downloads the typical buyer was only buying cheap ebooks for feedback, he or she probably never even read them. 3 months later my typical customer was someone who either already had an online business, or was looking to start one. My eBay shop Bestmultimediaguides had moved from being a retailer to a wholesaler.
Let me give you a very real example of where this can lead to. I got one such email from an eBay customer back in July – his name is Garry Short, an eBay Powerseller at the time. Garry bought a CD-ROM from me, was very happy with it and then told me he was looking to put together a weight loss product. Did I have any more products in that niche that I could help him with?
So I had a good look through the literally thousands of resale rights products I have on my hard drive, suggested a few products he could use as bonuses for his weight loss product, and we did the deal. This is the completed web site, which has been very successful with over 100 sales in a very short time:
(link opens in a new window)
A very nice quick and easy $5000 earned in a short time with very little effort – that’s how to use resale rights products effectively.
I supplied Garry with the free bonuses included in that product, and he tells me that they have been very much instrumental in persuading people to buy his weight loss product. However what is more interesting is that as a result of communicating with each other we decided to create an information product together. This was to be marketed away from the internet via classified advertising. At this time (July/August 2008) people were just starting to realise that the years of so-called economic boom and prosperity were about to come to an end.
What to do? Garry and I had the answer to that (both of us have a financial background) – a step by step guide on how to survive the coming financial crisis. More on this tomorrow…..
The lessons from this particular post?
- The typical buyer of digital media on eBay now is either an online business owner or wants to be an online business owner, NOT someone looking for cheap information that they’ll never read although they’re still out there
- By having a presence on eBay try and see the bigger picture. Never mind the stuff you’re selling on there, look upon eBay as free advertising for your business. Be open to other eBayers contacting you – you never know, you may just have found your next Joint Venture partner