It Isn’t About The Books
Written by Allen Brown on February 20th, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Online Auction.
Table of contents for Ebay Marketing
- Ebay Marketing - Introduction
- Turning PLR Into Gold
- It Isn’t About The Books
- Building A List And Automating Your Auctions
Now we’re going to talk about why it’s a good idea for you to sell ebooks (or reports) for a dollar or less.
The books we’re talking about here aren’t PLR books or ones with resell rights; these are books that you’ll write yourself or pay someone else to write just for you.
The reason you don’t care how much you charge for the books is because you’re not concerned with the book itself. What you care about is the product(s) you’re selling inside the book. And no, this strategy probably isn’t quite what you think.
See, what you’re going to do for this next trick is to find exact items on the internet and then write a short ebook or report about them. Then you’ll put affiliate links in the book and when the readers click through and make a purchase then that’s when you’ll make real money. If that doesn’t make sense to you quite yet, it will shortly once I explain exactly what I do.
You might be confused so let me break it down for you.
As you probably already know, there are too many stores on the internet to count. These stores range from huge stores that everyone knows - like Wal-Mart - all the way down to small specialty stores that are run out of people’s bedrooms. All of these stores sell their own items but of course the items they sell will overlap each others sometimes. For example, many stores sell LCD televisions. However, not all stores sell LCD televisions for the same price.
So what you want to do is find products that are usually cheaper (but not a lot) online than they are in actual stores. So, this will take a little research on your part but not much. In fact, you can just grab the Sunday paper and find products that are on sale in stores and then check to see if you can find them even cheaper online.
Once you have your product then you want to go online and find this product at its absolute cheapest. In other words, if we stay with the LCD television example, you would search all over the net and find the three or four cheapest stores that sell LCD televisions. Ideally, you’d want to target a specific LCD tv that is cheaper at the online stores than at the offline ones (in this case, most are cheaper online).
Then you would sign-up as an affiliate (if you don’t know what an affiliate is just keep reading, it’ll be explained shortly) with these stores. Then write a short report about LCD televisions, benefits of buying them online, how to buy them for cheap, etc.. Include your affiliate links in the book and then sell the book - with the affiliate links - on eBay for about twenty-five cents or so.
Perhaps one of the best methods here is to create a report either on how to find these products for less or how to find good quality ones that are still cheaper than the more commonly known (and more expensive) ones. Most people looking for such a product will gladly pay 25 cents in hopes of maybe saving a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars. Of course, you might need to do a little research to actually know what the cheapest product of a certain kind is, or to read up on which ones are really good, but once you get this method down, you can really whip out these reports fast.
The most important part here is to target the EXACT products that you have affiliate links for by putting the product name or item type in your title. For instance, you might have a title that says “Learn how to get [Merchant name or exact product model] for less,” or you can sometimes even get away with being more general and target something like “Learn how to get cheap LCD TV’s.” The trick here is that you want to grab people trying to find a specific product for less on eBay. If you do some searching ahead of time and see that the prices on eBay really aren’t less, all the better because they’ll be more likely to follow your affiliate links in your reports!
You can even take this a step further and offer to help your customer (of your new report) pick out whatever it is they’re interested in or that your book is about. For instance, if you have a book on LCD TV’s and how to find the cheapest ones online, you could offer to give them your advice (based on your research or current knowledge) to picking out one while also directing them to your affiliate link.
What’s an Affiliate?
Many of the stores on the internet have affiliate programs. How these programs work is that people sign-up through the store to advertise for the store and its products. Then the affiliate is given a code that they should use that will direct potential customers to the site. This code is unique for each affiliate so that when a potential buyer clicks the link, the store knows who sent the customer. Then that affiliate will get a certain percentage of any purchases the referred customers make.
So, here’s how it’s done:
Go to an online store and scroll down to the bottom of the screen. You’ll see a variety of clickable links but one of them should say something like “become an affiliate” or “join our affiliate program“. Just look for the word “affiliate”.
Click on the affiliate link.
Then follow the directions for signing-up. At the end of the signing-up and once you’re accepted, you’ll be given a link that you’ll use to send customers to that store.
This is the link you’ll want to include in the book you sell on eBay. Again, this link is unique to you and let’s the store know you were the one who referred the customer.
There are also affiliate networks that allow you to sign up for several different merchants that have affiliate programs at once. CommissionJunction.com, ShareASale.com, and Linkshare.com are three of the most well known ones.
Really everybody wins with affiliate programs. You’re able to get money without actually having any website, products, or anything. The store is able to get a lot of people (affiliates) pushing their products that they don’t have to pay unless a sale is made.
Becoming an affiliate is actually very easy and has the potential to make you some good money.
A Step-by-Step Example
Okay, so let’s go through an example together just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
First you need to pick a product. Let’s say you decide that you want to target digital cameras because you just bought a new one. More specifically, you just bought a Canon PowerShot SD1000 Silver Digital Camera. You love yours so you know you can quickly write a great report.
So you can go to Google or a similar search engine (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) and search for “cheap Canon PowerShot SD 1000 Silver Digital Camera”. Then you can go through and find websites that actually offer prices and reviews.
Or you could cheat a little bit and go straight to a price comparison website. Again, if you don’t know one, just search on Google or another search engine for “list of price comparison sites”. Once you get the list, make sure you take a look at several of them because they aren’t all the same.
For example, for our Canon digital camera, I went to one site and got a list of ten different prices and then went to another site and only got a list of three prices. So be sure to take a look at several price comparison sites before you actually decide which one to use.
Now, once you have your site, the next thing you want to do is choose the three or four stores that are selling your Canon camera the cheapest. Then go to each of these stores
and sign-up as an affiliate. (As a side note, these price comparison sites are affiliates for these stores as well.)
Once you’re an affiliate, take your affiliate links and put them in the book you’ll sell on eBay. Also include useful information about the camera: what you like, what it can do, etc.
Then sell the book for a dollar or less. Remember you just want people to get the book so you don’t want to make them pay too much at all.
Once they get the book and read it, hopefully they’ll decide to buy and click on one of your affiliate links. When they do, if they buy the camera, you’ll get a percentage of the sale.
Tagged with: affiliate • ebook • idea • money • plr • resell • resellers