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The Truth About Selling E-books on the Internet
by Albert Z
If you've surfed the internet for a while lately, you might have noticed the incredible amount of hype
generated around e-books, information products, resale rights and similar stuff. Indeed, it is a popular
subject since it promises a way to generate passive income, like real estate or wall-street shares, with
a minimal amount of effort.
Truth is, many internet marketers are now using all this hype to their own interest, by selling
poor-quality informational products at very high prices, or promising blatantly ridiculous incomes:
don't get caught in the marketing trap!
I'm Albert Z. and I've been selling e-books for a while on the internet: I own the site Culture-Books
and can tell you a couple of REAL things about selling e-books online!
What you might have been taught up to now is that:
 selling e-books requires no effort
you can make very high incomes every month (greater than $2000 per month)
selling e-books requires no skills
there is no investment to be made
it works on autopilot
Now, check those statings with the truth:
selling e-books requires some months for setting up your activity
you will make low incomes (100s), unless you write yourself a very good piece of text, which is time-consuming
selling e-books requires designing skills, copywriting skills (for most of your sales), a sense of marketing and lots of organization
indeed it does work on autopilot! but if you want to increase your activity over time you will HAVE to devote some time to it!
you will need a website, hosting, and provided you don't spend any money on designing, seo tools etc, initial goods for selling, you will end up spending about $50-100, provided you're a savvy money-saver!
As you can see, selling e-books is not very different from any other real-life activity: it requires work
and skills, lots of time (at least initially) and a little bit of overhead to set up everything! But it
does indeed have some advantages:
overhead costs are very low if compared with other activities
once set up, it requires very little maintenance time
it's fun (which is very important ;) ), watch the style of an e-book store here , doesn't it look fun?
it earns quite good money for the low amount of effort required
So, how do you go about selling ebooks? There are mainly three ways: EBay, ClickBank, or your own website.
The route I chose was eBay and personal website, because they are sinergic (they help each other): having
a site makes it so much easier to upload your images, to have a professional look etc; plus you get
webspace and you can just send out emails with a link for downloading your product (instead of attaching
your product with the mail, which incurs in many problems with spam filters or filled email boxes!).
EBay on the other hand brings good free, relevant traffic on your site and gives you some extra exposure
which may never hurt. It's common to offer a product for $1.50 on ebay, but selling it for $1.30 on your
site. This is a legal and intelligent way to "redirect" eBay watchers to your own site without spending a dime!
Bear in mind however that eBay and PayPal (your everyday staple when selling ebooks) charge pretty high
"default" fees that will quickly cut your revenues on low-cost ebooks (for instance, if you sell a $1.50
ebook on ebay with paypal, you might only get 0.50 revenue, which sucks big time!) so you're better off
selling products with a higher cost, in the range of $5-10 (so even if you lose that $1 in fees, you'll
still keep a good percent of your money)!
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