Earlier this year eBay published an announcement to all sellers that had many users up in arms. The change in policy affected selling ebooks and software within eBay’s standard auction categories.

eBay no longer allows digital downloads (including resale rights, master resale rights and even private label rights books) to be sold and collected by the purchases. This affected more sellers than most would guess (unless you’re already in this arena as a marketer of ebooks) and many have lost hundreds of dollars of monthly income as a result in the change in policy.

Website giant eBay seldom explains their actions - similar in fact to their April 2008 decision to move their affiliate program in house and away from Commission Junction - so the online marketer has no recourse but to speculate the reason for the change. Forums have been buzzing about resale rights products and one off sales of ebooks and some of the possible reasons for the change are listed below.

• Overnight Power Seller Status - An internet ‘technique’ for credibility - buyers and sellers of cheap ebooks gain quick, cheap feedback - potentially reaching power seller status in a week’s time. eBay discourages any action that gains such status so quickly so discontinuation of digital goods might have been their way of nullifying the technique.
• A large percentage of ebooks and software sold on ebay are low in quality and value. Support for the products are minimal to none and likelly have been the lion’s share of refund and third-party negotiations. Customer service is never profitable and it has been speculated that eBay simply didn’t want to deal with these items in their system, anymore.
• eBay partner PayPal stopped offering buyer protection for digital items quite some time ago. Therefore eBay was left with the negotiations between unhappy buyers and unscrupulous sellers. Eliminating all digital products (even the high quality ebooks and software) helps eBay to eliminate all the hassle that come with low quality items.

The Solution for eBook Buyers and Sellers - eBay Classified

One of the first avenues for marketers to make money selling digital products on eBay was via eBay classifieds. Today, eBay still allows digital products to be sold through this venue.

eBay classified ads run for one month and cost less than $10 to post. No other fees are tacked on and the standard auction posting “final value fee” is non-existant. Furthermore, classified ads run along with the regular auction listings, and still capitalize on eBay’s massive share of traffic.

Some common complaints from eBay sellers are that listings in classifieds take a long time before they start gaining any serious traffic. This is the result of the standard search results throughout eBay - sorted to display ending soonest first by default - the classified ads don’t generally show up until they’re almost ready to close.

While some say they don’t get much traffic to their eBay classified ads, others claim to get a lot. With a catchy title and thumbnail graphic, you’ll likely get enough traffic to your listing to make the ad worthwhile. With an attention to pristine copy you could be using your ad to gain both sales and subscribers.

I will write more advanced techniques using eBay classifieds for selling ebooks and software (namely those with resale rights) in a later post.

I believe it and my affiliate commissions attest to it as well.

Although my Squidoo pages aren’t generating much of an income for the Children’s Defense Fund on Squidoo (I donate all my Squidoo earnings there) - the marketing techniques I’ve been learning have been increasing my affiliate income - in markets I’d never thought I’d earn a dollar in.

I learned (and am continuing to incorporate) the techniques from this master resale rights product and it’s selling for just $12.99.

“Learn to Generate Traffic to Your Website, Grow Your Email List, and Earn Affiliate Commissions…All by using this FREE promotion strategy, in just minutes per day…”

Plus, because this is a relatively new resale rights ebook (actually a series since there are three bonus ebooks in the purchase) it’s easy to find the market and profit.

Squidoo ebook resale rights.

Now I’m not naming names here, as a matter of fact I fall into some of these traps on my own from time to time to. I’ll take it as a learning experience, constructive criticism, and keep moving forward.

I suggest all resale rights product owners do the same. If you’ve tried to sell and aren’t making enough sales, it’s time to try something different. There’s little sense banging your head against the wall after all.

Winston Churchill said: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Why stay in hell? Move forward - no bitching and whining - and start making sales.

If you’ve spent time reading at any of the popular forums, you’ve likely heard a lot of people whining about one product or another. They’re either saying how bad a product is or how excellent the information is and so much of this is based on personal experience level, too much time on their hands (why wouldn’t a person post their content to their own site and build a business in the process?) – or how well they know the original author. Marketing forums hold the worst of them, where people almost always discuss the latest product launch in their field, and in internet marketing there’s something new every day to talk about!

It’s not uncommon to see bipolar approaches to discussing new product launches, too. One approach will always focus on the negative parts of the product, lambasting it is a sham or as not useful. The other approach will be a little more realistic…observing what was good, what might be missing, and what could be improved upon. Usually the reviewers are not authors themselves - or for that matter students.

Often, you will see the negative comments coming from those who have had little to no success promoting the product – or who, they themselves, have had no real experience in successfully launching a product.

In contrast, you will likely see the positive comments coming from those who have successfully promoted the product and earned; or those who know marketing well enough that they could successfully promote the product if they decided to do so.

There’s a perfectly good reason for this!

Those who can successfully promote products and earn money know that almost any product, no matter how mundane it is, can be promoted with a high degree of success. Even a cheap and less than perfect ebook can bring in money if the marketer gets the product in front of the right audience. Most marketers (especially the new ones) don’t have a clue how to even determine their target market much less find them!

Smart and successful marketers know that a product doesn’t necessarily have to be radically different in order to provide information that the end-user needs most.

Here’s a real world example to a lousy or cheap ebook in the real world - McDonald’s. The food at […read the rest of this article…]

Here’s one that set me off my chair.

It’s a resale rights product.

It’s very cheap.

It spells everything out step-by-step.*

And the technique is fresh and hot.

$7 (I paid $37 for my copy when it first came out, then neglected to list it) buys you the product and the master rights. You can edit the sales letter, but not the ebook. You pay, download the ebook and within the ebook is the link to register your purchase, get signed up for the update notification list and download the reseller’s kit. It’s a paypal purchase.

Building Traffic using Web 2.0 Video Sharing Sites Such as YouTube - it’s called TubeTraffic. It’s 59 pages and loaded with case studies, screen captures, shortcuts and step by steps.

Check it out here - Web 2.0 Traffic, use it, sell it, and keep moving forward!

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* I think even my cranky visitor Vince R might even be able to understand and take the concepts further but here’s a hint if you need it - “Once you understand the core concepts and begin marketing using this technique, take it further by repeating the exact same process to other Web 2.0 video sharing sites like YouTube - it takes much, much less time for each submission and the results are multiplied with every upload.” You’ll see, check it out.

One of the online internet marketers sent this to me today as a gift. It comes with private label rights which I always appreciate since the opportunities are wide open for uses I may have for the content.

However, it’s crap. I wouldn’t even let my 12 year old submit it as her essay project to her teacher! She’d get an ‘F’!

Why, as marketers, do we keep passing this shit around? It’s useless and gives private label rights a bad name. I can’t imagine what the first person paid for it because my rights didn’t come with a sales letter, just a graphic of the cover, the .doc file and a pdf.

The problem is that the title makes it sound so appealing…A step by step guide to a task that so many of us bemoan…I’d love to follow a format and share one with my customers. But not with this product! It’s so bad I can’t even rewrite it into something good.

If you stumble upon something selling that looks like this:

Run.

Here’s why…

Top of page 5, “You’re Headline”. Hello? If a person was good enough to be a copywriter, good enough to write and sell an ebook about it anyway, you think he’d have a command of the English language wouldn’t you? “Your Headline” would be proper English. But even if it had been written in proper English it wouldn’t matter - the copy stinks. What kind of captivating, exciting chapter title is “Your Headline”?

Okay, 18 pages long. 18 pages isn’t going to teach anyone a system for copywriting. Sorry. Put your wallet away.

Certainly not these 18 pages! The report is page after page of references of “dogs dicks” (page 4), “spraying tom cats” (page 5), “shithouse” (page 3) - I can’t go on.

The whole thing reads worse than a teenager’s MSN Spaces post about how she hates the small town she’s living in…

Anyway, end of post. If you’re on a mailing list that is sending you crap like this, it’s time to unsubscribe or at the least redirect the marketer to this post. Let’s stop the tidal wave of garbage private label rights from being passed around. It’s worse than a virus.