Ebooks are not the way to make money on eBay, as glutted as the eBay market is with them. But, there is still money to be made with them if you know how to work the system. Selling an ebook on the site subjects you to intense competition, many times by people selling the exact same product for a dollar or less. There are also those who sell them even cheaper, losing money on each transaction through eBay and PayPal fees. But there is a hidden profit potential behind those .01 ebooks.
The cheap ebooks people sell on eBay are often sold with resale rights. This means that you can always find plenty of inexpensive ebooks to sell, but it also means there are hundreds of people already selling it. But by utilizing the sales in another way, a workable list can be built in order to generate sales for the real items you are selling.
Buyers on eBay these days are looking for incredibly cheap ebooks. So to get the customers you need, your books will have to be priced similarly. By having a low price, you will get more customers, making your list grow quickly. Once the sale is made, you can talk the customer into subscribing to your newsletter or other targeted marketing that you have available. One way to convince buyers to join is to offer them more ebooks for free. With that carrot dangling above them, buyers will jump to join your list. It’s a great deal for them- free ebooks. It’s a great deal for you- a cheap customer list. And with a list in hand, the door opens for countless other ventures.
There is yet another way to create lists using eBay itself. If you don’t have a newsletter autoresponder already set up, you can actually send newsletter through the site. The site now has its own newsletter system that can be subscribed to by any of your customers, making the whole venture impossibly easy.
If you are really creative, you might even come up with two newsletters, and get buyers to subscibe to both- one through your own ezine or newsletter, and one through the eBay system. If both newsletters have complementary information, both newsletters will be of interest to buyers and both will have subscribers. This keeps your products and information firmly in the mind of the buyers, likely leading to future sales down the road.
So, think of eBay as simply the first step on the road to ecommerce, instead of the end result. Hook them there, and then release them into your own site, where the real profit potential is much higher. If you have a content site set up (and if you don’t- get one), the newsletter can direct them to your site to read the new information you will post each week or month. This drives up your site’s page views, leading to increased AdSense dollars, as well as having the items you are selling right there for the buyer to look at. It may hurt to sell something for less than the transaction costs, but you’ll be feeling a lot better when those affiliate checks start arriving.
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