My first Product!

As I mentioned in my previous post (below) I've come to the conclusion that the only way to really make money on the internet is to have a product. As a result I've been converting various pages on my website and adding some things that I've found out on the way into an eBook. This took quite a few days to complete, with graphics, pagination issues, indexing and creating cover art, but by last Tuesday I had my eBook: 'The Secret to Maximizing your Web Traffic' was written.

Of course, that wasn't the end of things. I needed a sales page (which can be found here). Then I needed a way of actually physically selling the eBook. I created a protected directory for the downloads, an isolated web page to facilitate downloads. That way almost all my infrastructure was complete. But I still needed a way of actually physically selling my product.

ClickBank was a no-brainer just because of the sheer number of people using it. But it is expensive and fairly inflexible in terms of the features offered. In searching for an alternative means of handling affiliates as well as payments I came across paydotcom.com which seemed to offer an excellent service. As a result I set-up paydotcom as my main processing and affiliate-handling service. Which literallly took three minutes. After adding the payment links to my web pages and my affiliate handling links I was done.

Half an hour ago I ftp'd all my pages to the website and I was up and running. In a bout of creativity I'd even created a whole load of affiliate marketing material, including banners, eZine advertising copy, classified advertising copy and an e-mail newsletter. Things were looking good!

Admittedly, if you're thinking of creating your own eBooks (after this first one I have a further five in the pipeline) there are several big hurdles. You need to convert your text to PDF, you need to create graphics and you need to put the whole thing together. Personally I'm very hands-on about this (it probably comes from having an artistic bent and having worked in the publishing trade for a while). But if you're not into doing it all yourself you could do worse than having a look at the services offered by someone like evieb