Murray Newlands´s last blog post…Social Media Is Difficult and Worth It

E-junkie wins the gold prize for being the cheapest, fastest, most complete affiliate program manager that I’ve ever seen. It’s got a ton of options available and it’s sleek and professional. We love e-Junkie and fully recommend it.

As far as I’m aware, Clickbank does not restrict outside sales of your ebook. They are an affiliate program and hold some control on the management of that selling aspect. You need to create a promotional web page and thank you page according to their specs, but I don’t believe anything stops you from selling outside on your site or elsewhere.

Selling via PDF with no copy protection isn’t how I would go about things. PDFs can be locked and copy protected to some extent, offering some form of protection. If you have Adobe potential already, why not go one step further?

Another problem with straight PDF delivery is how you’ll actually deliver the goods. Via a download link on a web page? People can accidentally stumble across that page. Your link can make its way across the net from there and you could lose sales simply by a good search finding your page.

If you choose to email links, that does work – but how will you automate the emailing of the link after someone has purchased from you? Manually sending out emails isn’t effective because of the potential time lapse involved – what happens when you sleep? eat? go out?

Lastly, we’ve done some research into ebook software – no big advantage there, in our opinion. Even those that offer password protection require a delivery method, often sold separately for $$$.

PDF seems to be widely accepted as a format, but you’ll need to consider how you’ll distribute your product. We’re working on this and will have more posts about it this week – in the meantime, we welcome anyone’s comments and suggestions!

A couple questions I have:

– I’m inclined to sell my material as PDF’s, without any copy protection. I figure if someone really wants to copy it, they’ll figure out a way to do it. But I’d be interested in experiences others have had on this front.

– If I use ClickBank or someone like them, I assume I’m still free to market and sell my material myself directly through my website. Is this true? Or will they claim a commission on those sales, too, since one of their requirements appears to be that I maintain a web page promoting the material?

I was pretty surprised to find that actually selling ebooks wasn’t a simple thing. While it can be done fairly easily using a PayPal button for simple sales, there are many other considerations. Copying, printing, file sharing, affiliate programs, returns, shopping (for multiple offerings), programming concerns, site setup… ouch.

I’ll share more about our experience with this as we go along and learn. Hopefully we’ll save someone else some trouble and effort!