Increase Your Affiliate Earning Potential With An eCommerce Online Business

If you’re an affiliate marketer then you understand the fact that the more products you have to promote, the better commission checks you’re going to receive at the end of every month.

If you’re used to promoting one or two programs at a time, it’s time for you to explore a new option which will allow you to increase your profits more than you ever thought possible.

The world of internet commerce has created more opportunities for affiliate marketers than any other program ever has - the opportunity to have an entire ecommerce online storefront, full of products you can make commissions off of, all based in whatever niche you choose!

Building Your Own eCommerce Online Store

Having your own ecommerce online store is actually much simpler than most people think. A way to build an affiliate ecommerce store is by using data feeds. Data feeds make it possible to display products from one or more merchants in the same web site.

Data feeds are similar to the RSS feeds used by blogs - an ecommerce store set up by a traditional offline business will place descriptions, pictures, and prices of their products into these feeds, and then affiliate marketers can incorporate these feeds into their own ecommerce store and make a commission off of each product sold.

You can either build your own online store, or you can utilise the services of an ecommerce solutions company like Datafeedr.com who will walk you through all the steps and support you as you get your online presence built.

We recommend using the services of an ecommerce solutions company when building your ecommerce online store, simply because they already have all of the software in place to set up your data feeds.

Data feeds are the lifeblood of an ecommerce online store, as they are the ecommerce software that adds new products for you to promote to the site. Adding products manually to your ecommerce online store is certainly possible, but it is a very time consuming process.

Data feeds take all the guesswork out of adding new products to your ecommerce online site, making it easier for you to make better profits with a wider selection to offer your visitors.

What Are You Waiting For?

There’s never been a better time to build your own ecommerce online store, full of products that you could be making generous commissions from for every sale.

The folks at Datafeedr.com have millions of different products that you can choose from for your ecommerce online store; and are ready to help you get your web site up and running in no time!

Watch the video at Datafeedr.com and see how easy it is to set up your own affiliate data feed stores.

Digital Products & eBay

In early 2008, eBay make a shocking announcement that rocked the worlds of sellers around the world.  Countless people have made good incomes by selling digital products like eBooks and software on eBay.

But that all came crashing down when eBay made the announcement that they would no longer allow digital downloads in standard auction listings. There has been a lot of speculation over why eBay chose to ban digital listings.

Here are some of the possible reasons:

•    PayPal doesn’t offer buyer protection for digital items.  Perhaps eBay felt it should eliminate them in order to eliminate a lot of the hassles that came with buyers who were unhappy with the quality of items but weren’t covered by the buyer protection policies.
•    Buyers and sellers of cheap eBooks are often simply looking for quick, cheap feedback.  eBay discourages anything that gets people “undeserved” feedback, so eBay might have felt these digital auctions were a big source of this type of feedback.
•    A lot of digital items are notoriously low in quality.  Perhaps eBay simply didn’t want to deal with these items being in their system, as it could harm their reputation if they continued allowing these items to be sold.
•    Digital items are also very hard to monitor for copyright violations.  It could be that eBay felt that there was too much fraud with regards to digital products, and they may have decided the hassle just wasn’t worth it anymore.

Whatever their reasons, eBay certainly turned a lot of lives upside down.  Panic spread quickly among digital product sellers.  Many of them had been making most or all of their incomes with this method for a long time.

Others quickly saw opportunity.  They realized that there were ways to make money selling their digital products on eBay even with the new restrictions.  In fact, some sellers even realized they could make more money with the new restrictions than they made before!

Creative people soon realized that these new restrictions weren’t as detrimental as some people thought.  They quickly came up with new ideas for selling digital items.

eBay Classified

The first way people started making money selling digital products on eBay was through the use of eBay classifieds.  eBay actually still allows digital items to be sold through their classified ads system.

The eBay classified ads run for one month and cost less than $10 to post.  There are no other fees associated, and you don’t have to pay final value fees.  The classified ads are run along with the regular auction listings, so they get plenty of exposure.

Another great thing about eBay classifieds is the fact that you can link to a website.  You can’t link off the eBay website when you do a regular auction listing, but you can with classifieds!  This makes it easier to use eBay to build a list.

There is one drawback to the classified ads. Since they last for 30 days, they can take a long time before they start getting a lot of traffic. Since eBay searches are sorted by those ended soonest by default, the classified ads don’t generally show up until they’re almost ready to expire.

Some people say they don’t get much traffic to their eBay classified ads, but others claim to get a lot.  If you have a compelling title and thumbnail, you’ll probably get enough traffic to your listing to make the ad worth it.  Just be sure your ad copy is good, so that traffic will translate into visitors and sales.

The eBay classifieds can be used to advertise more than just eBooks and software.  You can also use these ads to send traffic to affiliate review sites or blogs, for example.  You could advertise services.  You could even use them to build your list by offering free downloads in exchange for an opt-in.

EBay classifieds are great, because you can use them for things you can’t do in normal auction listings.  So think outside the box and try classifieds in ways you couldn’t use your auctions before.

Shipping Physical CDs
A lot of people decided to start shipping their digital goods on CD to avoid having their auctions canceled by eBay.  Some people burn their own CDs and ship them, and others use a service like http://www.kunaki.com.

A few people reported that these auctions were canceled anyway.  Apparently the eBay staff has a hard time distinguishing digital downloads from shipped merchandise, probably due to the lack of shipping.  So if you’re going to sell your digital items on CD, you should be sure to include at least a small shipping charge, perhaps $1.00.

Also, some people have run into trouble selling their CDs if they state in the auction that the buyer can also download the item while waiting for the CD to arrive.  If you’re going to allow digital download, it’s best to send the link after the auction is over, and don’t mention it in the auction itself.  Consider it like an unadvertised bonus for your buyers.

Printing Your Digital Products
You can also print your digital products on your home computer and ship them as physical products.  There are several ways you can do this.

1.    You could just print the product out in black and white and staple or clip the pages together.  This is a cheaper option.
2.    You could print the pages in black and white or color, and then place them all inside a cheap binder of some sort.  For smaller documents, you can buy report covers that are clear plastic.  You place the papers inside, then slide a long piece of plastic down the edge to lock the papers in place.  For larger documents, you could use a hole-punch to punch three holes in the papers, and then put them inside a 3-ring binder.
3.    You could also print the pages in black and white or color, and then bind them with some sort of home binding system.  This is the most expensive option for printing yourself, but it would add value to the product.  Home binding systems typically cost a few hundred dollars.  They punch a lot of small, rectangular or round holes down the side of the paper, and then they wrap a plastic or wire binder through the holes to hold the paper together.

You could also take the document to a print shop or to a place like Kinko’s to have it copied.  It’s probably cheaper to have them printed at Kinko’s than to print them yourself, because Kinko’s probably gets their ink and paper a LOT cheaper than you could.

Many printing companies can also bind your book for you, so you should ask if that’s an option when you go in.  They may have several binding options available.  Remember to include printing and binding in your price.

Using a Self Publishing Service
You can use a self publishing service to print your book.  Sites like http://www.lulu.com can help you print your book out and even bind it just like a real book.  In fact, your product would be bound at a quality that would allow it to be sold on Amazon.com or in real bookstores!

I’ve actually seen books that were published at lulu.com in my local bookstore.  I’ve ordered a book from Amazon that turned out to be published through Lulu and I had no idea until it arrived!  They are published just like any other book.

Another great thing about using Lulu is the fact that they offer a special service that gets a real ISBN number for your book, and they can try to get you onto Amazon and possibly even into bookstores!  The service does cost a bit, but it’s VERY affordable considering the number of sales you could get if you make it onto Amazon.

Another great thing about using Lulu or other services to print a physical book is that it adds a lot of value to your product.  Most people (especially outside I.M.) believe that eBooks are junk.  Part of this mentality comes from the masses of people who have been selling crappy MRR eBooks on eBay for 99 cents.  People have come to believe that all eBooks are junk, but they believe physical books must be good in order to be published.

You don’t have to tell people that you’ve self-published the book.  They can just assume the book has been published through a “regular” publisher, just like I did with the book I ordered from Amazon.  You don’t even have to tell people the book is yours.  Just sell it like you would any standard book.

The great thing about publishing with Lulu is that you could also sell the book on Craigslist.  Although most posts for eBooks would be flagged as spam by people on Craigslist, you could easily sell one copy of your book at a time there with no problem!

Just post to the books section of your local Craigslist, and then email instructions on how to purchase it to anyone who responds to you.  In the ad you can say you only have one copy (just like any individual probably would have only one copy of a book they bought) but you can sell it as many times as you want to anyone who answers your ad.  This can be some nice extra income!

Online Business Calculators

Use any of these business calculators to quickly and easily evaluate your business.

Note: In order to use these online calculators you will need to have Macromedia Flash installed on your web browser. Grab it here (opens in a new window).

Starting Costs Calculator -Calculate the start-up costs of your new business before you get going.

Email ROI Calculator -Use this calculator to determine the ROI (return on investment) for your email campaigns.

PPC ROI Calculator -Use this calculator to determine the ROI (return on investment) for your pay per click advertising campaigns.

Conversion Rate Calculator -This calculator allows you to see the impact improving your website conversion rate has on your total online sales.

Custom Autoresponder Thank You Page in 1SC

I’ve been debating for about 3 years now whether to use 1ShoppingCart as my all in one tool for my online business. I finally decided to just take the plunge and as Nike says “Just Do It”.

In doing so I’m having to learn there system and with that comes questions. I just submitted a support ticket this morning that was answered within a few hours and for those of you that might be going through the learning process as well, I wanted to share the response with you.

My question: 

I would like to set up custom thank you pages for some of my autoresponders so that when a subscriber has verified their subscription they will be redirected to the custom page to access a free product. I’m not sure where this can be done or if it’s possible?

Answer:

What you need to do is go to opt in preferences under the  email and marketing tab and either create a custom opt in message or edit one of our templates.

Under the message body space you can select the custom thank you url for the message.

Put in the url to the page with the free product.

Save the changes and the letter will be submitted to our abuse team automatically for approval.

On each of your autoresponders general settings page you should select the new custom message you created as the verification email for all of your autoresponders.

This will cause all the people who sign up with you to verify using the same opt in message and they will all land on your custom page with the free report.

50 Ideas to Boost Your Business

Here’s another fabulous freebie for you! Alice Seba is showing her “sweetness” yet again with this great report.

Inside you will find 50 practical ideas that will help boost your business using a kind and sweet approach.

Download your free copy here (Report is in PDF format, if you need an Adobe Reader you can grab it for free here).