www.ray-johnson.co.uk/internet-marketing/whats-happened-to-ray-johnson

If you weren’t aware of this please read it first, and then come back here.

I wrote that blog post in good faith assuming everything in it to be true. Unfortunately it transpires that virtually nothing in there was correct. My apologies. The information in that blog post came from Ray Johnson.

UPDATE: If you clicked the above link you will realise that as of around February 20 2013 Ray Johnson’s blog is now coming up “account suspended”. I did save a text copy which you can read here – originally posted June 20 2012.

Here’s what has happened since:

• Ray Johnson has disappeared from the online world. He has ignored all emails, telephone calls and Skype messages since September 2012.
• My last communication with him was via Skype chat on August 18^th 2012. No mention of him being unhappy with our partnership, quite the opposite in fact.
• On August 16^th 2012 Paul Power sent me a very strange email accusing me of “ignoring and undervaluing” him. He knows that neither of those claims are true; I have kept a full record of all our Skype chats and emails. Paul Power then stated he was having nothing further to do with the business. I sent a detailed reply, this was ignored. I have been in business for 32 years and one thing I’ve learned is, in the words of Jim Morrison from The Doors, “People are strange”. That’s what I put it down to. Until…
• In October 2012 I learned that Ray Johnson and Paul Power had set up a site together. This site was registered on September 30^th 2012 by Paul Power. I guess that explains the email to me. The site is a typical video squeeze page in which Ray Johnson states on several occasions that he has earned “$150,000 in the last 3 months” (i.e. July-September 2012) and he will teach anyone else how they can do the same. The site URL is www.rayandpaulsfreecoachingcalls.com, as you can see it is now coming up “account suspended”. My commiserations with anyone who handed over any money…
• I have tried on several occasions to contact Ray Johnson, all of them unsuccessful. Indeed until recently I had to consider the sad possibility that he was no longer with us. Happily, following a recent meeting with my accountant, who is in contact with his accountant, I learned that this is not the case and Ray Johnson is, thankfully, still very much alive. As regards Paul Power, I do not know what has happened to him. His blog domain www.paul-powers-blog.com expired a few days ago, before that it too was coming up as “account suspended”.

To summarise the above points – at the time of writing my blog post of 20^th June 2012 on Ray Johnson’s blog, I assumed that Ray Johnson, Paul Power and myself would be working together in a new partnership. Whereas in fact some time between the end of June 2012 and the beginning of September 2012 they actually decided between themselves to either remove me from the business, or set up a new one without me.

In principle I don’t have a huge issue with this, partnerships start and they finish, that’s life. It’s a pity but that’s the way it goes. However I consider it fundamentally dishonest, as well as somewhat cowardly, to not discuss this but to instead scheme behind your business partner’s back and ignore all their correspondence. Hardly the sign of a professional business marketer and “mentor” is it? There are also tax issues (as Ray Johnson is finding out) to deal with, amongst other things.

The above points are all factual and I have deliberately avoided any speculation. I can back up everything I have stated above. I appreciate some people who have dealt with Ray Johnson (and indeed Paul Power) may be shocked and tempted to think “how dare this Robert Black character write these things, I’ve always trusted Ray”?

I understand that viewpoint, believe me I really do. I used to share it wholeheartedly and I suspect I have had more contact with Ray Johnson than most people reading this post (and yes I have met him face to face).

It took me a long time to make the decision to write this article, what made my mind up was receiving yet another email from a customer today complaining that they couldn’t access what was in fact our most successful product – Google Affiliate X.

So what happens now?

OK let me break up this last part into different sections…

Google Affiliate X Customers

For those who purchased this product and can no longer access it – unfortunately neither can I. I strongly suspect the site has been taken down. My understanding from the emails I am getting is that Ray Johnson is not replying to support tickets; sadly I do not have access to the support tickets. I would love to help out but I have also been “locked out”. My suggestion is to contact Ray Johnson, although I suspect you may wait a long time for a reply.

Other Customers

Again I have no access to support tickets so I cannot help. I am unaware if any are being answered or not. In fact if anyone is getting any replies it would be useful to know that.

Affiliates

I have had emails from customers who have recently purchased some of Ray Johnson’s products (Google Affiliate X) asking for help so I know that they are still being promoted by affiliates. If you know of any affiliates promoting, or considering promoting this product, or indeed if you are one of Ray Johnson’s affiliates yourself please be aware that Google Affiliate X has not worked for a number of months. This is due to technical issues that are actually easily fixed but I do not have access to the site. Also please be aware that support tickets are not being answered. Therefore if you are thinking of promoting this product please be aware of the negative impact this could have with your subscriber list.

Solo Ads

I am going to choose my words very carefully here. Paypal has closed down, and is continuing to close down, accounts for selling, promoting and mailing via solo ads. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who may have bought solo ads from Ray Johnson. If you’re considering that as a business model, unless you REALLY understand every possible ramifaction – DON’T. Run, don’t walk, away from it.

What happens now?

I want to make it absolutely clear that I have no connection or association whatsoever with Ray Johnson. As far as I am concerned my partnership with Ray Johnson ceased in June 2012 when he transferred the last payment to me. I haven’t received a dime since then.

In fact he actually owes me quite a lot of money. When we started the partnership I invested a large amount of money into the business, on the understanding that I would have access to the customer list. I don’t. Some of you have reported that you have been receiving autoresponder emails from an address blackrob230@gmail.com. Please be sure that despite the name, that is NOT from me. I would appreciate anyone receiving emails from that address to let me know.

I am continuing with internet marketing – real internet marketing i.e. DOING it rather than SELLING it. I have a number of projects on the go and things are growing nicely. I suspect the model of “fake it till you make it” (i.e. sell products about how you have “made $150,000 in the last 3 months” when in reality your only source of online income is selling such “how to” products to newbies when you yourself don’t have the first clue of how real money is made online) has thankfully just about come to an end.

The way forward

I don’t have a training program or “how to make $150,000 in the next 3 months” type of product to sell you. Not at the moment. However I’m doing Internet Marketing full time (as well as a couple of offline projects) and it would be nice to have a place to bounce ideas off each other, help each other out, that kind of thing. I have a few ideas but unfortunately as mentioned above I don’t have access to Ray Johnson’s email list. Therefore I can’t just fire off an email and get several hundred people viewing this post at once and starting a discussion. At the moment I have no idea how many people will even find it. Such is life.

But anyway I would like to get some kind of Mastermind group going and see where we can help each other out.

I’m happy to answer any questions you may have on Internet Marketing and help out where I can. Mail me. No, I don’t want any money. Bear in mind that when running my businesses in the offline world I have sold products to a total value of around $130,000,000 (yes that’s millions) so I think I am reasonably well qualified to offer advice.

It may also be that others have a particular expertise that they can help with. Honestly, I have no idea how this will pan out at this stage. If there is enough interest I’ll be delighted to put more useful stuff on the blog and expand it.

So here’s what I would like you to do. Fill out the optin box on the left hand side with your name and email address. That way we can keep in touch and I can let everyone know when there’s an update, a new post, or whatever. No I’m not going to spam you with affiliate offers. I genuinely don’t have the time nor do I have the financial need to do that. So do that now, you also get a pretty useful free ebook, which kind of mirrors what I did when I was getting started online. Except the offline boss I was hiding my online business from was me

Finally, comments are welcome, whether below or whether you want to send me an email via the “Contact Me” tab at the top of the page. In any case I will reply to all comments and emails.

PS I know some of you know I have been working on a major “real Internet Marketing” project for the last 12 months or so and have been asking me what it’s about. Take a look for yourself

http://www.marketerswarehouse.com/

POST UPDATE

Since I wrote this post a few days ago several people have got in touch with me, including some interesting names. So I’d like to update you with the latest developments. Rather than edit the whole post it makes more sense to add them here at the bottom.

1) As you’ll see from the comments below Paul Power has been in touch. We have had a very amicable conversation on Skype and it’s obvious that Paul has been duped by Ray Johnson as much as I, and others, were. Paul will very shortly be back in internet marketing and his blog will be back up very soon. He has a wealth of knowledge and experience and I am very much looking forward to working together again with him in the future.

2) Ray Johnson is apparently still selling solo ads. This despite the number of people who have got in touch complaining that they have paid him for this service, and received nothing in return. However it would appear that he is disguising his identity by using the name of his partner Sonya Freeman. This is Sonya Freeman’s Facebook page. This is the URL of the site he/she is using:

http://www.cash-money-marketing.com/supersoloads/

Prices range from $49 to $237. I very strongly recommend that if you have that kind of money to spare that you spend it more wisely than on that site. You may also want to let others know. By the way it may well be that Sonya Freeman doesn’t even know about the site and is unaware that her partner Ray Johnson is using her name. It is a familiar modus operandi of Ray Johnson’s to use Skype, Gmail, etc using other peoples’ logins and assuming their personas. I write from personal experience and I know this happened to others.

At the very least if you contact “her” I can guarantee that it will be Ray Johnson who replies. Ask Ray Johnson or Sonya Freeman where this list of 65,000 (or 2,000,000 depending on who you ask) names has come from. Because it would of course at the very least be extremely unethical if such a list of leads hadn’t actually come from asking visitors to your site to optin in the normal manner via a respected autoresponder service provider such as Aweber or Getresponse, wouldn’t it? And I guess it would be even more unethical if the names on that list had originally been told “we promise never to share your email with anyone else” and it materialised that actually all the names on that large list had indeed been exchanged with other marketers? Hypothetically speaking of course…

3) For anyone who has tried to contact Ray Johnson on his usual Skype and email addresses and been ignored I have some new contact details that I suggest you try:

Email: cashmoneysonya@gmail.com
Email: enquiries@web3point0marketingtest.com
Skype: sonyacashmoney

Despite the names in the above details, all those accounts belong to Ray Johnson

4) After ignoring my emails, text messages and Skype messages for almost 5 months Ray Johnson has finally got in touch today. No apology, no explanation. Just a request from me. Oh, and a statement saying that due to “the state of my mind and health I am unable to continue with internet marketing”. I guess trying to persuade people to part with money for solo ads while hiding behind your partner’s name no longer counts as internet marketing. Cool. Learn something new every day.

• “The Money is in the List”
• “Content is King”
• “You must have your own Product”
• “Be a Seller not a Buyer”

We are told we need to learn how to create web sites, learn keyword research, graphic design, write articles, learn copywriting, write ebooks, write reports, create videos, use autoresponders, learn affiliate marketing, find JV partners, learn SEO etc. Plus a whole lot more stuff I can’t be bothered to even think about now. No wonder most people are failing to make money online – we are suffering from a chain reaction of information overload.

It’s all crap. I’ve come to the conclusion you only need to learn one skill, and one skill only, to start making money online….

One simple word – Traffic.

If you know how to get traffic you’ll make money online. It may not be much at first but it’s something you can build on. Let’s try and create the world’s worst web site…back in a while…

OK it’s taken me about 8 seconds to create this in Microsoft FrontPage

And we’re done. All we need do is link the “Click Here!!!!!” part to one of those CPA “win an Ipad” Prize Draw offers that pay say 25 cents per lead and upload that page to our site. Let’s call the site www.fakefreeipadscams.com. Why not?

You know of any course that tells you that you can make money from such a site? Well here’s an internet first then – I’m telling you that such a site will make you money even though I’ve tried to break as many internet marketing rules as possible.

As John Lennon might have said “All you need is traffic”. Suppose you got 1 million visitors a day to your “world’s worst web site”. That’s a million people every day. A percentage of them will click that link to the CPA offer and your bank account will increase by 25 cents for every one that does. Even if you write in big bold 48 point font underneath “DO NOT CLICK THE ABOVE UNLESS YOU ARE A MORON WHO WANTS TO BE SCAMMED” some people will still click. You’ll still make money.

There is a very serious point to all of this that I hope is coming across – it doesn’t matter how poor your web site is, it doesn’t matter how much you’re doing wrong, IF you can get traffic you can still make money.

Once you have traffic all the rest is fine tuning. I’m sure you’ll agree with me my “site” can be improved. Even the greenest novice can suggest improvements. Even those who only discovered 5 minutes ago that there is such a thing as internet marketing would be able to point a finger or two at that site. Fine tuning, that’s all it is.

Forget all the other stuff for now, all that list-building-product-creating-content-writing-aweber-wordpress-find-your-niche crap. It’s BS. Forget

“Build it and they will come”

Instead think

“Let them come then I’ll build it”

More on this shortly…

As many of you know I live in Turkey. Great country, great people, great climate and I love it there. However there’s a lot of stuff you just can’t buy over there for love nor money. One of those is cigarette papers and filters for hand rolling tobacco (yes I know but with all the antismoker attacks in the UK and elsewhere I no longer care, anyway it’s my only vice :-)). Given that Turkish customs don’t get the concept of people in Turkey wanting to order items from abroad and will either confiscate or charge extortionate tax (i.e. several hundred percent) on imports that wasn’t an option for me. The weird thing is you can probably get away with just about anything at the airports, no-one checks anything there.

Anyway I digress. Every November I make my annual road trip from Turkey to Germany (where my parents live) and the UK (where I’m originally from). This post is coming to you from Germany. So, before I left I thought I’d have a look on eBay and order my filters and papers in bulk (i.e. about 12 months’ worth) and have them sent here. No problem – you would think. Be a nice order for someone – you would think.

I found 8 different so-called “Power Sellers” or “Trusted Sellers” or whatever they call them now. All of them seemed to be businesses rather than some 14 year old teenager working out of his mother’s basement. All of them offered worldwide postage. All had feedback well into 5 figures. The price was around £180 (about $290). OK fair enough. The only issue was the postage – all of them wanted over £200 to send these items to Germany. The weight of them is just under 1kg, by the way.

So obviously their payments page hadn’t allowed for combined postal rates. If I sent them a message asking them to combine postage and asking how much that would be I’d get a reasonable answer from business people keen to do business, right?

Wrong.

Out of 8 messages sent to 8 different sellers I got ZERO response. Nada. Not even an acknowledgement. It’s not like I’m someone who has just signed up with a brand new eBay account from somewhere like Nigeria with zero feedback. I’ve had an eBay account since 2004 with a 4 figure positive feedback rating (as a seller not a buyer). So no need to worry about any kind of scam, I would have thought.

I assume these items have a minimum of 1/3 profit, i.e. £60 (almost $100). Maybe more. Nice easy money for 2 minutes work sending me a message with a more realistic figure for sending a 900g parcel from the UK to Germany. But no. As my (slightly sarcastic) title says, it has got to be real simple to make money selling cigarette filters and papers over at eBay. So simple that sellers are doing so much business they don’t even have to bother replying to a question that will make them a quick $100. Can’t honestly think of any other explanation.

Anyway I found another seller that was charging £35 for postage which seemed far more reasonable to me so I just ordered from them without even bothering to send a message asking for a better rate. You’ll be delighted to hear my parcel arrived in Germany safe, sound and complete 4 days later.

The moral of this tale?

1. I should probably quit smoking for health reasons. Not the usual ones associated with tobacco but more to stop my blood pressure from going through the roof trying to deal with businesses that don’t want to take my money. Aarrrgghhhh!
2. Business is obviously not as bad for everyone as the media would have you believe
3. When I was selling info CDs priced at a mere £1.97 on eBay a few years ago I replied to every single email. Often I got 10 or more queries a day. You would think that with putting digital ebooks onto a CD and selling them cheaply there wouldn’t be many questions to ask. I must have had an average of 5 people a week asking me for a special price for a large number of products combined (30, 40, 50 or more) and 2 or 3 a month asking me how much I wanted for ALL the products I was selling at the time (I had over 500 listings). Nice easy business. One such message led to me doing a Joint Venture with a guy in a completely unrelated field that netted me around £15,000 ($25,000). All because I responded to a query. That’s the point – reply to every customer enquiry you get because you just never know where it will lead.
4. Anyone wants to send me $100 I absolutely 100% guarantee I will reply to your query

Rant over.

First this is what the email looked like, I’ve had to spread it across 2 images. Click on each image to view full size, then click your browser’s “back” button to come back to this page. Or open it in a new tab or window.

Pretty much a perfect copy I’d say.

Except for 2 things:

1. The greeting is blank – “Dear      “. A genuine eBay message will have your eBay user name in there
2. I’m not actually listing the item in question. In fact at the moment I’m not listing anything at all. D’oh

Anyway, like a fool I clicked the link and entered my eBay user name and password on what looked like a genuine eBay sign in page. Then realized what I’d done. Idiot.

It took me 4 password changes and a 45 minute live chat with eBay to resolve this. I’m not some internet newbie. I first went online back in 1992 with a Psion series 3 and a Compuserve account (anyone else remember those?). I thought I could spot these fakes.

The point is this can happen to all of us; we all get complacent, we all lose concentration momentarily. Check your eBay messages, indeed all emails from places where you have an account – Paypal, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc very very carefully. The same applies to anything from your bank.

Never EVER click a link in an email from places that require you to login, especially those holding any kind of financial or personal information about you. Open up a separate browser window, go to the site’s home page by typing in the URL and MANUALLY log in to your account.

Stay safe.

About 12 months ago I decided to partner up with one of the leading internet marketers in the UK, Nuneaton based Ray Johnson (link to his blog on the right if you’re interested). We had been collaborating on various projects for a while and we decided it made sense to make it “official”. In January of this year we set up Web 3.0 Marketing together. That’s also why there hasn’t been an update on this blog for 12 months, we’ve been using Ray’s blog instead. I’ve been mostly doing the product creation, and Ray has been doing the promotion and marketing.

One of the things we looked at was list building. Many of our customers ask us how they can quickly build up a list of subscribers and customers. Just over 12 months ago we put together a product called Adswap Masterclass which is all about swapping lists with other marketers to build up your own list quickly. That product sold extremely well and we have been looking at doing an “upgraded” version of it.

One of the points that came up was “how quickly can we build up a list of 1000 subscribers starting from scratch“?

We decided to test that. However, as you know it went horrifically wrong.

This is why – because we are snowed under with work on various projects we didn’t have the time to do this right now. So instead of waiting and doing it ourselves, we outsourced it. And 2 major errors were made:

1. Mailings were ONLY supposed to go to subscribers on the NEW list created a couple of weeks ago. See image belowThe new list is called “continuitysqz”. Mailings should ONLY have gone to this list, unfortunately they went out to ALL of them.
2. The second mistake was worse than the first. There should have been only TWO mailings per WEEK – one with some genuine free, useful information and the other a promotional mailing (an adswap with another marketer). As you know, and as I have just discovered myself, that didn’t happen. The emails were stacked up one after another, sent out one after another, in many cases 2 promotional emails a day. Madness.

Rest assured I have now stopped this. No further automated mailings will go out. Below is the up to date screenshot from my Aweber account:

You’ll notice under “Status” it says “Review”. This means they have been stopped.

I am however, a great believer in trying to take a positive out of every situation. These are the positive lessons I have taken:

1. Yes I got unsubscribes but I am amazed there weren’t more. Personally I would have unsubscribed much sooner. All I can say is thanks for being more patient than I would have been
2. Not everything can be/should be outsourced
3. Ironically as the first graphic above shows, our list building methods do work. In fact they work very well indeed – starting with ZERO subscribers we built a targeted list of just under 400 in 10 days. However……

The real problem with that graphic is 107 unsubscribes – over one quarter. We upset a lot of people by overmailing (if that’s a word). That upsets me; I tend to take every unsubscribe personally. But at least I know the reason why.

I thought about what I could do to try to make amends; those of you who have met me know that isn’t my normal way of doing things.

I know a lot of people struggle with building up a list of customers. We’ve just done a customer survey on Ray’s blog and that came up as one of the top 3 problems people have online. Your list is the most important thing you can have, without it you have no business.

So I’m going to give you a free copy of Adswap Master Class. This isn’t some crappy 10 page ebook containing stuff you’ve seen before. It’s a training program containing 12 videos, an ebook and several templates you can use. I personally wrote that ebook and personally recorded those videos (those of you who know me will recognize my voice ). Last year we sold a LOT of copies of that at $200 each.

You can download it free from the link below, I’ll leave it up until midnight November 11th UK time so be quick! Since we’re still getting folks paying good money for that, I’ll have to take the link down after that.

***UPDATE November 12th – link now removed***

Finally I apologize again for the inconvenience. I’m not going to completely stop sending out emails with USEFUL content in the future but I think for now a period of quiet is in order.

Feel free to leave your comments below – good and bad. I’m a libertarian so I don’t censor anything on here!

Best wishes

Robert

What if I told you there was a better way – one where you could take the same “tired old ebook” and with a little bit of work create something that’s virtually unique to you AND command a higher asking price? Instead of selling an ebook for $9.97 you could sell the same thing but in a different format for twice, three times even 10 times as much. That’s the beauty of physical products……

By saying “physical product”, all we mean is that instead of your customer clicking a link to download their ebook onto their computer, they receive a package through the post – with their ebook on a CD-ROM. OK so how do we go about doing this?

Many of us have Gigabytes of Resell Rights stuff sitting on our hard drives doing nothing except collecting “virtual dust”. That’s how I got started making money online – I decided to do something with all this “useless” stuff. To create a physical product from a digital one you need the following things

1. Blank CD-ROMs
2. CD Labels
3. CD Jewel Case or DVD Case
4. Inserts (covers) for your CD or DVD case
5. Software to create graphics for your labels

That’s it! That’s all you need. I sell physical info products on eBay

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/bestmultimediaguides

All it takes me is about a minute to produce each product; in fact it actually takes a little longer to print off the address label than to create the product!

Now, if you don’t want to do that there are even fulfillment houses that will do the work for you. The best known one is

www.kunaki.com

You send them the files for your digital product, i.e. graphics, PDFs etc and they will burn your product to CD-ROM, put it inside a DVD case and despatch it to your customer. You don’t handle the product, you don’t have to put it in an envelope and you don’t have to take it to the post office. The cost to you – a mere $1.75 plus shipping.

So those are your 2 choices – create the CD-ROM yourself or use Kunaki. I actually don’t use Kunaki, I prefer to be in control of the process myself rather than rely on somebody else. If errors happen then your customer won’t be blaming Kunaki, but YOU!

Another issue for me is that Kunaki are in the United States, whereas most of my customers are in the United Kingdom and mainland Europe. Shipping from the USA to the UK is notoriously slow – I’m currently waiting for a movie DVD (Mousehunt if you must know :-)) I ordered from a company in Chicago 3 weeks ago. When chasing it up I was told “25 to 30 days shipping time is normal”.

However, if most of your customers are in the United States, and you’re selling high ticket items and can factor in the higher shipping costs, then it is certainly worth considering Kunaki. If you want to read more about doing the process yourself I’ve actually put together a video course and an ebook on how I run my eBay business doing exactly what I’ve described here.

http://www.easyauctioncashsystem.com/

I’ll be writing more about how you can get started converting those Resell Rights products taking up space on your hard drive into cash generating physical products….stay tuned!

• Where to find quality products with a resell rights license
• How to do the copywriting

I solved the first by creating my own web site (Bestmultimediaguides) and the second I figured out a system that I haven’t seen anyone else using……one day when I get around to it I’ll write a full ebook and record videos for this system as well as charging a lot of money for it, but until I get the time to do this….here it is for free

I attended a one day seminar here in the UK about 3 years ago – the cost was £5,000! A big part of that cost was the resale rights products included. At the time I had no idea where to buy them and this seemed to solve my problem. We were given a bit of very basic training on product creation, i.e. you have a 10 part video series on let’s say creating mini-sites. So your front end product is 1 of the videos with another 2 thrown in as bonuses; the back end product is the other 7.

Fair enough.

Except despite having run my own sales and marketing business and done face to face selling for nearly 25 years, I didn’t have a clue how to write sales copy. Sure I read all the books, I knew about the structure but the problem is when you are suddenly faced with an empty Microsoft Word document writing sales copy seems a very daunting task. So I did nothing with what I had learned on my £5,000 one day seminar – shame on me. I did actually ask the “guru” what to do about the copywriting – “Do it yourself, you’ll find it comes naturally”. Hmm, great advice for £5,000. Not.

It was only when I started selling ebooks on eBay that I finally figured out how to do copywriting – and quite by accident. Of course to sell on eBay you need to include some kind of sales copy in your listing or no-one’s going to buy from you! All of the 50 ebooks I initially listed came complete with sales copy so my plan was to simply “copy and paste” that into my listing.  But then I realised I wanted a “uniform” look for all my listings – i.e. same font size and colour for the header, same font throughout the main body of the sales letter, change US English spelling to UK English spelling, correct spelling and grammatical mistakes and so on. (On a side note you would be surprised just how many errors there are, some serious, in the sales copy supplied with well-known Resell Rights products.)

To do all of that, obviously I had to READ the sales copy, rather than simply copying and pasting. After about 6 or 7 of these listings I found myself almost subconsciously changing a few words here, a few words there, improving on the headline etc etc. Because I was reading the sales copy looking for mistakes I suddenly “got” how the sales copy is structured – I didn’t study it, I didn’t try to memorise anything, it just sank in at a subconscious level.

To test out this theory I took an ebook I hadn’t planned to list because it came without sales copy. Less than 30 minutes later there it was, I had written a passable sales letter complete with headline. OK this was for a $5 recipe ebook and if I was writing copy for a $5,000 seminar it would have needed something more but, we all have to start somewhere right?

So here is my 9 step system for writing basic sales copy in less than 30 minutes. First make a folder of at least 20 resale rights products that you already have that come with sales pages (if you don’t have any then contact me). It doesn’t matter what subject they are about. Your aim is to create a uniform look, with the same fonts, styles, sizes and colours used throughout. You will be making some small change to EVERY part of the sales letter.

1. Change the Header font – type, size and colour
2. Ditto Sub Header – if there isn’t one there then create one, doesn’t matter what it is, use one from another sales letter
3. Change the font for ALL of the body, if it is Times New Roman change it to to Tahoma or whatever. Do this paragraph by paragraph
4. Change the salutation from “Dear Frustrated Internet Marketer” to “Dear Friend” or whatever
5. If the bullet points are in itallics, change them to bold.
6. Highlight and/or underline a few key words
7. Change the font in the bonuses and the testimonials
8. Proof read the whole document – correct spelling and grammatical mistakes, I guarantee you’ll find them
9. Rinse and repeat 20 times in a row

When you’ve done that, take a Resell Rights products WITHOUT a sales page and see what you can write. As they say in the soap powder ads “Try it, the results will amaze you”.

But seriously, writing copy is one of the most valuable skills you can acquire. Take the time to try out this simple system – no it won’t turn you into Ted Nicholas but it WILL give you workable sales copy. More importantly it will give you the confidence to go ahead and write more copy, and practise makes perfect!

I decided to order, the package looked good, this web site must spend a lot of money on Google PPC advertising so presumably it’s a good deal, right? Having paid my $97 eventually I got to the download page. Before I started downloading the individual files I noticed the terms of the licenses were below the download link for each individual product; I also realised the terms for almost all the products were the same. Here they are:

[NO] Includes Sales Page
[NO] Can be given away
[NO] Can be packaged
[NO] Can be offered as a bonus
[YES] Can Be Edited Completely and Your Name Put on it
[YES] Can be used as web content
[NO] Can be broken down into articles
[NO] Can be added to paid membership sites
[NO] Can sell this product
[NO] Can be offered through auction sites
[NO] Can sell Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Master Resale Rights
[NO] Can sell Private Label Rights

What is going on???!!!

There isn’t a heck of a lot I can do with these so called “Private Label Rights” products according to the license above. I can “edit them completely and put my name to it” but I am not allowed to sell them. Neither am I allowed to give them away! Nor can I use them as a bonus, which was actually my intention. And I cannot pass on resale rights to others! What we have here is in fact not a series of “Private Label Rights” products but “Personal Use Only” products. I have NEVER come across such a restrictive so-called “PLR license”.

Having got in touch with the web site owner, there was apparently an error in the license terms and I was allowed to sell them. But I couldn’t pass on resale rights to my customers, neither could I use them as a bonus. If you read through the license terms again you will note that NOT ONE of these products came with a sales page. So if I wanted to sell these items I would need to pay someone to write me a sales letter for each one, no doubt at a minimum rate of $1000 per sales page!!!

Fortunately I was able to get a refund; the guy behind the site is probably a respected marketer with little understanding of what is generally understood by “with Private Label Rights”. Lessons to be learned:

1. Just because it says “with Private Label Rights” doesn’t mean that that is the case with some web sites (this one is on Page 1 of Google by the way, that’s how I found it)
2. Be VERY VERY careful where you buy from – I was lucky enough to get a refund, many sites will not refund
3. For most of us PLR means that in most cases I have the right to sell the product and resale rights on to the next person – others take a different view
4. Most of us assume that most high quality PLR products (and these were seemingly very high quality products) will come complete with a sales page and graphics to help us sell them. Sure there are individual products without sales pages but this was a whole series of related good quality products with NO sales page, no graphics.

So what can you do? Well, I make no apology at all for directing you to my main web site stocked with high quality PLR and MRR products:

www.bestmultimediaguides.com

Every product has as a MINIMUM:

• Either MRR or PLR – you can resell ANY and ALL of them and keep 100% of the profits for yourself
• A sales letter – no need to get a copywriter to write you one at several thousand dollars a time
• Graphics – no need to have graphics created unless you WANT to
• CD Ready – physical information products are becoming more and more popular, all products on the site are “ready to burn” to CD and come with a fully interactive user menu for that professional look

Many products come with much, much more – articles, ecourses, ready made content sites, etc. Just read the product descriptions. Of course you can also buy them one at a time, as and when you need them rather than having to buy bundles of ebooks to get just the 1 or 2 you really need. Go and check it out now!

This is an issue for a lot of new marketers, I can fully empathise because it’s one I fight with on a daily basis. The more you get into internet marketing the more you realise that there are just so many possible ways of doing things. There is no way you can keep up with even a fraction of them. It is so tempting to wait until “all the conditions are correct” before starting a project. Well let me tell give you some advice, learned the hard way from almost 25 years business experience:

Conditions will NEVER be and NEVER have been perfect

There will ALWAYS be a reason to NOT take action. In fact if you’re not careful you’ll find a lot more reasons to avoid taking action than to actually DOING something. If you’re a perfectionist like me you’ll find yourself nodding your head in agreement at this point. I have a list of 12 different things I would like to do to this blog alone. However, they all come behind a much bigger list of other jobs I want to do. So do I give up on writing content on this blog until I have everything else set up?

NO!

The point is things will never be 100% perfect, never be 100% ready. Whatever you’re doing, just do it now, today. It doesn’t matter if it’s not right. It is far better to have bad sales copy than no sales copy. It is far better to have a poor looking web site than no web site at all. EVERYTHING can be improved, but it has to be there in the first place before you can make it better! If your product is only 40% right, well you can by time improve upon that, but if you haven’t even offered it to potential customers then it’s 0% right!

I’ll conclude with an example. This is my eBay shop:

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/bestmultimediaguides

Click on any of the listings and you’ll see that I use the same template throughout all my listings. I have changed that 4 times already, each time I have gained more sales. Also on my “to do” list is to change them all yet again because there are a few new things I want to try out. Now I got sales from the very first “template” I used, but I have never been happy with the look or content. That doesn’t matter, the important thing was to get something there on eBay that I could improve upon.

So the lesson is this – whatever it is that you want to do, just do it. Don’t worry about getting it right the first time, I can almost certainly guarantee you that you won’t. Finish that web site, that ebook, the sales copy – forget how it looks, just get it out there in front of people. This is the internet – with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks you can improve on anything – quickly and easily!

I have probably spent more time and money than most people into researching this. When I think how many weeks, months and even years I wasted – never mind the money – jumping from one idea to the next I could cry. At least I had one advantage; I was running a very successful business so I had the money to invest in internet marketing ideas, and I also had quite a bit of time to do this at quieter times of the business year. Without going through the whole myriad of different ways you can start an online business I’m going to give you my four letter recommendation right here, right now:

Ebay

Yes, eBay – the auction site that at times is infuriating to deal with, that will suspend you for no apparent reason without telling you why (happened to me), that will change their policies at a moment’s notice, and who resolutely refuse to answer your customer service queries. The same eBay where many of the buyers seem to have only just learned how to switch on a computer and can only communicate in txtspk, rather than English. The one where the scammers all come together to fleece the unsuspecting and naive seller and the very same site where you as a seller are absolutely 100% guaranteed to get the worst possible price for your product.

There – I’ve said it.

So why do it?

Well, if you fit any of the following criteria:

1. You have NO previous business experience
2. You have NO IDEA what products or services you want to sell on the internet to start your online career
3. You have NO technical knowledge of creating web sites, graphics, search engine optimisation, how to get traffic etc, etc
4. You don’t know where to get started and you’re suffering from “information overload”

Here are 4 good reasons why (in my very humble opinion) eBay is the best place on the internet for you to start earning money online

1. You don’t need to worry about how to create a web site, or shop front for your product – eBay do it for you. Sure, there’s all sorts of tools you can use to improve the look of your listing but you can learn those “on the job”
2. How do you get traffic to your site? With eBay consistently being in the Top 5 sites in the world you don’t have to worry about people finding your product – eBay have driven the traffic there for you
3. You WILL get sales on eBay – I am constantly amazed by what people will buy on there, and also what they will sometimes pay. Getting sales, making your first few pounds or dollars online will give you incredible confidence to want more!
4. Selling on eBay lets you learn as you go along but…..you will still get sales and earn money whilst you are “studying”. Sure in time you will want to create your own web site, which is where the real money is, but eBay is a great “apprenticeship”.

And since eBay banned the sales of digital downloadable products such as ebooks just over a year ago there is a whole new opportunity to make money from info products. It was thanks to this decision that I was able to put together my own product, a definitive guide to making money on eBay from PHYSICAL info products.

If you are serious about getting started selling info products via eBay then you must read my report by clicking below:

www.easyauctioncashsystem.com

If I’d had a package like that 15 months ago I wouldn’t have wasted a few thousand dollars on trying to get started on eBay and I would have saved myself several weeks if not months. Try it now.

I must be honest here – I only started to use signatures in my emails about 3 months ago. It was one of these tasks I had always been meaning to do, but never got around to actually doing. Since I have included signatures. the response has been truly amazing. Emails have come back from customers “I didn’t you realise that was your site”, “I never knew you did that” etc. More importantly using email signatures has led to an increase in sales. I know that for a fact – I have sent emails to customers, they have clicked on one of my signature links and spent money with me.

Let’s just go back to the example template email from my previous post, which you can see here:

http://www.robert-black.com/essential-communication-skills-a-working-template

This is the template email again:

Hi Rick

Many thanks for your email.

1. Answer Question 1
2. Answer Question 2
3. Answer Question 3
4. Answer Question 4

I hope this answers your questions, please let me know if there is anything else I can help with

Best regards

Robert

So, our signature goes underneath. Obviously we would use this space to bring to our customer’s attention any other web sites, products or offers we may have, together with the relevant links. This is the actual signature that I use on the bottom of every email – feel free to adapt that to your own purposes:

==============================================

The online Resale Rights Warehouse – your best source for ebooks, software,

graphics, videos and much more. ALL complete with RESALE RIGHTS,

ALL complete with SALES COPY!

BRAND NEW – All products supplied in our UNIQUE “VirtualCD” format

with ready made interactive menu system – ideal for CD info

sellers, just copy and burn to CD! Visit

http://www.bestmultimediaguides.com

and claim a useful gift

==============================================

Turn your ebooks into cash with my unique free tips, strategies and warnings

for making easy money online with resale rights products – visit my blog

http://www.robert-black.com

and help yourself to my free gift

==============================================

Join the others who have simply COPIED my unique system that I personally

use 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to make money selling

digital products on eBay where 95% of the sellers have failed!

http://www.easyauctioncashsystem.com

If you currently don’t have any products then at least have links to affiliate products, and your blog. If you don’t have a blog yet – what are you doing?! Get one today!

How do you set up your signatures? Let’s have a look at the most common email program – Outlook. This is very simple to do:

1. Tools > Options
2. Click the “Mail Format” tab at the top
3. Click “Signatures” near the bottom
4. In the “Email Signature” tab click “New”
5. Enter your signature text in the block at the bottom
6. Click “Save”

That’s how easy it is! For web based email accounts such as Gmail, Hotmail there are options to do the same thing. So – add your marketing signature text to your emails TODAY, before you forget about it!

Actually this is a serious point to bear in mind. More and more people are coming online who haven’t been taught these business skills. In many cases it’s not deliberate, I suspect it has more to do with online communications being seen as a little more informal than the old written business correspondence of yesteryear. Anyway, as I promised you here is a quick and easy-to-use template for when you are replying to customers’ queries. It is simple but effective, follow this and you will truly stand apart from the rest of your competitors.

Here is a genuine email from a customer – this is  a typical query (name changed to protect the innocent!)

Hi, Is the £1.97 the resale rights price only and do you offer reprint rights for your products. ie. Can i put my brand to your work and resell your products? Thanks Rick

OK, my “Golden Rules” for dealing with customers are pretty simple

1. Address the customer by name
2. Thank him or her for their email/message
3. Address and answer EVERY one of their questions
4. Sign off with your name

Identify all the questions – in the example above “Rick” has asked me 4 different ones:

1. Is £1.97 the price for resale rights?
2. Do I offer reprint rights?
3. Can I brand your products?
4. Can I resell your products?

So using the 4 “Golden Rules” my reply would be…

Hi Rick

Many thanks for your email.

1. Answer Question 1
2. Answer Question 2
3. Answer Question 3
4. Answer Question 4

I hope this answers your questions, please let me know if there is anything else I can help with

Best regards

Robert

Simple isn’t it? But don’t overlook those steps – at the risk of repeating myself, the vast majority of marketers do NOT do this, crazy as it sounds. There is actually one more very important element missing from that email, and we’ll have a look at that tomorrow.

Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of selling on eBay for now, although the same principles also apply off eBay. Most of us are either selling digital products on there, or thinking about it. You will get questions from potential customers on a regular basis. Contrary to what some people say questions are good. In fact they are better than that – they are great. If someone goes to the trouble of asking you a question, then this means they are getting ready to buy from you.

In the majority of cases they want to buy from you, if you can overcome their objections. You should welcome this with open arms – they have gone to the trouble of asking you a question which in a lot of cases narrows down to “if you can answer this for me then I am ready to buy from you”. For every 1 person who has asked a question of you there were maybe another 10, 50 or 100 who also viewed your sales page but didn’t send you an email, they didn’t send you an eBay message. These people haven’t bought from you but…..you don’t know why they haven’t bought because they didn’t get in touch with you.

This is in contrast to the person who has gone to the trouble of sending you a message asking about your product. So you should actively welcome questions from prospective buyers. What this means in practise is to act quickly and reply truthfully to their question. It does not mean wait a day or two until you have more time, or there isn’t anything on the TV that night.

The question might be simple (“can I have a discount if I buy 3 items?”) or it might be more complicated (“why should I buy from you when this similar looking product I have seen elsewhere is cheaper?”). If the question is straightforward enough for you to be able to answer it immediately do so! You’d be amazed at the number of people who will email you straight back expressing surprise and complimenting you on the speed of your response.

I keep writing this over and over again but this is a point I want to stress to you – MOST eBay sellers do NOT do this. Not only the part time eBayers who are only clearing out their attic but also many Power Sellers are guilty of waiting 2, 3 days before they send a reply to a seemingly standard question. DON’T be like this – stand out from the crowd!

Now, on the other hand if the query you have received is a little more involved and may take a while to answer what can you do? Very simple – write back to them immediately thanking them for their correspondence, state that you will look into their request and get back to them by a particular date or time. Imagine how professional that looks! Of course if you have written that you will reply within 24 hours, then make sure you do.

Tomorrow I’ll give you a working template to use when replying to customers – the essential elements you must include for your messages to be effective.

You regularly see eBay listings written in “text speak” and full of grammatical errors such as

i will send u the video’s immediately after u pay m8

That’s part of a sales page I read – one of my “competitors”! I would guess around 95% of people selling on eBay communicate like that. Now – if a buyer is asking me a question about a product then I don’t care about that, after all the customer is always right. No problem with that at all. But I see this happening more and more in correspondence from sellers – emails riddled with spelling mistakes. Sales copy full of ridiculous spelling and grammatical errors, and this is for expensive digital products where there really should be no excuse.

Now I will readily hold up my hand – none of us are perfect, and I am sure the pedantic will find grammatical errors in this post (hopefully no spelling mistakes)! But really (yes I am aware that it is not good practise to begin a sentence with ‘but’!), there is no excuse at all for this. Almost every program has a built-in spell checker feature. This applies whether you are composing an email, writing an ebook or designing a web page with an HTML editor. This blog uses WordPress, and has a spell checker included. Before I publish this post I’ll click a button to make sure I haven’t made any errors with my spelling.

It’s so simple to do. Do the same with your emails, use the spell checker option. Look this is important. Most of your competitors will not do this, whether it’s due to laziness, lack of knowledge or a general feeling of apathy towards good communication I really don’t know. However I am totally convinced that if you make just a bit of an effort to communicate correctly then you will stand out from “the rest of the herd”.

Remember this. You have no store where customers can come inside and interact with you face to face. Obviously there are no worries about spelling when you are speaking with someone! It is far easier to communicate with customers when they are standing right in front of you. When I ran my offline business I would much prefer to drive 100 miles to visit a customer and negotiate face to face than attempt to do business over the phone. It was just a lot easier to do business that way.

However, in the online world generally we don’t have that option. The main interaction is the printed word. So make sure your emails, your web sites, your eBay listings, all your written communications are spelled correctly, check your grammar and stay away from the dreaded “TXTSPK”.

Alrite m8?Mor 2moro

PS I’ve spell checked and re-read this post several times – I just know I’ve set myself up for several people writing in to point out this error and that error. Never mind, I can take it By the way, has anyone else wondered why almost every spell checker thinks the word “internet” is wrong? Weird.

Firstly, let me make something crystal clear. NEVER EVER be tempted to just copy and paste someone else’s content. You are in breach of their copyright, and sooner or later you will get caught. Apart from anything else, why would you want to do that? The person who wrote the MRR ebook you are working on may very well become a valuable joint venture partner for you. Also imagine how you would feel if you had taken the time and trouble to write a high quality ebook and someone else just copied it, AND passed it off as their own work? Right.

So, having got that out of the way let’s take a look at how you can create your own unique ebook from someone else’s MRR ebook. Let’s pick a subject, for example “how to train your puppy”. Now, first of all it’s very likely that you aren’t going to find just 1 MRR ebook on this subject but several. If you can find preferably 3 different ebooks on your chosen niche, in this case puppy training, then you have enough.

Read through them carefully, making a particular note of chapter headings. These are the key subcategories of puppy training that you will need to write about. Look at which subcategories appear in all 3 ebooks. Make sure you include all of those. Ideally you would aim for about 10 chapter headings which at 4-5 pages per chapter will give you a 40-50 page ebook – a good length. If you want to go for more than that – great, but get your ideas from the 3 existing MRR ebooks.

Should you be short of ideas, there’s plenty of places you can go to get more than you’ll ever need. Article Directory sites such as Ezinearticles are pretty good, have a search on forums and see what questions people are asking about “puppy training”, even a simple search on Google can yield excellent results. Having got your chapter headings (or niche subcategories) all you need to do is rewrite the content you have.

OK, I can hear you groaning “but it’s not that easy!”. True enough, but it’s not that hard either. Trust me on this, I have written a lot of content from blog posts to articles to whole ebooks simply by rewriting exisiting content. Go through the content one page at a time and rewrite it in your own words. Give your ebook a new title, and make sure your chapter headings are not the same as the original content.

With practise, and assuming you at least have a basic knowledge of the subject, you can get that done in less than 3 hours. All you need do then is create graphic of your ebook (an ecover) and congratulations, you have created your own unique product.

If all of that sounds like a lot of hard work, then for less than the cost of a takeaway pizza I have the answer for you from my resale rights site. I suggest you check these 2 great products out – both with resale rights so you start selling them right away:

How to create your own ebook without writing one word:

http://www.bestmultimediaguides.com/page.php?id=create_own_ebook.html

Create your own instant ebook covers software:

http://www.bestmultimediaguides.com/page.php?id=instant_ecover_generator.html

Let me know how you get on.

It just depends how you look at it. The main argument against using products that can’t be edited is that it is impossible to make them unique to you, therefore the only way to differentiate your version of that product from everyone else’s is the price. Follow that reasoning through to it’s logical conclusion and you’ll be selling it for cents, therefore not making a profit, therefore you’re not going to bother with MRR products.

At a quick glance it’s difficult to fault the logic above. However, what if I told you that there is another way to look at this, in fact there are other ways – plural. This means that instead of following the rest of the herd who say “there’s no money or point in selling MRR products” you consider these points….

The main question to keep in mind, and to constantly ask yourself, is “How do I make my product look different from all the others?” This is actually a relatively simple thing to do, but it requires a little bit of effort – not much but a little. With MRR products, while you cannot change the product itself, you can change other elements. Here are 3 ideas to get you started:

1. Change The Sales Copy

If your product has come with a ready made sales letter then change it. Either rewrite it slightly so it doesn’t look the same as everyone else’s or write a brand new one. This is not as difficult as you might think. Change the headline, change the font, add a few more bullet points and you have a unique sales letter.

2. Change The Graphics

Often your MRR product will have come with a “ready made” web site, including graphics of the product (usually an ebook cover), a header graphic and a footer graphic. Change them. Either do it yourself if you are comfortable using a graphics editor such as Photo Shop, or pay a designer to do it for you.

Should you change the name of the product in your sales copy and graphic? That is up to you, but I have done it myself on occasion. There is a very popular ebook titled “Recipes from South of the Border” – I sell that regularly on eBay using a different title in my sales copy – “246 Mexican Recipes”.

3. Add Relevant Free Bonuses To Your Product

To make your MRR product stand out from all the others, offer related free bonuses in that same niche. For example, do you suppose someone buying an ebook about Mexican Recipes would also be interested in other recipe ebooks? Of course they would. So you could offer 2 or 3 other recipe ebooks as free of charge bonuses (always check that the license allows you to do that though). Or, just to expand on that thinking you could offer something Mexico related – how to learn Spanish, how to get cheap holidays in Mexico, etc. You get the picture.

So those are just 3 quick and easy things you can do with a MRR product to make yours appear different to all the others out there. Don’t make the same mistake that almost all newbies make by thinking if you can’t edit the contents of the ebook, it’s not worth selling. That attitude will cost you a lot of money in the long run.

Tomorrow we’ll have a look at something even more exciting – using MRR products that you are not allowed to edit to create your own, 100% unique product!

There are at least four very good reasons to use MRR instead of, or rather in addition to, PLR products.

1.    Far More Resale Rights Products Are Sold In MRR Format Than PLR.

I would estimate that out of the literally thousands of Resale Rights products on the market, no more than 10% are Private Label. Therefore if you decide NOT to use MRR products you are excluding yourself from the vast majority of products you could potentially sell. Furthermore if far more products are available in MRR format than PLR, then naturally it follows that…

2. Many More Product Niches Are Available In MRR Format

A good example that comes to mind is the Pet niche, generally a very profitable one. PLR products within the pet niche are readily available for cats and dogs, but it is not as easy to find PLR ebooks on the subject of other animals. This is common sense of course, after all the 2 most popular types of animal to keep as a pet are cats and dogs.

However, what happens if you want to offer ebooks on other animals – rabbits, mice, fish or something exotic such as iguanas? You will struggle to find anything in any format other than MRR; even if you are fortunate enough to find a PLR product then it won’t be cheap.

3. Add Credibility To Your Web Site, Product Range Or Product

Some ebooks with MRR are quite well known in the online world. One of my best selling products in my eBay shop is “597 Ready Made Business Letters”, which is one of the best ever selling products on the internet. This product was created well over 10 years ago by one of the great pioneers of information marketing (both online and offline) – Mr Bill Myers.

Bill (or maybe I should call him Mr Myers?!) put this product together in the 1990’s and sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it, at prices up to $100. Today I have the right to sell arguably the best known digital product for what I want, where I want without having to pay any royalties or commissions to Bill Myers. If I’m honest I find that quite humbling. It certainly adds credibility to my site that I am allowed to sell products of such calibre.

Suppose this product were available with PLR – would I sell more copies with my name on the front as the author, or am I better off leaving Bill Myers’ name there? Not a difficult question to answer….

MRR products are also great to include in your free bonuses (check that the license allows you to do that though). They ADD to the credibility and value of your own product. So what if you can’t edit it – don’t worry about that, don’t get hung up on being able to insert your links into every product you’re selling.

4. Help you become an authority within your niche

For many niches, there are just not enough PLR products to go round. I’ll give you an example. Within weeks of starting my eBay business, I actually became quite an authority on recipe ebooks on eBay. At one time I had almost 50 listed, and I was even getting hits to my eBay listing from Google searches!

That’s right – many of my eBay recipe listings were on the first page of Google! Out of those 50 ebooks no more than 5 had PLR – the vast majority came in a format that I wasn’t allowed to edit. Now, if I had only sold PLR recipe ebooks do you think I would have done as well as I did?

But….but….I hear you say.

•    But won’t I be competing against lots of other sellers with EXACTLY the same product?
•    But isn’t it impossible to differentiate myself from other sellers except on price if I can’t edit the ebook and title?

Make sure you read my next post on this subject which will have you looking at MRR products in a totally different light.

This craze of making ebooks into a standalone executable program started a few years ago. Anyone who has downloaded the big ebook packs “200 Free Ebooks” etc will know what I mean. Here are my 5 main reasons why I hate them and will have nothing to do with them:

Reason # 1 – Many Will Only Work If You Are Connected To The Internet

They don’t tell you that do they? Well, not until after you’ve bought. Then you open the program and there is a small note on the opening page “Note – This Ebook Requires An Internet Connection”. Why is this?

Simple – a lot of the “executable ebooks” link to a page on the author’s web site. If the author decides that internet marketing isn’t for him or her, or if they take the page down your nice little “executable ebook” is also gone. So instead of buying a product you thought was “for life” you only bought a product that is only available to you for as long as the author can be bothered to maintain his or her site. Nice.

What happens if you don’t have an internet connection where you currently are? What if you’re on the move – on a train, ferry, car, plane? What if your home or office connection is down? You have NO access to the product you have paid for!

Reason # 2 – Many Are Just Disguised Google Adsense Sites

This is another reason why so many will only allow you access if you have an internet connection. I have seen so many that are basically just a “copy and paste” job from a “made for” Google Adsense advertising site. You get a little bit of content in the middle of the page surrounded by a sea of ads. Is that really something you want to sell to your customers?

Reason # 3 – Most Cannot Be Printed

This is a bigger thing than you might think. A lot of buyers like to be able to print out their ebooks. If you have a PDF it’s as easy as clicking “File” and then “Print”. Can’t do that with most of the executable ebooks….

Reason # 4 – Cannot Be Used On A Portable Device

The world is getting more mobile. We want to carry our information with us. Many people have Iphones, Smartphones or PDAs. Mobile versions of Adobe Acrobat run on all of them, Windows Mobile (Microsoft’s operating system for mobile devices) includes it as standard. So whilst you can read your PDFs on a mobile device, unfortunately that doesn’t hold true for “executable ebooks”.

Reason # 5 – Cannot Be Read By Portable Book Readers

Staying with the mobile theme, these kind of devices are becoming more popular. The most well-known is Kindle, distributed by Amazon. Yet again, PDFs present no problem to Portable Book Readers. In contrasts don’t even think of trying to open an “executable ebook” with one.

I took the decision to ONLY sell ebooks in PDF format, both on my web site

www.bestmultimediaguides.com

and my eBay shop

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/bestmultimediaguides

I strongly suggest you do the same.

Auction Sites

Many marketers begin their career selling digital information products on eBay. That’s where I started and it makes a lot of sense. It’s very easy to set up, you don’t need to be a web site design genius because eBay supply you with some reasonable templates, and you don’t need to worry about traffic – eBay supply that for you.

However, you are NEVER going to get the optimum price for your information product on eBay. That’s just a fact of life; buyers go onto eBay in search of a bargain. What does this have to do with Resale Rights licenses?

In my experience, when the creator of a MRR and PLR product does put restrictions in the license, the most often used restriction states “not to be sold on auction sites”. Whilst there are lots of other very minor auction sites, the biggest is eBay of course. The reason this restriction is included is to maintain a sensible price; the product creator does not want to see his or her work appear on eBay at some ridiculously low price.

Be aware that Ebay have lately become very quick at spotting listings that have this restriction in the license. If you are very lucky they may only pull your listing, in most cases you will be suspended. So if you are using eBay (and you should) always check that the license allows you to sell it there. If in doubt – leave it out.

Minimum Price

This can include terms such as “not to be given away for free”. You might do this to encourage people to sign up to your newsletter or membership site. Make sure that this is NOT forbidden in the license. Sometimes, especially with software, you may find a sentence with words to the effect “NOT to be sold for LESS than $19.95”. If it says that, then DON’T sell it for less than twenty bucks – you came into internet marketing to make some real money didn’t you?

Do Not Include In Bonuses

Most information marketers package their main product together with free bonuses. It’s a standard marketing tactic which I use and it works very well. Many buyers will buy your product purely for the bonuses, I’ve done that myself. However….do check that the terms of your Resale Rights license allow you to include that product as a free bonus. Sometimes they don’t.

In other cases they may specifiy a minimum value for the overall product, eg “This product may only be included as part of a bonus if the price for the whole product is $40 or greater”. In other words if you’re selling a product for $17 then you may not include it as a bonus, if your selling price is $47 then you’re fine.

Passing On Resale Rights To Your Customers

Whilst you may have the right to sell this product for whatever price you want, wherever you want, some licenses specifically EXCLUDE you from passing on those Resale Rights to YOUR customers. In this case you can only sell that particular product to your customer for their own personal use. Your customer is NOT permitted to sell the product on, only you have that right. Obviously this affects the price of your product, an ebook with resale rights naturally has more value than an ebook with none.

There are other restrictions to watch out for, but the above are probably the most common ones. The point I’m making is check your licenses carefully. There are 2 very good reasons for this

1. Breach the author’s copyright and you can get into very serious trouble. If you are selling on eBay they can and will suspend you. If you’re very unlucky you might also get a nasty letter from a lawyer…
2. Apart from the legal implications it’s actually common courtesy. One day it will be you who is selling YOUR product with Resale Rights. After all the trouble you will have gone to in order to create your product would you be happy if buyers were just flouting your Resale Rights restrictions? Of course not.

Usually your package will have come in “zip” format, i.e. all the various files have been compressed together in one archive file to save space, and make it more convenient. First of all, you need to “unzip” them using software such as WinZip or WinRAR. This extracts the files into their normal folder structure. Usually you will find the License file in one of the following formats:

1. PDF
2. Text Document (Open with Notepad)
3. MS Word Documents
4. HTML File
5. A JPG or GIF Image File

The most common format is a PDF or a TXT file. Usually it has the word “License” or “Read Me” somewhere in the file name. Once you have located the file, open it and have a look inside.

What about products where the Resale Rights License is part of the ebook itself?

It is quite often the case, especially with MRR ebooks that the license is actually contained within the ebook itself, rather than a separate file. You might have to spend a bit of time looking for it but it is usually within either the first 3 pages of the ebook, or on the very last. Sometimes it can be quite complex with all sorts of terms and conditions, in some cases it might be a simple sentence at the end of the ebook “You have full rights to do with this ebook as you want”.

How about if there is still no mention of a License inside the ebook but the source file is included?

I have noticed with a quite a number of PLR products that there isn’t a separate license as such included, but as well as the actual product in PDF format, the source file in Microsoft Word format is also there.

<Disclaimer>This is NOT repeat NOT legal advice and I won’t take any responsibility if you get into legal issues. If you are unsure, then either take appropriate legal advice, contact the original author or do not sell the product.

Having said that – this is what I do. If the source file is included then that almost certainly implies Resale Rights. Whoever you bought it from has not passed on the license to you, either because they forgot or they themselves did not receive it. Read the ebook carefully – if there  is no mention of copyright anywhere then you should be fine.

(On a side note I was nearly caught out once – I was about to sell an ebook which came complete with source files, I did a quick check and on the second page it had a huge copyright warning. It pays to check)

As a final check put the name of the product into Google. There should be others selling the same product as you, with the same graphic and possibly same sales page. That means you’ll be fine – there’s safety in numbers. If on the other hand Google and Yahoo don’t bring up any other searches for your PLR product I’d have a much closer look at it.

If in doubt, don’t sell it. It’s not worth it, there is such a huge choice of Resale Rights material to sell, never ever get hung up on one specific product. Just put it to one side and move on to the next one.