I’ve heard several prominent web marketers mention in their classes and public forums how easy it is to create your own software. Why, all you have to do is run over to Elance.com or RentACoder.com and have some poor shmoe from Outer Slobvia whip out what you want. And all for price of a few trips to Starbucks.

Uh, not quite.

Is that a spec in your eye? -----------------------------------

First of all, there is matter of specifications. A spec is a description of what your software should do. The more specific your desires, more detailed your specification needs to be. Even most malnourished coder in Slobovia is going to balk if you say, “Try a gray background–oops, no, don’t like that. Let’s try light blue… Oh, that’s not right, either. Let’s try mauve.” If you just want to specify “the important stuff”, you have to be prepared to accept all “unimportant stuff” however it is handed to you.

By way, both RentACoder.com and Elance.com have provisions in their process and terms of use that protect their developers from vague specifications. The good news is that there are also provisions to protect you, publisher. Regardless, more detailed your specification, greater chance of a happy outcome. Ah, but writing those darn specs takes a lot of time… far more time than it sounds like when gurus tell you how easy it is.

This was only a test… ----------------------------

There’s also small matter of testing. Once you accept a developer’s work, they get paid and get on with their lives. You, however, must live with software. If you don’t find every bug that must be fixed before you pay coder, you either have to put out another project for bid to repair things or live with problems until you do.

What I want to show you today is a legal technique which is completely FREE, and that I have been using for about a year with great success to sell ebooks with resell rights , to drive targeted traffic to your website using nothing more than eBay!!

Before you read on let me tell you a story: when i first wanted to start selling ebooks on internet I didn't have a clue about how to do it, so I looked at websites of people who were already doing it. There was one seller who had about 300 daily listings on eBay (for 300 different ebooks!!!): he had a link that pointed to his own website, in this website he did NOT sell products, he only had links to his ebay store: this is a key thing to understand in eBay policy!! You CAN link to your website if it has valuable information about products you are selling, but you CAN NOT link to your website if you're selling products directly on it (because eBay won't get any commission that way)...

Back to story: one day, eBay suspended this seller's account because of their "downloadable media policy" (basically, they suspected some of his ebooks of being copyrighted and sold illegally), so he transformed his own site in a real, stand-alone ecommerce store. The store was designed VERY poorly, with sloppy graphics, absolutely NO SEO, no descriptions for products etc. Next thing i know: I visit his new website a month later and he has 200 thousands page views and hundreds of sales. How did this happen?? Simple: he had links registered in google,yahoo etc (coming directly from eBay, which has a high pagerank) which were pointing to his domain. These links alone gave him a pagerank of 2, he used emails of buyers from ebay to send them a message about his newly opened store...and he had success!!!