Reselling Ebooks - Has Bubble Burst? By Peter RoeThe Web is crammed to bursting point with ebooks with 'Resale Rights' and sales web sites - but does market saturation mean that most people are wasting their time and money trying to sell them?
The answer may be 'yes' - unless you do things a little differently.
Does any of this sound familiar?
You've bought latest 'killer marketing' ebook complete with resale rights, you've uploaded a copy of sales 'mini-site' to your web server and used your favourite auto-submitter to send URL to search engines. Maybe you've joined a few 'link enchanges' and perhaps even bought some 'pay per click' keywords that looked hopeful.
So now you sit back and wait for dosh to roll in.
......And wait ......and wait.
So what has happened? You've done what you've been told to do - you've shelled out on a good domain name, web hosting, maybe some promotion software or PPC keywords - but still no sales. So WHY aren't people buying 'your' product?
The answer probably lies in your 'web stats'.
Take a look - just how many 'hits' are you getting? Chances are, just a few a day, at best.... and THIS is why you aren't making sales. And main reason for this? - simple market saturation. There are simply too many people doing EXACTLY same thing you are, too many people submitting identical cloned web sites to search engines, too many people trying to get noticed using exactly same keywords.
The fact is that it is simply no longer enough to do what others are doing. If you want to succeed on Web, it is now absolutely ESSENTIAL to do something different in order to get noticed.
For 'why' of this, lets look at a brief history of 'web marketing'.
In beginning there were search engines. It didn't take very long for 'direct mail' people to discover this free resource and to use it (and abuse it) to advertise their stuff at almost zero cost, to hundreds of thousands of 'prospects'(the Web was still a baby then).
Then there was email marketing - just 'harvest' a ton of email addresses from Web then blast lot of them with your 'killer' offer. Never mind quality - just feel quantity!
Next were 'free for all' classified ad sites, banner ads, pop-ups, 'pay per click', Google Adwords, and rest - each touted in turn by web marketing 'wizards' as THE way to grab a share of Internet gravy train's riches.
The trouble is, of course, that while each of these methods worked for a while (and often made a fortune for those who were first on block with an effective system) nothing seems to work for long on Web.
Of course, that has never stopped various 'gurus' who have made a killing with each new marketing method then going on to try to make another one - by selling their 'system' or 'formula' to others, long AFTER wave has passed.
And waves are now passing at ever increasing speed.
For example, in race to get otherwise unexciting web pages to top of search engine listings, 'search engine optimization' techniques have been used successfully for some time to increase 'page rank' in major search engines. They worked well for many years and it is only relatively recently that writing has appeared on wall for these methods, in form of new indexing methods by Google and other SEs, designed to exclude web sites using these techniques.
Similarly, mass email marketing ('spamming')worked for several years, until volume of trash became so large that individuals, web service providers and even governments have been forced to take steps to stem flow.
Even its house-trained successor, use of 'opt-in' mailing lists generated from sales or sign-ups, is rapidly becoming ineffective, as targeted messages become lost in a torrent of spam, or are deleted by 'anti-spam' filters.
For a while, banner ads and even FFA postings worked (but never very well!), as did 'pay per click' and other paid methods for getting included in search engine results. But now, just a year or so after PPC was hailed as holy grail for savvy marketers, competition for useable keywords and phrases has become so intense that cost of hits has become uneconomic for anything but specialized niche- interest keywords.
And recently, 'pop-ups', 'pop-unders', 'slide-ins' and various other irritating intrusions have been touted as next marketing breakthrough. In fact, for maybe six months they have worked quite well for one particular purpose - building 'opt-in' lists in exchange for freebies such as an ebook or newsletter.
But guess what? Now a large proportion of surfers never venture on Net without their faithful 'pop-up killer' software running, so they will never even see your amazing offers - no matter how tempting! Even those who don't currently use such software soon will, as search engine 'toolbars' and latest browser software packages offer pop- up elimination as standard, often as 'default' setting.