Public Domain

Anyone out there looking to start an internet marketing business of some sort must first beware of the landmines that exist to grab the newbie and just take your hard earned cash. These landmines or scams exist in all facets of marketing and for everything you will undoubtedly need to proceed and build a successful online or eCommerce business.

First and foremost be sure to be ready to do your homework and research every part of doing business online. Internet marketing products and all things needed to do business online can and will need some research from eBooks on step by step guides for doing business to hosting, shopping carts to collect your payment, wholesalers, dopshippers, software to help automate your business. Also things like building opt in email list and running your newsletter, autoresponders, mailing list management are also important.

For every marketing product you need watch out for the programs that promise unbelievable results, like 1000s of optin email lists in days and weeks, these programs and promises generally are scams. If it sounds to good to be true It Is! There are great and useful products out there find the ones you can and should trust first. From hosting to software products and eBooks you can find great information and trustworthy products, just do it right the first time and you will not get frustrated and quit or give up on your dream.

From personal experience I was looking for a product some time ago to take advantage of google adsense and there are 100s of products out there. Now the one I did some research on sounded amazing and I could build sites with 1000s of pages of original content and rank well in the search engines for. The sales page even shoed how these websites ranked for competitive keywords and would get all the search engine traffic you could ever want. When I checked out these statements and looked farther into these domains they were no longer found in any of the big 3 search engines. What this proved to me was that these programs did nothing to impress the search engines for the long haul and that is what an internet business is not just a temporary quick cash grab.

I also visit a lot of forums to see what products and marketing programs that people are talking about. You can learn a lot by joining some of these marketing forums, just do a search for “marketing forums” and join. On and adsense forum I had been visiting for some time I read a long sad post by a marketer who had been making 1000s every month from google and all of a sudden his income dropped to $800 in one month. Now he was getting his checks from google by Fedex I believe and you only get that treatment if you are making over $10,000/month. Obviously his sites built the fast, easy way no longer impressed the search engines. So like I said do it right the first time and stay in for the long haul.

Obviously there are many great and trustworthy products from hosting to ebooks and more out there, just find the right ones by doing your homework. Check out review sites and forums and ask questions of members on certain products or services you are interested in. Most people are more than willing to give advice or their results good or bad for any product you may be interested in. There are great review sites out there that you can visit and read reviews that are unbiased and that you also con give your own reviews on products and services that you have purchased or used to help other newbies to this business and help them not make the mistakes or send them on the right road to success in the ecommerce and internet marketing business.

In closing, do your homework, research and most of all remain focused on your dreams goals and never quit it may take some time, but if you persist and do the hard work into anything you try you will succeed in the long term. Imagine how you will feel and be able to brag to your family and friends that your efforts have paid off.

Alright so your e-book based on a public domain work is selling, but you find that it is not selling fast enough. What to do?

In the world of business, one of the best tested methods of achieving success is to sell and sell it fast, before others decide to join the bandwagon and you find yourself dividing the market among yourselves. Well, that is probably inevitable, but if you want to get the best slice of the cake, you need to be quicker than the rest.

Think on your toes and always, always look for better alternatives that promise bigger profits.

The same thing goes with e-book reselling. If you want to make maximum profit out of your hard work, look for other alternatives. Most successful e-book resellers have turned to affiliate programs to generate more income. They use these programs as another avenue to increase their products’ exposure and hopefully turn more people into potential buyers as a result.
 
You can do this, too.

Basically, affiliate programs work this way: You offer your public domain-based e-book as a reseller or affiliate program. When someone else comes along and decides to purchase a copy of your e-book, he can then sell the e-book for an unlimited number of times. And because the work is sold under his own name, he gets 100% of all the profits.

But what about you?

Well, you do not have to worry because when he purchased your work, you already gained your profit. This method is also called “franchising” or “turnkey” and it can be very rewarding if you play your cards well.

Generally, if you make an initial investment in a reseller or affiliate program, it will cost you anywhere around a hundred dollars. Once you have laid down the ground work, at least in terms of finances, the only other investments you have to make are time and energy.

Selling and marketing your product by yourself is going to be very difficult. That is because the market is so huge it is a lot like standing in a room full of crowds. There is no telling buyers will even notice where you are standing and get interested in the product you are selling. You need to take the active part.

Give yourself an edge in sales and marketing by using a franchising operation with the following added tips:

• Charge less than the average selling price of the product. This is one sure-fire way to undercut the competition and thus give your product a boost in terms of buyer attractiveness.


• Make sure your sales website looks professional and clean. Avoid any clutter. Your product description and all text found in your site should be easy to read and offers fresh content.


• Under no circumstances should you make any blatant marketing hype in your website. This will only sour the costumer’s opinion of you, considering how many scams and con artists profit by fooling their clients with too much hype.


• Create an e-book from another public domain work, preferably on a related or similar topic, then offer it as a free bonus alongside the affiliate product.

If you do all these things, your buyers are going to think they hit the jackpot, and they sure did if you play your cards right. And in the mean time, you are sitting back and reaping the rewards for all your excellent business sense.

Have you noticed how successful companies these days keep on packaging and re-packaging their products over and over?

Essentially, it is the same product but because of the face-lift, they somehow get it into the minds of their consumers that it is a wholly new and different product.

Walt Disney even made use of this great business strategy. He came up with a new way of telling old fairy tales, giving the stories a wholly refreshing feel to them. You can do this, too, with an old public domain story.

Just choose the public domain work you want. Create a revised edition of it and then sell it as your own. Or, make as many revisions as you can until what emerges is a product that is so completely radical from the original though both are still essentially similar, then file for a copyright notice, and the work becomes another original.

Sell this new work as your own and earn royalties from distributors. Additionally, because of the copyright protection attached it, no one else can copy your ideas. This means the work is completely yours – free for your use, private or otherwise.

Giving public domain works a face-lift does not take a creative genius to do it. So do not feel intimidated by it all.

The whole thing can be simple; just change the format of a work by doing any or all of the following:

· Make the type face cleaner;

· Make the text more attractive by arranging them into sidebars and tables. This would make the content so much easier to read than blocked text arranged in a boring, monotonous paragraph;

· Add graphics, headings, or color texts;

· Make a few actual changes to the text, either by adding new material or subtracting unnecessary lines.

After all that, your book or e-book is now considered officially “revised” and you can start redistributing them through your own website or webpage or through large publishing sites like Amazon.com.

**NOTE: If you only made minor revisions to a public domain work and did not make any actual changes to the context, then it is not advisable to file for a separate copyright notice for the “new” work. If you must protect your product, then use the protection feature that most e-book creation software offer – one that makes it possible for you to protect your files from major theft and tampering.

There are many approaches to creating an e-book. For instance, you can make an e-book by simply reproducing an exact copy of a public domain work, and there are many ways to go about this:

• You can obtain a digital copy of the complete book and redistribute it;


• Or you can scan the pages of the physical book yourself and compile them into one file (usually in PDF format)

An alternative would be to make changes to the public domain work. This is called “modernization,” which is really no more than rearranging the text or the presentation to make the content of the work appear new.

Whichever approach suits you, just remember to make your choice based on what is more convenient and easily accessible to you.

Creating E-Books with HTML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It is a type of web programming language which is the de facto script all web browsers are based on.

HTML lays the groundwork for the World Wide Web as most web pages are based on HTML files. In addition to that, HTML files, when compiled, also make up a considerable number of e-books. Plus, the script is so simple that you do not even have to learn it to generate an HTML code.

Here are some tools you can use to make an HTML-based e-book:

• Word Processor – This includes word processing programs like Microsoft Word. The “Save As” feature of most of these programs (usually found under the File option) will allow you to save the documents you write as HTML files. All you need to do is to make sure that the documents look exactly like how you want your e-book format to be, then click “Save.”


• E-Book Creation Software – If you are not comfortable using a word processing program to create HTML files, another option you have is an e-book creation software – a special program designed solely to generate or produce e-books. 

E-book creation software ranges in price from free to a few hundred dollars. It is up to you if you are willing to spend your precious bucks for the extra features paid software usually have. Or perhaps, you are satisfied with the features you are already getting from the programs free of charge.

Most e-book creator programs are easy to use, which, of course, translates to increased productivity. Again, it is up to you which one you prefer.

If you feel that you can produce more e-books with an e-book creation software and you do not mind the extra cost so much, then go ahead. Whatever is more convenient for you.

For starters, you can use the following e-book creator software samples to start creating e-books and start making profits:

eBook Compiler Software – A free e-book creator available for download at eBookCompiler.com. Only after you have fully explored the system and tried out all its features and decide to start selling your e-books will you be asked to pay a one-time registration.

     eBook Pack Express 1.7 – A free to try e-book creation software by Caislabs Software available at Download.com. The program is very user-friendly and supports HTML, JavaScript, Flash, MP3, and video files.  The beauty of e-books is that they can be easily downloaded from the Internet, whether direct from a website or as an email attachment. However, downloading can be slow for some consumers, especially if they are not using broadband connection.

  A free to try e-book creation software by Caislabs Software available at Download.com. The program is very user-friendly and supports HTML, JavaScript, Flash, MP3, and video files.