Selling Affiliate Products through Online Auction Sites 2
By Sydney Johnson

Part 1 discusses selling an affiliate book called White Heat Metabolism. My point was that this ebook has been selling so well because my review is so simple and because I say what I really feel and people recognize my sincerity. So, if you really believe in what you’re talking about, it isn’t that hard.

But, I had several people ask me other kinds of questions. Because White Heat Metabolism is an affiliate book, I’m not selling it directly off the auction sites, but am offering information on it for a penny, then not collecting the pennies. Instead, I sent customers directly to the affiliate site.

My friend Gary received a warning from eBay for doing this, and asked if I had a similar experience.

This is where we need to be creative.

1. First, I will not be surprised to receive a similar notice any day from eBay. I recognize that eBay isn’t especially fond of customers doing this, because their revenues on a one cent sale aren’t especially great.

The reality of life on eBay: they have so many items for sale at any one time that unless someone complains, they don’t notice what you are doing.

Who might complain about something you are doing? Perhaps your competition. Or I guess there are people in life who feel it is their duty to make sure everyone is following the rules. Personally, I am too busy to check up on what other auction sellers are doing.

One of the sellers mentioned in Make Your Net Auction Sell! was contacted by eBay for selling items for a penny and he was very aggressive about it. He contended that eBay made lots of money from his other auctions and had no right to complain. He got them to back down and leave him alone. Fighting eBay takes too much time and energy and I wouldn’t bother unless it was really important to me.

2. A second way to handle this kind of issue is to sell on other sites. In spite of all the hullaballo, there really is life outside of eBay. I have successfully sold on Yahoo, Bidbay and ePier, as well as some of the other larger sites mentioned in How To Suck Up Hungry Customers.

Some sites won’t fit what your products. For example, zdnet and cnet focus on computers, something I don’t sell, so they are of little use to me. My techie son, though, uses them a lot.

3. The third choice is very powerful and what I really want to emphasize. Suppose I am determined to sell White Heat Metabolism on eBay and they have told me to quit using my one cent ploy. What can I do?

I can create a package or collection that leads to the ebook, instead of selling it directly.

For instance, I could write up a two or three page “Special Report” about my personal experiences with Power Breathing.

Then I could spend some time finding some freebies, or very low cost digital items, that would be appropriate for this package.

Just for the sake of this article, I went to google.com and typed in “natural health”,”we*ght l-o-s-s” and “metabolism”. The last two phrases weren’t especially helpful because they took me to sites selling weight loss products, mostly pills of some kind.

But only a short time at a couple of health sites lead me to all kinds of free treasures, such as:

A 21 day “live food”

A recipe book with over 200 easy to prepare weight loss recipes

A natural beauty book, including how to make treatments at home for skin and hair beauty

A software program that allows the user to figure out daily calories, fat grams, etc.

A software program to figure your percentage of body fat and what you need to do to reduce these numbers

Software to personalize an exercise program And there were lots more. I found these in about 15 minutes. How good are they? I don’t know, because I was just doing research for this article. But there were so many choices that I know I could find some really good ones.

I could find a few of these, bundle them with my Special Report and sell the entire package for 99 cents. There are thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of items on eBay selling for 99 cents. They couldn’t possibly object to this. And guess where they package leads the buyer? Right to White Head Metabolism!

Plus, there was an added benefit: just l*oking for goodies for the package lead me to several other possible affiliate ebooks to sell, creating even more mini sites and more revenue streams.

And, naturally, I could use each book to generate traffic for the others. “If you like our Power Breathing book, you will really be interested in our Body Wrap story at …”)

4. A fourth way to sell this affiliate book is to find an actual physical product that you could sell. For example, I know that some of the diet programs insist that their customers weigh their food. I could find a food scale and sell it at cost. Or a piece of exercise equipment, a “regular” book or tape, or even join some of those affiliate programs that sell pills or other diet products, and still offer the Power Breathing book.

If you really want to sell something on eBay or anywhere else, don’t take no for an answer. Instead, just get creative and find another way.