April 2008
Monthly Archive
How to Create a Download or Thank You Page
Martin | : The Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
Part 20: A Long Look at Download Pages
How to create a download (thank you) page.
Some people get very worried about thieves stealing their ebooks. There are a lot of people online who are less than honest and think nothing of hacking their way into your site’s download page, ripping it off and distributing your hard work to all and sundry.
Is this a real problem?
Yes. I once received an email from a subscriber who said this:
“Why do you bother to try to sell your book to people in my country? They won’t buy it. Don’t you realize that as soon as any ebook is published it will be copied by people from my part of the world and sold for a fraction of the price you are charging?”
Well, maybe. I do sell quite a lot of ebooks at full price to people from that person’s country, so his sweeping generalization cannot be completely true. But even if there is an element of reality in it, should we worry?
My personal view is no.
I doubt very much if any of the people who are grabbing my ebooks for pennies on the dollar would have ever bought a full price copy in the first place. Have I lost a sale? No, I don’t think so. But I have gained an opportunity to get my name distributed more widely, and to advertise affiliate links, or subscription sign up pages within the ebook that they have taken.
Although there are reasonable safeguards that I can put in place to deter casual pirates, the ‘professionals’ will get my book whatever I do.
In Internet marketing, time is money, and I figure that the more time we spend worrying about the threat of piracy, the less time we have to make money. Not to mention the stress all that worry may cause.
Here is what I do.
I normally create the ebook in Adobe Acrobat with the security settings set so that the book’s contents cannot be changed or copy and pasted. This affords a small measure of protection against casual plagiarism.
Password protection. I don’t like it and don’t use it, but if you are really worried about security, you can create PDF files that can only be opened with a password. To my mind, this just annoys legitimate purchasers and does nothing to deter pirates (who can easily pass on the password anyway).
Another problem with password protection is that inevitably ‘real’ customers will forget their password and you will have to provide customer service for an indefinite period.
Now for some common-sense safeguards.
When you upload your ebook to your website ready for customers to download it, put it in a folder that nobody can guess the name of and on a web page with an equally obscure name. The URL may look something like:
http://www.mydomain.com/a3f7t/eht38s.htm
(Don’t bother to click on it as it doesn’t exist!)
You’d be surprised how many ebooks are stored on easy-to-guess URLs like http://www.mydomain.com/thankyou.htm
Those ones are just asking to be ripped off
Another way to add an extra layer of security is to make your download URL point to a redirect page. For example, the URL http://www.mydomain.com/a3f7t/eht38s.htm would arrive at a page which is comprised of the following HTML code :
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Refresh” Content=”0;URL=http://www.mydomain.com/q5tge6/et35h.htm”>
</head>
<body>
<p align=”center”><font face=”Arial”>This page will redirect in a few seconds.</font></p>
<p align=”center”><font face=”Arial”>If not <a href=”http://www.mydomain.com/q5tge6/et35h.htm”><font face=”Arial”>Please Click Here</font></a></font></p>
</body>
</html>
This page will then redirect the visitor from the first URL to the one embedded in the page.
The benefit of this is that you can change the actual download page and folder – even the entire domain – anytime you like by simply amending the html on the redirect page – without ever having to worry about old customers having dead links.
An even better, and faster way to accomplish the same thing is to use a PHP redirect. With this, you create a page that comprises just this line:
<?php header(‘location:http://www.the-redirect-page.com’); ?>
(Change the URL to the appropriate one.) Save it with a php suffix and when you point a link to this page, it will immediately redirect the viewer to the one you’ve coded.
If you want to take security to a higher level, software solutions are available that will make sure that only the person who has made the purchase can access your download page.
What should a download page include?
* Zip or not?
Even though PDF files are already compressed to some extent, they can often be quite large. Running them through the Windows XP or Vista compression program (right click on the files or files, select ‘Send to’ and then select ‘Compressed (zipped) folder’) or using a program such as WinZip will often make them a little smaller. The result is that the file that you offer for download is now called myfile.zip rather than myfile.pdf.
For users or most modern browsers, that is a crucial difference because they generally have PDF reading capabilities built in. That means that if your thank you page offers a PDF file for download, your browser will open it to display rather than download it. And THAT can cause no end of confusion because customers do not end up with a copy of your book on their hard drive. As soon as they close their browser the book is lost.
If you are offering a PDF file from your download page, you must tell your customers to ‘right click on the download link and select ‘save target as’. This forces the browser to save the file rather that just display it.
However, .zip files are downloaded correctly so by offering your ebook in compressed form (whether that process actually makes a smaller file size or not) you are able to avoid the confusion.
Back to what your download page should or could include.
* A link to the ebook.
This is one of the things that appears to most confuse Internet beginners, so I’ll explain how you make a link to a book.
When you have made your ebook into a PDF and zipped it (if you want to do that). You will have a file called something like ebook.zip
Upload that file (usually by FTP) to your web space – ideally into a folder with an unguessable name. It doesn’t have to be the same folder that the download page itself is in. In fact, it is probably better that it is not.
Now your ebook will be in a location something like http://www.mydomain.com/hel28d/ebook.zip
Create a hyperlink on your download page that references that URL. The HTML that achieves this would be:
<a href=http://www.mydomain.com/hel28d/ebook.zip>Click Here to Download</a>
Now, when anyone clicks on the link they will be asked if they want to download the zip file.
* A link to an unzipping utility.
Windows XP and Vista are pretty good at unzipping files, but some recent versions of programs like WinZip can baffle it. It always best to explain the zipping and unzipping process to your customers and to offer them a link to the latest WinZip trial (currently http://www.winzip.com/ )
It is a good idea to also inform Apple Mac users that they can get a free decompression tool from Stuffit Expander. The URL for that is http://www.stuffit.com/mac/expander/index.html
* A link to Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Once again, Windows can display PDF files perfectly happily, but as not everyone has that operating system, it is a good idea to tell your customers where they can get a free copy of Acrobat Reader. This is the link you’ll need to display: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
* Instructions and contact details
Never assume that your customers have as much knowledge about ebooks, downloading and reading them as you have.
In fact, it is safe to assume that some will have almost no idea what an ebook is.
I actually got this email from a very nice lady who had just bought one of my ebooks:
“I’ve bought your book, but my printer hasn’t started yet. Can you make it start from where you are, and how can you add the cover if I don’t have thicker paper?”
There is always one!
Try to explain everything that they need to know or do, in plain English.
However, there will be people who are confused, so make sure you display a contact email address prominently so that they can get in touch with you. It is also worth mentioning which time zone you are in so that they don’t panic if they hear nothing for a few hours.
* Payment details.
It is also a good idea to reiterate how much their credit card has been charged and who the payment has been made to (i.e. ClickBank)
* Upsell
The best time to extract more money from a customer is just as they’ve parted with some. If you have already prepared a backend product, now is a good time to tell them about it and perhaps to offer a special deal.
* Bonuses
If your product is sold with bonuses, create download links for them and add in any instructions that may be required.
* Opt-in form
The thank-you (download) page is a great place to grow your email list! Explain to your customer that by purchasing your book they are eligible for free updates if and when the book is revised, but in order to notify them, you will need their valid email address. It is acceptable also to explain that by providing their email address they will also receive your newsletter as an unadvertised bonus!
Note that you should set your autoresponder to double opt-in these people.
* Privacy statement
Naturally, if you have an opt-in form, you must display a privacy statement to the effect that you will not share their email address with anyone.
Some Optional Extras
* Some people use their thank-you page as a valuable advertising medium in its own right. Among the clever uses that I’ve seen are:
* Cross promotions with other ebook marketers – in other words, you display a small ad to their ebook on your thank-you page and they do the same for you on theirs.
* Offers of subscriptions to other ezines (where those publishers also display your sign-up details.
* Affiliate ads to ebooks on related topics.
It is up to you!
How many of these ideas you use is entirely up to you. At its simplest, a download page doesn’t actually need any of them at all – even a download link is optional! Many Internet marketers have a download page that consists only of an email sign-up form and nothing else. The customer has to fill in the form to be emailed the ebook. Their reasoning is that they simultaneously capture the buyer’s email address, and avoid the need to protect the download page – as there isn’t one.
I personally prefer to make my download pages as informative as possible as I see them as the beginning of a relationship with my customer.
And in my experience, a confused customer is one who is far more likely to ask for a refund.
The Right to Profit from Other People’s Work
Martin | : Private Label Rights, The Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
Part 19: Reprint, Resale, and Private Label Rights
Selling stuff that other people has made is a great way to make money online. At its simplest, you just recommend the other person’s product to your readers or site visitors, they go to the vendor’s sales page and when they buy you get a commission. That is called affiliate marketing and is hugely popular. But what if you are not happy to ‘just’ get a commission? What if you’d rather get the whole sales price for yourself?
In that case, you need to look at buying or acquiring the rights to the product. Depending on which ‘rights’ you buy or are given, you can then sell the product from your own site, in your own way, and keep all the money for yourself.
What are reprint rights, and how to profit from them.
When you buy an ebook or a program online, you generally buy the right to read it yourself, or use it on your own computer. Anything beyond that basic usage is usually forbidden.
That means that
- you cannot give it away to anyone else.
- you cannot change it in any way.
- you cannot sell it.
Even if there is no obvious copyright mark, the author of all published works (ebooks and program scripts included) is automatically awarded the copyright to their work as soon as it is published. The © mark acts as a reminder, but is not strictly required.
So how is it that some people can sell other people’s ebooks and programs, change them, rename them, give them away as free bonuses, and even sell you the rights to do the same?
It all comes down to the original author selling certain ‘rights’ to those works.
There are a few different types of ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across online. They are all quite different in what they allow you to do, so it is always wise to read the terms very closely to be sure you know exactly what rights you are actually buying.
Here are the most common ‘rights’ that you are likely to come across and what they generally mean. There can be variances though, so be sure to check the small print carefully.
Resale Rights.
The simplest of all. When you buy resale rights, you are given the right to sell the product on. While you can effectively do that as an affiliate, the difference here is that the product becomes your own. You have to handle the orders (through your own payment processor account) but you get to keep all the revenue from each sale.
Effectively the product becomes your own except that you cannot change it.
You will sometimes see resale rights being sold that attempt to dictate the price at which you will sell the product. While this is generally a good thing from the product’s point of view (if people start selling a $97 ebook for $1, the value of the book will fast disappear and resale rights owners who are charging the full price will find it hard to compete) it is almost always illegal.
Price fixing in this way is not allowed.
However, it is usually in your own interest to adhere to the recommended price.
Buying the resale rights to an ebook usually costs 3-5 times the normal selling price, but you don’t need many sales to start to see a good return on your investment.
Reprint Rights
Reprint rights are similar to resale rights, but differ slightly in as much as they confer on you the authority to have the ebook printed out to sell as a physical product.
This right is not seen as often as resale rights (and indeed, sometimes the resale rights licence will give reprint rights as well).
It can be very useful to have this right to print as a lot of extra money can be generated by offering ebooks that you sell with a physical product option. Simply by printing out an ebook and putting it in a nice binder, you can often command a much higher price from your customers.
Master Rights.
Master resale rights, or master reprint rights are the next step up and usually cost quite a bit more. Typically, 10-15 times the original product’s asking price.
They are so much more valuable because they give you the right to not just sell the book and keep the profits, but to sell the resale or reprint rights too. And again, any sales you make are entirely your own with no need to share with the product’s original author.
Master rights can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand they can help you generate significant profits by selling on the resale rights, but on the other, by selling those rights to others, you are creating your own competition!
Private Label Rights.
The final ‘rights’ that we will examine here are the so-called private label rights. With these, you buy the text to a book, or the code to a program and can then do whatever you like with them (within the terms of the license – so be careful to check).
What that means in practice is that if you buy the private label rights to an ebook, you can then change the way the book looks, add more content if you choose to, take content out if you like, reorder it, change the title of the book – even put your own name as the author. In fact, pretty much anything.
The only thing that is usually forbidden in the licence (although by no means always) is reselling the private label rights themselves.
This freedom to do whatever you want with private label rights ebooks is incredibly powerful and potentially amazingly profitable. In effect, you can create unique ebooks, under your own name, with your own look and feel, without having to do any of the hard writing work! It is almost as good as going to Elance and hiring a ghostwriter of your own.
The only drawback is that private label rights ebooks tend to be distributed via membership websites who typically have around 500 other members. Potentially, that is a lot of competition.
But the reality is that barely 5 out of every 100 people who belong to those sites ever make use of the content they are given, so your real competition is minimal.
At the time of writing this, private label rights are massively undervalued.
Most membership sites that give private label ebooks to their members have two new ones created every month, and some have a back library available of 50 or more just waiting for you to make your own and start to profit from.
Although I sell many ebooks and products that I have the resale rights to, my personal preference is to use private label works. I’ve got several reasons for this:
1. With ‘resale rights’ you have to sell the book exactly as it is supplied to you. If you are unhappy with the format or the look of it, bad luck. You cannot change it. It there is something about the content that you are less than confident with, that’s a pity, but you cannot change it.
2. With resale rights you have no real idea how many people are in competition with you, and no way to protect your profits if they start to wildly undercut your price. Often, the only way to compete against deep price cutters is to build an amazing selection of bonuses to offer alongside your product. This may be effective, but it can be time consuming and expensive.
3. Private label rights give you the power to do so much more than *just* publish an ebook. You can use the content in many different ways to make profits.
4. When you take a private label ebook and add new content, reword existing sections, add pictures, change the title and author’s name – in the ways that I recommend – you are creating a whole new unique work that has no competition in the marketplace at all.
“I’d love to start an online business but don’t know what to sell.”
Buying the rights to other people’s work is the fastest way to get a product of your own. There are literally tens of thousands of ebooks out there that you can buy the rights to – resale or private label – in an almost limitless array of niche markets.
Not having a product to sell is no longer an excuse to prevent you from starting an online business. Authors are falling over themselves to sell you the rights to their books – they’ve done all the work, so you can pick up the profits.
18 Ways to Profit from Private Label Articles
Martin | : Private Label Rights, The Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
Part 18: Getting the maximum value from PLR articles
In the previous installment of this course we looked at why private label material is such a good idea from both a money and time saving viewpoint. Today we’ll take a slightly deeper look at private label articles specifically to see some of the many ways they can be put to profitable use. A good word to use here is ‘repurposed’ – most people use plr articles in just one way, but here you’ll see that there are at least 18 alternatives.
The good thing is that most of these are not mutually exclusive. If you want to squeeze every penny or cent of value from the many private label articles that you will inevitably collect, there is nothing to stop you exploiting each article in a multitude of uses.
The only word of caution is that you should check the terms and conditions of your private label articles supplier – some are more liberal with their terms of use than others.
18 Ways to Profit from Private Label Articles
1. Mini Sites
Each pack of articles (usually between 10 and 40) can form a niche mini site in its own right. A mini site is usually a small website that is focused on selling one affiliate product – or an ebook that you’ve created yourself, perhaps from a private label ebook source.
2. AdSense Sites
Similar to mini sites, except here the primary monetization method is from displaying Google AdSense ads. This is by no means as profitable as it once was, but can still bring you in a good ongoing income if you build a string of such sites. With your content being provided by plr articles there is no real excuse not to!
3. Portal/Content Sites
Content sites are normally much more complex than basic made-for-AdSense sites. A content site will build up over time until it can have scores or hundreds of pages. A recent strategy for such sites, that works well with the search engines is siloing. In a siloed content site, you would place themed private label articles in their own directories and link them together vertically – with the last article in each directory (or silo) linking to the first in the next folder (silo). We will look at such internal linking strategies later in this course.
4. Creating eBooks
If you can collect together a sufficient number of well-written, tightly-themed articles, there is no reason why you should not then use them as the basis for an ebook. Naturally you will want to augment the content by adding information of your own and rewriting the articles to expand on their themes. The overall result will be that you can produce an ebook a lot faster by using the articles as a starting point than you can if you have a blank screen to begin with.
5. Adding to existing eBooks
One of the most important things when creating your own products using private label ebooks as your starting point is to add new sections, improve existing sections and generally make the book ‘your own’. Private label articles can easily form a big part of that added material.
6. Special Reports
If you don’t want to go to the effort of creating a whole ebook, or if you feel your private label articles are not of sufficient depth for an ebook, then why not consider using them to create a series of short special reports. Five or six themed articles can be put together and surrounded by a commentary from you and then sold as special reports in their own right.
7. Autoresponder series
A great way to get subscribers to sign up is to offer them an ongoing series of tips and ideas as a free autoresponder series. Needless to say, many people have a great deal of trouble writing such autoresponder courses, but using well written plr articles can shortcut the process. Many private label articles are of the ‘tips and strategies’ format and so can be adapted to the autoresponder series format with minimal effort.
8. Ideas bank
I often benefit from plr articles without ever using them! I just read through them looking for ideas and inspirations. You’d be surprised how often I find it too – if only to spark my thinking into a whole new sub niche.
9. Keyword research
One thing is for sure – in order for someone to have commissioned plr articles for you to use, they will have had to have done some good keyword research first. And by looking at the theme of each article in a pack, you can soon get a useful list of profitable keywords to use in other sites and blogs.
10. Adding to web pages
Even if you are adept at creating content on your own, private label articles can be used to add depth and content to your web pages. By adding a carefully chosen plr article to your page you can increase your wordcount (if your niche needs ‘meatier’ pages) introduce LSI words and ideas and increase your main keyword’s on-page count.
11. Sound bites
Not many people do this, but it is very easy to read a private label article into a microphone (using the excellent free sound editing software from www.audacity.com) and then let people listen to the content on your pages.
12. Blog posts
Just as you can use the articles to build web sites, you can also use them to build blogs. And because they are plr articles, you won’t have to show someone else’s resource box at the bottom of each one. You are perfectly at liberty to post them as if you are the author. A blog that is constantly fed new content on a daily basis will very quickly get the attention of the search engines.
13. RSS feeds
RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is a method by which other people can take your content and put it on their own websites and blogs. By creating an RSS feed for your plr articles, and adding links within them back to your sites, you can get a growing number of backlinks. We will look at RSS feeds later in the course.
14. Forum posts
Be careful here. many forum owners don’t like people to post articles, and those that do expect them to be of a high quality and written by you. Having said that, there are forums that are less picky and may allow you to put up the occasional plr article. The benefit is that you will also usually be allowed to add a ‘signature’ line to your post with a teaser ad to attract people back to your own URL.
15. Your own members
Some private label membership sites make no restrictions on the way you use the articles – including reselling them on to your own customers and or membership site subscribers. This can be a very welcome and useful service to provide your membership, but make sure you check your supplier’s terms and conditions first.
16. Article Directories
In general, article directories don’t like to see private label articles posted. however, if you use the plr article as the basis for creating a new article of your own, then the objections often disappear. The secret is to make sure that you change substantial parts of the original by rewording and rewriting throughout. At first glance this may seem to be a lot of work, but it quickly becomes second-nature and is a lot quicker than writing new articles from scratch.
17. Ezines
Let’s be honest, most ezine publishers run out of things to say every now and again. When those dry patches appear, private label can prove to be a great source of inspiration – or even of pre-written filler articles.
18. Offline Newsletters
There is a huge, and still largely untapped market for real paper and ink newsletters. The number of markets that can support monthly newsletters is vast and the number of people filling the demand is tiny. Private label articles not only help you to find suitable niche markets to consider creating a mailed-out offline newsletter for, but they can also help provide some of the content.
There are lots of other ways that PLR articles are being used every day by canny marketers. Think around the edges and see what you can come up with.
But here is the golden secret – and the dire word of warning.
Private label may be a short cut, but it shouldn’t be seen as the easy way out. You do still have to make sure that everything that goes out in your name is of the best quality that you can make it. Your reputation is your number one resource and it is incredible easy to lose. Whatever you do with private label articles, take a step back and ask yourself how you can improve it, how you can add value, how you can make it visually appealing, and how it can help grow your reputation rather than diminish it.
Keep that in mind and you’ll profit from PLR for a very long time.
