Expert: Annette - 10/26/2009

Question
 Hi Annette -  I have written an ebook called Importing Village Treasures.  My website is   www.importingvillagetreasures.com   The book sells for $59 with PayPal and I’ll pay them $25 for each sale they make.   I have several people who want to sell this book.  

  Question:  How can I set them up so they can get paid by Paypal when someone buys the book?  Do I need to set them up with their own website?  I don’t understand the whole computer thing so I need something _simple_.

  Thank you!

  Michael

Answer
Hello Michael,

First of all you have to track the sales.  You will need a salesperson identification code for each person that can be used to tally each person's sales.  There are different ways to do this.  Each person can have a link on their webpage that goes to your webpage.  The salesperson identification number will be transferred to your webpage and will be included in a computer record that contains the sales information.  This is the concept of affiliate marketing.  Another way to do this is to have your full webpage on their website, and include their salesperson information in the computer record when they make a sale.

There are affiliate marketing companies that set up this whole process and also allow other webmasters to join your affiliate program.  They take a percentage of the sale in order to make money.  Two programs that you might be interested in are www.clickbank.com and www.cj.com.  You don't need to use an affiliate marketing company, but it is a good way to get additional webmasters involved in the process of selling your ebook.

In terms of Paypal, you can manually pay your salespeople by sending money through PayPal, or you can set up what is known as a batch computer file.  The PayPal site has more information about this.  Note, if you use an affiliate marketing program then you will not need PayPal since they process and pay out all the payments.  However, you can choose to use both PayPal for your current salespeople and affiliate marketing for additional webmasters that the affiliate marketing sites will bring in.

Please feel free to ask me any more questions.  I am a programmer and I have affiliate links, so I am very familiar with the process.

Annette