I've been concentrating on ebooks (one form of digital product) and  I've sold over 1000 of them in the last couple months. Out of those thousand I've probably only had to email 50 or so to people who bought the books via fax or phone. Oh  . . . and some had to be emailed to people who don't understand downloading and using their Adobe Acrobat reader. 

Aside from that the other 950 books were sold and delivered totally automatically.

Digital products

Let me first mention that at this point I only sell Adobe pdf files and call them ebooks. There are many other kinds of digital products like audio files, and computer programs that you can sell too. Both of them have a higher level of complexity than simple pdf files. Keeping in line with my philosophy that I only use dull edge technology -- or technology that most people already know how to use -- we'll stick with that for now.

I've got to tell you that this is a beautiful thing. I sit here and watch email notices with money in them come in all day long. I finally got around to making the email orders play a "Ka Ching" sound like money hitting the cash register.

How it works

The customer reads about my product on one of my websites. In the advertisement for the product is a link to my shopping system http://www.kickstartcart.com . The customer clicks on the link after they have made the decision to purchase one of the books. The shopping system "kicks" in and in some cases tries to sell the customer additional products when they are "checking out."

After the customer puts in their contact and credit card information, the shopping system automatically checks to see if the credit card is good. If it is, the money heads to my bank account and a screen pops up which allows the customer to download their digital product (in my case that's an ebook).

The system then sends me an email telling me that I have a sale.

What else happens?

The shopping system sends the customer an email that has the download link in it as a back up in case they missed the download screen that popped up immediately after they purchased. Sending things twice automatically really helps keep the customer service calls to a minimum because the customer is pelted in a couple different fashions with the links they need.

The email also warns them to download the ebook within 24 hours or the link will expire. The link expiring automatically is a feature that prevents your customer from posting it somewhere so all their friends could download your book for free. If they do try that, the link will only work for one day and then become non-functional.

The normal transaction details / receipt is delivered automatically via email to the customer.

From my experience I have found that not everyone knows how to use their Adobe Acrobat readers. In fact, the initial download of the book is a foreign operation to some people who aren't computer savvy. So I set my shopping system to automatically deliver a set of download instructions for the Adobe Acrobat reader. This again cuts my customer service phone time almost to nothing.

What's the bottom line?

As you can see, once the system is built it can just churn money into your bank account. I highly suggest you review the material you have that is salable and create ebooks out of it. Once you get one or several places to sell it, the time spent on the delivery is virtually zero and so is the cost of goods sold. This is about as profitable as you can get.

More automation techniques:

This section will be an ongoing effort to keep you from grabbing your mouse which slows you down, and is bad for your wrist.

• In Internet explorer don't mouse around to your email program. Simply type mailto:tom@antion.com in the address line and hit enter and it will fire off your email program with the whatever email address you put after the mailto: in the "to" line of your email program.

• Type the word "desktop" in the address area of Internet Explorer and you'll go right to  . . . you guessed it . . . your desktop programs.

Upcoming topics for this section

• Organize your email

• Reduce the impact of SPAM email

• The greatest keyboard shortcuts

• Respond to emails while you sleep with autoresponders

• Using templates so you never have to reinvent the wheel

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