I have a short ebook that I’ve been selling for a little over a year now.  I started out selling it on eBay, but after a while I decided that wasn’t working — in addition to how time consuming it was to list the ebook, answer questions, and deal with individual sales, "feeBay" was taking almost 40 percent of the income I got from it, once you considered listing fees, final value fees, and PayPal fees.

So I decided to go it on my own.  I set up a subdomain on my regular website and created a sales page for my ebook.  I also created a PayPal payment button and a way to download the book after payment had been made.  Now the only bite out of my profit was PayPal’s fees, but there was no way around that.

The problem, however, was how to sell the ebook now that I didn’t have hundreds of eBayers browsing my listings every day.  Because there wasn’t much online on the subject, my job should be pretty easy.  Still, to get a higher search engine ranking I decided to try some article marketing.

Article marketing is where you write and submit free expert articles on subjects related to your business.  Although you don’t get paid for the articles, they help your business by establishing you as an expert, funneling referral traffic your way, and boosting your search engine ranking.  Because they build link popularity by creating many URL and contextual links back to your website, they are also an important part of many link building campaigns.  In fact, many a search engine marketing company uses this approach.

Unfortunately, article marketing is also very time consuming, which is why it’s not uncommon for a small business owner to find an Internet marketing service to do this kind of thing for them.  I found this out the hard way: I finished only eight marketing articles before giving up, and haven’t written any since.

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