Ripped Off Again!

Good morning, friends, and thank you for subscribing to my
newsletter. This morning I am going to go on a rant about
something. There is a lesson or two to be learned for sure, so
listen carefully.

Several years ago, someone purchased a reseller product from one
of my sites. I forget the product, but it wasn't mine. It was a
piece of software I purchased with reseller rights. I offered the
buyer a full refund or a trade for another similarly priced product.

The buyer wanted to trade for a more expensive product of my own
and I declined to do so. I felt I was within my rights to make a
counter offer at a similar value or give him his money back. I
forget the lurid details, but the guy got so mad at me that he
told me he was going to pirate my product, Price Spinner, and
sell it himself with reseller rights to his 5000 subscribers of
his own list. He did it, and ever since there are dozens of
people illegally selling my product and pocketing 100% of the
revenue. The loss represents thousands of dollars and many wasted
hours trying to shut down all the sites selling my product without
my permission.

Today I learned of a French web site that is selling Price
Spinner. The whole site is in French including the video. My
developer and I are amazed. So many people selling the product
and we're not making a dime from it.

This isn't the first time this has happened. I mentioned not
long ago that I found my ebooks, Make Your Ebook Sell, and
Publishing with EbookoMatic available for sale on Amazon.com
under their Kindle section. Here, too, I am amazed by the gall of
some people to repurpose content across platforms for which they
have no right to do so. Publishing with EbookoMatic states on the
cover page that it is a free ebook, but that has not prevented
someone from trying to sell if to for $1.00 on the Amazon web
site. Make Your Ebook Sell is sold with reseller rights but the
copyright notice on the cover page also states the content may
not be published on another platform -- only as a PDF.

And Amazon has been of zero help. While they have someone
overseeing potential copyright infringement, they do not do their
job very well. I have found many other reseller titles repurposed
for the Kindle platform, and if there is a good intellectual
attorney out there, I think there is a great class suit waiting
to be won pretty easily.

At the end of the day, it is very easy to rip off someone's
product or intellectual property. Ebooks and software can be
purchased and then resold behind your back and you may never even
know it. Luckily, the young man in France understood that he had
done something wrong and he shut his site immediately under
threat of an international lawsuit. Also, he has put me back in
the hunt for pirates. He sent me a link to the site he purchased
my product from illegally. I'll deal with that guy next.

But it's time consuming and ultimately is a waste of time.

So why would you create a product of your own knowing full well
that you could and most likely will get ripped off by someone at
some time? If you do it right, you will make a few thousand
dollars on the initial sale of a new ebook or software tool with
reseller rights. But it fades fast as the super affiliates and
super resellers market your product to large lists. Soon the market
is saturated.

The real reason you create a product with reseller rights is to
build a mailing list. The first page of my PDF ebooks always
reminds people to register their copy for future updates and
bonuses. There is a link to my original site and when they
register for updates and bonuses, my list grows my another well
qualified name. To this day, while I do not sell any copies of
Make Your Ebook Sell directly, I receive a few new registered
emails each week. The single product has probably added 500
names to my list and the product cost me next to nothing to
create. A domain name and a mini site design. Everything else I
did myself. Nowadays, I would design my own site, so my only cost
is the domain name. $14.99 for a 500+ list of qualified repeat
buyers is a very good investment. I have paid $147 to run a
one-time ad in another marketer's newsletter and it generated
only a few dozen click-throughs, one sale, and only a few dozen
names added to my list. That's why I think creating your own
product with reseller rights is a great way to build your own
mailing lists. Don't be short-sighted. Think long-term growth of
your own mailing lists and repeat buyers and back end sales.

Until next time,

Steven