One Automated marketing method involves creating and selling digital products. Until recently, people did this with sucess on Ebay. Ebay has now banned digital products but can still make an automated income from ebooks/software (just look at clickbank to see the size of the digital marketplace).

When a customer pays for a digital product, they want that product instantly so it is not good business sense to manually e-mail your product out each time you get a sale. The delivery process can be automated - for free if you plan on only using paypal as a payment processer. You just tell paypal the webpage you want to direct them to after they have paid.

If the free paypal option suits you, you can get started on making your product & doing the marketing part. However, if you can affford it, you will certainly benefit from a paid option for a few reasons:

I Personally use a product called DL Guard. I found out about this product when I stumbled across a forum that was sharing one of my ebooks. This forum was linking directly to my download page & when I checked it out, the forum was set up to specifically share paid ebooks. The one download page protector that these guys could not crack was DL Guard. DL Guard cost me $127 and has been worth every penny, now when i check my visitor stats, I don’t see any visitors from dodgy forums.

Below, I will talk about the benefits of DL Guard, this is because its the only ebook delivery product I have needed.

The benefits of a paid Download guard are:

Customised e-mail to your customer with download link

The e-mail is instant & can be customised to include whatever information you want. You can even have a “Powered by DL Guard” link which has your affiliate ID embedded. You will be suprised how quickly you make you investment back with just this one trick (2 sales).

Minimize Digital Theft, Maximize Sales

Using the paypal method, you have to have a static link somewhere on your website in order to forward your customers onto your download. Even if you have “no index” & “no follow” instructions on this web page, this does not guarantee that search engines will not index and expose your download page.

There are people who will not think twice about posting such links in public forums. People who could have been paying for your product will be receiving it for free.

DL Guard stops this by allowing you to set time restricted links (ie give the customer 24 hours before the link expires). Another security feature of DL guard is that you can limit download attempts. For example, you can set the link to expire if thre have been more than 6 download attempts.

Automatically grow your mailing list

DL Guard has an in built system that signs your customers upto your mailing list. If you are new to internet marketing, you will hear many times that the money is in the list and the best type of list to have a proven list of buyers.

Analyze & track your visitors

DL Guard has analytic facilities that allow you to track & tweak your sales page. A quick hint - send a similar amount of traffic to 2 similar sales pages, compare the conversion rates & use the winning sales page. Repeat this process until you have a great, high converting sales page.

Create & manage membership sites

You can use DL Guard to create and manage your membership sites. You can set up everything from the look and feel, the payment processing and the recurring billing.

DL Guard can be easily intergrated with the major payment processors including paypal, clickbank, world, 1 shopping cart etc…

The only Digital ebook selivery software i have ever used it DL Guard but there are other options.

E-Junkie offers a similar service and charge a monthly fee. You could sign up for a month and see if such automated methods suit your business. Due to the recession in the USA, E-junkie are offering their service free for a year to those made redundant recently. If that’s you, google e-junkie and you are on your way.

Mydigitaldispatch is reccomended by ebay powerseller john Thornhill. I have never used it but as far as I can gather, it sends the ebook as an attachment to the e-mail.

However, DLguard is the only product I can reccomend with any confidence. You can view the full feature list here