Today I received a very nice email from a reader over in the Netherlands. Hoe gaat het, Tom?

I believe developing products is best suited for me as I love creating stuff and I'd like to actually provide value to people, so that's the route I am going to follow, at least for now.

On that note, I have three questions. I hope you have time for them.

Developing products is definitely a good way to go. Far more reliable income than adsense or any other form of monetisation. Note that after a sale, you need to continue provide Technical Support and so on…

You often write about Secure Delivery (DPD) as a good way to do digital product delivery. However, for a student such as myself with a limited budget, the monthly cost of Secure Delivery is a bit steep. I don't mind investing money if necessary, but I was wondering, are there any good alternatives? After all, I only have one product to sell for the moment. I saw Dotwidget and Eliteweaver mentioned on your blog with quite negative commentary.

I suspect that if you contacted Jason from DPD, he might well be able to come up with a reduced price (maybe for a trial period). If your sales take off, then the price will not be a problem. DPD.

But, alternatives…

You could use Jonathan Ledgers $7 script. This is a script which hadles payment via paypal and automatic download. It costs $7, and though it is not perfect, it's a good way to do things cheaply.

Or, you could just use an encrypted paypal button - though it's difficult to make any downloads fully secure…

The two products you mentioned (Dotwidget and Eliteweaver) are both discontinued unfortunately - they are both OK, but both had some bad problems with coding.

I have a number of ideas in my head and although I really enjoy learning new stuff, I sometimes lack the tools (such as a properly licensed desktop programming environment for C++ for example). Now I noticed you mention in your post "WDYDT: 09 Aug" that you were hiring a coder to create a product for you. I am betting your coder is either a friend or someone you worked with in the past that turned out to be trustworthy. What's a good place to find a coder?

Finding a good coder is quite difficult. You can try the "lance" sites like scriptlance etc, but I'd be wary about anyone you find on those sites unless they have lots of good feedback. I got lucky as I found a great coder.

The other, and better option is for you to find a Technical C++ Forum in your own language, and make some posts on there to try to find a coder who;

• is speaking your best language (obvious reasons!)
• is in your own time zone (nothing worse than waiting days for an email from someone in India say)
• is not too expensive (too expensive makes it harder for you to make a profit)

If you can find someone who does all these three things, you will be onto a winner.

If I remember correctly at least one or more of you three worked in the SEO business during office hours. What was your first (successful) project when you started out as Interweb Entrepreneur? If you want to reveal that, of course

I read an eBook called "30 Days To Success" by Joe Kumar. This eBook is a compilation of a number of "famous" Internet Marketers and what they would do if they had just 30 days to make money, and had no existing assets to fall back on (like a mailing list and so on). The eBook opened up my eyes to the possibilities of selling products…

I decided to try this out, and created my first little eBook which was a book about 15 pages long, and was all about SEO for osCommerce. I can't remember the exact figure, but I sold over £2500 (3600 Euros, 5100 usd) of that eBook in the first 30 days, including upsells. Of course, this rate of sales did not last, and I had done nothing but promotion, promotion, promotion in those 30 days - I did no "real" work (at the time I was into hosting and website building, SEO and so on).

Well, the eBook continued to sell even though I had stopped promoting it. I continued to get lots of SEO work from the eBook. I thought to myself, if this 1 eBook is making me $500 a month, why cannot 5 eBooks make me $1000 a month…

So I wrote more eBooks! And they also sold really well, even to this day! All of the eBooks were based on osCommerce - and what can be done with it.

Then I thought, if these 5 eBooks make me $1000 a month, why cannot other monetisation bring me $2000 a month -> but that's another story

I'll sum up by saying, that I now have about 250 individual products that I sell, not all of them sell often, some of them do. Not all are based on osCommerce - I have products as simple as a 2 lines of code PHP script, and as complex as desktop tools containing thousands of line of code.

Thanks for the questions Tom, and hope I answered OK

If any readers have more questions to ask, feel free to email me on oscshops AT gmail DOT com - I'm happy to answer questions so long as you are OK to have them answered in the form of a blog post.