If you haven't heard, eBay just announced that as of March 31, 2008 they will no longer allow the sale of downloadable items on their site. This basically means no more sales of digitally downloaded ebooks, audios, videos, etc. You can see their official announcement here:

http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200803241300132.html

When I first heard the news this morning (I must admit) I was pretty bummed out. Selling digital items is a big part of my lead generation efforts. But the more and more I thought about it, the more opportunity I saw. Here's what I mean:

-This will eliminate a TON of competition. Most sellers of digital items will simply close up shop and leave eBay-

So what does this mean for the rest of us? Massive opportunity. Here is my exact plan to take advantage of this opportunity:

I will immediately change all of my downloadable items into physical products. Sound hard? It's not really. You can simply burn your files to a CD and ship the physical item. Now I'm all about automation….and I absolutely loved automating the delivery of my digital items. So I am going to do my best to automate the delivery of my physical stuff too by using a company called Kunaki.com. Here's how you can do the same thing.

You simply upload your file to Kunaki.com and they will produce, package, and ship the item to your customer. And the cost for all of this: $1.75 plus a $3.00 handling fee. These costs can easily be passed right along to your customer since a physical item is now being shipped. And Kunaki makes these CDs look great. You can even upload your own graphics and have them printed on the disc….so you get a very high quality product shipped to your customer. There is a much higher perceived value in these products so you can charge more for them.

Another great company to look into is Disk.com. Disk.com will handle printed material as well as CDs and DVDs. So you could even start selling printed manuals instead of ebooks and charge alot more money for them. Disk.com will print and deliver the manuals to your customers for you. The cost is dependent on the size of your manuals but it is definitely reasonable.

Now here's the real kicker: Now that you are sending a physical product, you can include a sales letter with your product and upsell your customer. So let's say for example I am in the business of selling real estate courses. Now, whenever I sell my customer a $7 CD about real estate investing,  I can now include a sales letter for my more expensive real estate investing master course. Let's say that I sell this course for $297. My customers will read this letter and some of them will buy the master course for $297. Most of them won't, but you don't need to make alot of sales at $297 for it to add up to a nice chunk of change.

And you can do this in any market, whether you have a product of your own or not. You can always sell someone else's product as an affiliate for a commission. Simply do a Google search for your topic and add the word affiliate. So in the above example you would search for "real estate investing + affiliate". Browse through the results and look for a good product that pays a good commission.

In all honesty, I think this is one of the biggest opportunities to hit eBay in quite some time. Almost overnight all of the junk ebook sellers will be gone and the landscape will be wide open for good marketers to move in and start providing high quality physical products. The main thing to remember is that you want to make sure that you sell high quality info that really helps people. That is the absolute best way to build a base of happy customers who continue to buy from you again and again.