Mark Cuban is an Internet billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. He has a new book out. It’s short at just under 100 pages and it’s cheap too, at $2.51. He hopes to sell a billion copies (he seems to think in billions). Imagine if he does sell a billion copies. I’m looking for the current numbers, and don’t know what Amazon keeps but even if he gets $1 a book, that’s one hell of a profit (over $1.5 billion).

You’ve heard of blog to book deals. The newest rendition of this is blog to ebook.  And you won’t need a book deal or publisher. All you need is some big success and a lot of friends. Cuban has over 330k friends on Facebook and 760k followers on Twitter.

The book is basically a compilation of Cuban’s blog posts you can read free on his blog. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming an instant bestseller. It’s titled: “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It.” I like this interview with Mark Cuban about his book and life.

I love this line, it just strikes me as so amazing: Of all your business ventures, the profit margin for this book is unmatched. Much of the book already had appeared as blog posts, and the production, promotion and distribution costs were negligible.

I love to use Twitter to find great headlines. Here’s a few about this story:

The Book World Is Changing: Mark Cuban Creates A Best Seller Out Of Some Blog Posts

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban hopes for a slam dunk with his new e-book

I’m buying it to see how it differs (in format) from his blog and to read it in one concise place on my Kindle. But really I’m reading it to see what all the hoopla is about. And to learn.

Check out

Mark Cuban’s book on Amazon

In related news, the Justice Department is looking into if Apple is keeping prices for ebooks artificially high.

Move over Angry Birds, the #1 app on iTunes doesn’t feature flying birds, it has a talking cat. Talking Tom is free but you can pay for an ad-free version with more animations or add-ons (like food). It got over a million downloads in a single day and made Outfit 7 millions. I love that they bought the character for $60 on eBay.

My friend Scott Lazerson scored his client a fun interview with Andrej Nabergoj, the CEO of Outfit 7 on Bloomberg. It’s pretty funny – you should click & watch it.

Outfit7 introduced “Talking Tom” last June and has been downloaded over 50 million times. The cat will repeat whatever you say back to you. It also drinks milk and purrs when you touch the screen. The company has branched out to a dog and other characters. You can find it on the iPhone and Droid.

I keep thinking how annoying or funny it would be to use in certain situations – like on your kids or to deliver bad news. I’m off to try it on my husband. I need to tell him I accidentally left our front door unlocked for 4 hours yesterday.

Kevin Davis hosted a Meetup about product launches – based on the classic on the topic Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker (which is opening up again). His product is a book called Cash in a Flash: Fast Money in Slow Times by Robert G. Allen and Mark Victor Hansen.

The book is just a book but he had a giant launch around it and a continuity program (in marketing speak, a way to make income every month by offering more products on the backend). What I’m saying is that is where the money is made, not on the book itself.

Even though I got back late, I really couldn’t sleep after this because the ideas in my head or just thinking about the applications of what I’d learned. I must say this is not my style of marketing but several ideas were helpful and can be applied to any online businesses. It’s effective though – they are doing very well.

Here are key takeaways (being careful not to reveal information that Kevin wouldn’t want out – he was incredibly generous and I think a genius).

• Find JV (joint venture) partners. These are people who have email lists. The size of the list isn’t necessarily correlated with the response. It’s more the engagement and the fit of the offer with the list owner. How to find? events, calling people, emailing. Send free review copies. [I wish Quantcast or somewhere told you if they had a mailing list and approx. size]
• Create videos, previews and have partners do the same to build up awareness. For example, they had free weekly calls and gave people exercises to do to apply what they learned. Then use the answers in the next call. Use information in videos, audio, webinars and transcribe into blog posts – could even use as a product.
• Consider giving a discount for holidays – there are always holidays. This is good to motivate affiliates and give you something to hype (and send out press releases about).
• Project management and communication along with all of the content and web sites you need to create are significant barriers. Just the help desk requirements answering emails and handling refunds, etc. if formidable. I suggest outsourcing your help desk (CD Baby used these guys). This is the part that was overwhelming to me. Someone to manage and recruit JVs, someone for affiliates, someone to design, write, manage the forum, edit video, promote on social sites (that could be $3,000 plus by itself), etc.
• Run contests to keep interest high among JVs.
• Use Google Analytics to track results, Crazy Egg to track where clicks are (what’s working).
• Shipping anything overseas is expensive, consider making the products digital only.

Other tools:

BooksAMillion – ship books, just give them a spreadsheet of the orders
oDesk or Guru.com to find someone to write copy
Disc.com – duplication & replication of USB Flash drives, videotape and diskettes
Kunaki prepares and ships DVDs

OSFLV – open source video player, Wishlist WordPress plugin for forums, Hannah player to embed into post, shopping cart. Pelotonics to manage, Evernote to keep track of notes (integrates with Google Docs now), OS Ticket for help desk tickets.

Pretty intense. I’d hire Kevin. Of course I’m not sure how in this world he even manages what he’s already doing.

When I got back from my honeymoon this week (I was offline 99% of the time) I had an order from my online store, paisleybabies.com. Had I known I would’ve hired someone to mind the store – basically to email in the order. Then today I got another order. Which means it’s being found (must have search engine rankings).
What is surprising about this is that I haven’t done anything to promote it besides onsite optimization (incorporating keyword phrases on each page). I put up the site almost a year ago and the only order I got until now was from a friend. I set it up so I could learn the ecommerce solution I was teaching others.

Most of the people I taught never got an order on their online store in the time I worked with them. However, if they applied what I taught and also built links, they probably have started making money by now. The problem is they were led to believe it would happen within 90 days.

My blog took a few years before I made money – not that making money was the purpose. It still isn’t, but I was learning affiliate marketing and wanted to test out what I was learning. It worked. I still prefer affiliate marketing because work I did over a year ago is still selling and I don’t have to do anything else. No customer service, answering emails, returns, etc. I just refer the orders to someone else and make a commission on every sale.
I also had a check from Google when I got home – another surprise. I always think they’re junk mail. The first check (you must make at least $100 before you get paid) took over a year to arrive, this one took months. I don’t use much Adsense on my sites, but a little.

It took several months to get 1,000 followers on Twitter but then only a few months later, I’m at over 1,800.

I’m sure I could’ve make money quicker had showing me or if I outsourced more of the work. I learned by practicing. After some momentum and time (search engine rankings aren’t instant) it is now almost effortless. I have a little more flexibility in my life now so I can do more to promote my sites, including a redesign of Newspapergrl.

As I was catching up on my blog reader today, I did a double take on this revelation: Sam’s Club (or WalMart) offers Internet Marketing services. The company that offers the services is called Innuity. It’s not new but I’ve never heard of it until today. I spoke to them to find out more.

First, Sam’s Club members get a free web site. It will be yourbusinessname.samsbiz.com until you get your own domain. 5 pages, content only (no shopping cart). For $10 a month you can get a CMS template ecommerce site. For $900 they will design the site (you write the content).

If you want to run PPC advertising to your site, for a minimum of $50 per month for 6 months, they will set it up in 4 days. Google only unless you want to spend more ($200+). About 15% of this is administration fees and the rest is for your ad budget.
Otherwise there are SEO services of $500 per month for a minimum of 6 months. That includes an article a week and landing pages for your top keywords. Basically building links.

So does this mean Internet marketing has officially hit the mainstream? And who is doing the work? Are the services any good? Anyone tried it or have any insights?

Next thing you know they will offer business blogging and email marketing

Update: Innuity is quite saavy, despite the connotations of working with Sam’s Club. I got two emails from them the day I wrote this post (without so much as a trackback to alert them). They have 30,000 clients and focus on taking “enterprise” level internet solutions to the small business owner. Like most SEO companies, their target market – small business owners – often don’t know they need or can afford Internet marketing.

They have larger clients that include well-known companies like: Overstock, ADP, and Amazon.

After last week I have even more empathy for Seth Godin after Paypal seized his account. I recently had my biggest client bounce a rather large check. Being paid on time and paying other people on time is one of the biggest challenges I face. That’s why as an affiliate a lot of us like Commission Junction – they pay monthly and they collect so you don’t have to. Plus no invoicing. Not only did this check cause my account to go in the red, but it emptied my business savings instantly. Needless to say last week was stressful. But I’m not the only one who has things like this happen.

I thought of going to Paypal only because at least it almost guarantees the money is there. But after reading this I’m not sure that’s the best solution either.

Seth wrote about his bad experience trying to get his account back. I wish he put more detail about other’s dealings with Paypal (this is definitely a time when I wish he accepted comments). I wonder how Google Checkout compares or how it will evolve.

What solutions have you found to this problem? Have you had bad experiences with Paypal?

—— Burning through your cell phone minutes? I use Skype… ——

My own ecommerce baby products store, an experiment for me, is getting really, really close. Check out Paisley Babies – baby products. The most exciting part of this store is still to come. I have a friend in Mexico I met through Twitter. He’s an artist and I commissioned him to paint some art for a baby’s room. It’s a set of a moon, star, and sun which are brightly colored.

I also want a selection of cards and t-shirts. I think I’ll search Threadless for now. Ok, I did. Not much of a selection yet. Cafe Press?

Here’s a picture of my favorite person (I got his teddy bear at Affiliate Summit):

I want to add the following features:

• design your own onesize feature
• paisley babies t-shirts for pregnant moms who are having twins, triplets, etc. with feature to make them into a e-postcard “coming soon…” and put the due date
• paisley baby cards and baby shower invites with paisleys of course
• comments on articles and a social networking piece
• printable cards that are free
• a forum to share baby care tips
• an affiliate-based baby products blog to review/discuss the best products, like my favorite, what I call the baby train. It’s a wagon with 3 compartments that the triplets in my neighborhood ride in.

I’m not baby hungry. This is part of my ongoing experiment to make my entire income online. I’ve never had an ecommerce store and wanted to be a 1-person shop. I know a mom with triplets and it fascinates me how they keep it all going. They are about 1 year old now – 2 girls and a boy. I was teaching about branding. For smaller retailers you need a target market or niche. This is mine.

Feedback or ideas welcome…and this is bigger than it appears…I want to do something much bigger for moms, more details to come.

I just noticed that Guy Kawasaki has a link to Doba – a Utah dropship product aggregator on his blog. It’s on the bottom right under “Alignments of Interest”. It says, “Doba – Drop ship products for ecommerce sales.” Does that mean Guy is an investor? I did some reading and he’s actually an adviser for the company.

I’m impressed that CEO Jeremy Hanks has Google alerts on his company. He notices what is said about Doba and comments on blog posts. Now that is conscientious! (I’m a huge fan of Google alerts as a way to track your online reputation – put one on your name and your company and Google will email you every time you’re mentioned online. Or, for ideas on what to blog about.). I also noticed for the words, “Guy Kawasaki, Doba” I have two posts in the top 20 on Google. One for this version of my blog and one from the old version. Different stories.

While I was on Jeremy’s blog – I watched an interview with him. He says the strongest product category on the Doba is computers/laptops, home & garden, electronics, bed & bath, and clothing & apparel. Also, about half of their customers are selling on eBay and half are selling their products in their own store.

Here’s where I think Doba is best – to round out your product selection when you only have a few products for your online store, or to make things more simple (no dealing with suppliers directly which for some can be a good thing). eBay is a lead generation tool people to your ecommerce site. Another company I’m curious about is called Shopster. How is it similar to or different from Doba?

I got an invitation to check out a dropshipping site called Drop Ship Access. I decided to check it out. I’m always looking for companies who will drop ship products. That makes it easy to have an online store without a lot of capital. No need to buy inventory. You make the sale and the customer pays the retail price. Then you call the company and have them charge you wholesale and send the product to your customer. You don’t have to stock products or handle shipping and returns. They have another place selling their products. It’s about $40 a month to sign up.

Places like Doba and Drop Ship Access are another middle person. Ideal if you need products fast to make a web site so you can get accepted by a dropshipper. You probably won’t get the most competitive prices. But the biggest problem here is that you have no access to the manufacturer. You can never develop a relationship with the supplier directly because you don’t have a relationship with them. In business that’s how you get ahead. It’s all about relationships. You negotiate terms and as you sell more you get better prices or arrangements. The best part is just having a good relationship so you know what is happening. The bestselling items. New items. Out of stock items. The more information you have the easier it is to market effectively. Plus, it’s more satisfying to develop relationships.

Drop Ship Access says they have Adidas – you think it’s the shoes, but it’s perfume. It doesn’t have a lot name brands from what I can see. They sell Estee Lauder perfume for $54.29. The same perfume retails on Estee Lauder’s site for $68. That’s not terribly bad. However, the most I could find it listed for in the top Google results was $62.99. The lowest was $47.75. So if you figure that you probably won’t sell it for full retail and that it looks like you’ll have to sell a lot to make much on this item.

I’d like to review more drop ship sites so if you know of any that will give me a free trial, let me know. I would really like to try World Wide Brands. Or, if you retail or manufacture a product that you would drop ship for small to mid-size online retailers, fill out my contact form. I coach a lot of people who are looking for products to sell.

Conclusion: I’m still learning about drop shipping but right now I’m still sold on The Shipper because of the price and selection plus the free trial. They could do a lot more to make the site easier to use, but it’s a good entry level site. WorldWideBrands looks promising though. Higher fees, but a much larger selection.