This DLGuard review focuses on using this simple shopping cart software to administer an ebook business with little or no intervention. The application can sell any digital file type, but ebook publishing is one area where it has seen the biggest take up.

After writing ebooks in 2008 I was searching for shopping cart software to automate the sales and subsequent emails/downloads to customers. Using enterprise level tools wasn’t an option (financially) and I’d wanted a tool that specifically worked with Paypal, ClickBank, WorldPay and AlertPay. The DLGuard reviews from other webmasters were favorable so I got a copy.

Once installed on a web server (a 30 minute job) the application scripts provide shopping cart pages/logic with all the regular functionality you’d expect – promotional coupon support, multi-item sales, payment processing with Paypal & co. Customizing the pages to blend in with my site took 2 days though anyone with good coding skills would do it quicker.

After payments are processed, the checkout process auto-responds to the customer with an email containing their download link. DLGuard secures this download link by setting a limit to how long the link can be used and how many downloads can be tried. This is crucial to protecting your ebook business from link sharing and the resulting lost sales when the customers buddies all download your ebooks for free.

After the installation, configuration of page design and establishing your product inventory of ebooks there is little intervention needed with the product. The customer tracking and reporting shows you plenty of sales/download data and can help you with refund requests (especially if the same person continually makes refund requests – a sure sign they are stealing your books for redistribution).

If you want to avoid sales commissions to online sites and control the marketing and customer mailing lists for your ebooks then this is the ideal product for those wishing to start publishing ebooks.

Gotcha! If you’re one of the quarter of a million people who enter the words “make easy money” into a search engine every month, then welcome. This post is for you. First of all, let’s have a little reality check. Do you really think making money online can be easy? Well, perhaps if your current job is collecting  trash or digging ditches then the idea of working online will seem easy in comparison.  Do people make money on the internet? Of course they do – and I don’t just mean people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or even Steve Pavlina. Ordinary working people can make money here to. You don’t need a graduate degree or even a college education to do this. Just a strong work ethic and the ability to write to a reasonable standard. So many people are put off by the ‘writing’ part that I have to keep saying again and again  – if you can read this you can probably write it. All you need is the ability to get your thoughts down on paper in a reasonably coherent fashion.

If you read around this subject (and you probably have) you’ll know that there are some quite average writers out there making money from their websites. What they may lack in talent they make up for in application. They work at it and work at it until eventually it comes together and they start to make money. Of course, they’re following some well known plans of action (well known to those in the know, obviously) that take time and effort to implement.

There is just so much advice out there both free and expensive that you can’t fail to find something that will work for you. The difficulty is sorting out the wheat from the chaff. Good places to find free advice are BloggerUnleashed, or Lissie Sowerbutts’ Passive Income Online, or the comprehensive directiry of articles about making money online at The Post Service.

By far the best paid-for advice can be found at The Keyword Academy, where they’re not trying to sell you services over and above the monthly subscription, but offering sound, tried and tested techniques to help you make money yourself. They also offer great tools like the Niche Refinery (an automated keyword research tool).

To summarize, you too can set up a profitable on-line business with the right advice and encouragement. Don’t let past failure stop you either. The great thing about this game is that you can always start over anytime and begin again from scratch – after all, no-one knows who you are, do they? What’s to lose?

This is a guest post by Rachel Moore of Rachel’s Wealthy Affiliate Review:

WealthyAffiliates is a program that teaches you how to make money online through affiliate marketing.  While the owners and creators of the program have put together a lot of materials on affiliate marketing, ppc, and other traffic generation methods, they have also created a way for the members of the community to share their knowledge and methods with the rest of the members.  That place is called that Share Zone, for obvious reasons.

At the Share Zone, any member can easily create a step by step tutorial or upload a pdf or video that they want to share.  One of the greatest things is that a lot of members of Wealthy Affiliate are advanced internet marketers with innovative techniques to share.  One of these members is a guy named Justin Brooke, from SiteFling.com.

Justin has a tutorial in the Share Zone called the Oprah Method.  It’s really neat, and I’ll just give you a run down of some of the great points about it.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a whole bunch of affiliate links out there and on the first page of Google for “the Secret”– the day before Oprah mentioned it.  Well, what a lot of people don’t know is that Oprah publishes the topics that she’s going to speak about on her website three days before she speaks about them.

And three days is enough time to get on the front page of Google if you’re using Web 2.0 properties like Ezine Articles, Hubpages, and Youtube.  If you create a lot of these landing pages on these sites and ones like them and then bookmark like crazy, you can totally take over the front page of Google, right in time to take advantage of all the traffic that Oprah will be generating.

This is why I love Wealthy Affiliate.  I would never have had any clue how to do this if not for the Share Zone, a place where affiliate marketers can share their techniques with other like minded individuals.