Profiting from Group Projects

There's a really cool payment processing script that has been around for a few years called "Rapid Action Profits" or RAP for short.

RAP is designed to allow you to set up websites that sell stuff online. it's like a simple shopping cart that's usually used to sell services and digital downloadable products. Services people sell include access to consulting, coaching, webinars, teleseminars, and even recurring subscription services. Digital downloadable products that people sell include eBooks, software, games, and membership sites. There's also an addon that lets you sell CDs and DVDs through Kunaki.

You need to have your own web hosting with your own domain name to set up RAP. Once you've done this, you can set up as many products (or projects) as you want on that domain.

RAP has had support for something called "Equity Partners" for quite a while, but it was limited to a maximum of two. This limitation has been removed with the recent release of Version 3.2 of RAP. You can now have an UNLIMITED number of Equity Partners. THIS is what makes it possible now to support group projects. I'll explain how in just a moment. First I need to describe briefly how RAP manages payments.

When someone purchases something from a website, you as the customer don't usually see where the money goes. If you use a credit card to make the payment, all you see is the money being taken out of your account.

On the other side, your funds can actually go to several different places.

RAP uses PayPal to handle all of its payment processing. PayPal has an option that lets customers pay with most major credit cards whether they have a PayPal account or not. But RAP only deals with PayPal on its end. If someone pays with a credit card, the payment is sent to whomever RAP designates is the payee.

One of the unique things about RAP is that it is designed to send payments to different people for different reasons. In fact, RAP lets you set up four different groups of people who receive payments:

* Resellers (or Affiliates)
* Joint Venture (JV) Partners
* Equity Partners
* You -- the vendor

There are two sides to this equation. There's a group of people who are paid to make sales, and a group of people who "split the profits". The people who are paid to make sales are the Resellers / Affiliates and the JV Partners. The people who "split the profits" are the Equity Partners and you, the vendor.

At a bare minimum, only ONE of these is REQUIRED -- that is YOU, the vendor. All the others are optional; use them if you want.

In this case, it's the Equity Partners feature that we're most interested in. We'll ignore the Resellers and JV Partners here.

After you've set up RAP, you go into the administrative panel and select your product to work on. Then open up the Equity Sharing settings screen. Then you designate all of the project participants who are to be paid as Equity Partners. You can have as few or as many as you want! (Click the image above to see an example of what it looks like.)

One thing to remember is that RAP uses PayPal to manage its payments. So in order for all of the Equity Partners to get paid, they MUST have a PayPal account -- either a "Premier" or "Business" account. (A "personal" account will cause all payments to get hung-up pending acceptance. They're a big hassle.) Once they have their PayPal account set up, you simply enter their PayPal email address in the field along with the percentage of equity they're to receive, and add them to the list.

When people purchase your product, what RAP does is allocate the first payment to the Vendor. Then it will simply go down the list allocating payments to each of the Equity Partners in rotation. It keeps track of how much each person was paid and always ensure that when their turn comes around again, if they haven't earned at least the percentage they are due, then it allocated a payment to them.

Depending on percentages assigned, different people might get a different number of payments. If all of the percentages are exactly the same, then everybody should be allocated the same number of payments and earn the same percentage of income.

However, if the percentages are different -- say one person gets 9%, two get 15%, while the others each get 30% -- then the payments will be made in a fairly unpredictable order. In the end, the software does ensure that everybody gets roughly the amount they're due. It's not exact, but it's a heckofalot simpler than any other alternative today.

Once you've got RAP installed and working, you want to decide what you're going to create as a group. Some ideas include:

* an eBook
* a software product
* a CD
* a DVD
* tutorial materials
* class materials

Everybody works on a part of it, and you all then decide how the profits will be split up.

Each person is allocated some percentage, with a maximum of 99% that can be allocated. RAP only lets you split 99% because the vendor must have a way to get paid once in a while. Also, the vendor is NEVER listed as an equity partner; they're paid whatever percentage of the earnings are not paid to anybody else. In general, you'd want to have the vendor -- a.k.a. the "admin" -- get a slice of the pie as well, if for no other reason than to compensate him/her for managing the web site and making sure things are running smoothly so everybody gets paid properly.

Obviously, you need to have some agreement up front about how to allocate revenues. If you have 10 people and one person does 90% of the work, but every body get's 1/10th of the earnings, that's not fair to that one person.

Once your group project has been finished, you want to upload your files to the proper locations on your RAP-based site so that people can access them from the download page.

There are even cases of people selling physical products via RAP sites, and what they provide as a download file is a document that talks about their purchase and how to contact them for any reason. It only needs to be one page. This is a very smart idea as it helps your customers trust you.

Before you start selling anything, be sure to make a test purchase. You can set the price to ten cents or so and then have someone do a test purchase through their PayPal account. If it works, great! If not, fix it and try again.

In any case, be sure to have the Admin go into their PayPal account and issue a refund BEFORE making any other test purchases.

A lot of people think, "Nah, don't worry, it's only ten cents!"

The way RAP works is it always pays the vendor first. Then it pays the Equity Partners. If you don't issue a refund, the next payment will go to an Equity Partner. That's generally what you WANT to happen -- except when you're testing. Whomever got paid needs to issue the refund. If you do NOT issue refunds, it'll mess up the way RAP does its accounting and it could start allocating payments in strange ways.

So, **ALWAYS** issue refunds on test purchases that are not for the full amount of the purchase!

NOTE: using the PayPal Sandbox may not help when you've got Equity Partners involved.

Once you've run some test purchases, then you're ready to go make some money!

Ok, now that your project has been completed and it's ready to be sold, you want to get everybody in the project involved with promoting it.

They can tell their friends via eMail; post to their FaceBook and MySpace pages; Tweet about it; make videos about it; and so on. You're only limited by your creativity.

When you tell people about it, you'll need to send them a link to the sales page.

TIP: whenever you send your site's URL via email to someone, you can protect your domain name from getting accidentally stuck on a blacklist somewhere by hiding your URL inside of a link shortener of some kind. Some popular link shortening services are:

* tinyurl.com
* bit.ly
* su.pr
* is.gd

The su.pr links will actually do double-duty -- they'll put a StumbleUpon menu at the top of the browser window that will let visitors stumble it and tell others that way.

You should also get everybody on the project to bookmark the page (the direct URL, not a shortened version) on any number of bookmarking sites:

* digg.com
* redditt.com
* MIxx
* BlinkList
* Mister-Wong

and so on.

What will happen is when people go to the site and then make a purchase, they'll be sent to PayPal. RAP will pick the next person in rotation that is entitled to get paid, and that payment will be sent directly to that person's PayPal account.

The nice part about this is that nobody needs to collect the money, deposit in the bank, divvy up checks, collect W4 tax info, or send out 1099s at the end of the year. The funds are sent directly from the buyer to each of the project participants' PayPal accounts as they get paid in rotation.

Nobody can embezzle anything because there's nothing there to embezzle! Again, that's because the Project members, as Equity Partners, all get paid directly.

I hope you've found this little tutorial informative and that it helps you put together some group projects that can make you some extra money. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a note in the Guestbook below or contact me through my web site at:

TheToolWiz Blog

Thank you and good luck with your group projects!
-David

Rapid Action Profits

This is the core product. It might seem expensive; don't buy it if you don't have a plan for actually selling something and making your money back on it quickly. Even a $5 item will pay for this with 25-30 sales!

RAP supports about 25 addons now that extend it's abilities significantly. Here are some of the best ones to consider:

The Add-To-Cart Addon

This addon is one that I consider a "must have" addon. It might look very innocuous, but it's really not. Unfortunately, it's difficult to explain its significance if you've never used RAP before. What the Add-To-Cart addon does is it lets you create "Buy Now" buttons for your RAP-based products and put them anywhere. The value in this is you could put up a page here on Squidoo and put one of these Buy Now buttons right here and people would be sent directly to PayPal to purchase your widget. Afterwards, they'd be sent to the download page. In essence, this addon allows you to turn ANY WEB PAGE ANYWHERE into a "sales page" that hooks into your RAP sales platform. In fact, you can even bypass your sales page completely and send people to wherever you put your Buy Now button!

For example, you could put up a page here on Squidoo that talks about something of yours. Then you could get a Buy Now button from the Add-To-Cart addon in your RAP Admin panel for that product and put it here on your Squidoo page. Then put the URL to your Squidoo page as the "Bypass URL" in your RAP Admin panel for this product. When people use the link to get to your RAP sales page, they'll end up here on your Squidoo page automatically! If you have no clue what that means, trust me, it's VERY COOL!

The colorful button below was created with the Add-To-Cart addon. it lets you set up a different pricing scheme, limit the number of sales or length of time the prices are available, and it can either show an "Sold Out" notice or just the regular price when the limits have been exceeded.

Advanced Marketing Solutions With RAP

This is an eBook that I've written that explains in living color many of the wonderful ways you can make RAP handle sales for you. The User's Guide that comes with it is very "functional" and simply explains what's there and how to make it work. My book explains WHY many of the features are there, and amazing things you can do that you simply won't get by reading the manual.

As an example of the Add-To-Cart Addon (described above), here's a Buy Now button for my ebook. It's normally priced at $27 (which you can see if you click the link above). But using this button, you can buy it at a special discount!

Kunaki CD/DVD Fillment Addon

Ok, now THIS is a PERFECT SOLUTION for a band who wants to sell CDs or DVDS! Get RAP and set it up so that each person in the band is an Equity Partner. I recommend you don't allocate more than 50-75% of the earnings to individuals so you have something left over to cover your operating expenses. You can make your CD or DVD and put it up on Kunaki for sale. Then set up a product in RAP to sell it. If you have the Add-To-Cart button, you can even create Buy Now buttons that you can give out that they can put on their websites to help you make sales. (They won't earn any referral fees using those buttons, but that feature may be added in the future. If you get the addon, let Mike, the author, know you'd like to see it added!)