We have helped many people through our Information Publishing & Marketing Training Site on how to diagnoze the problem when your ebook sales go down and how to revitalize your sales to even higher profits than you may have had in the past.
Many people today wonder if the ebook market is still the place to make money publishing their “how-to” or instructional content.
Should they package their content into cheap ebooks that sell on Amazon for Kindle or should they continue to package their own self-published ebooks into PDF’s that they sell from their own website?
Are ebooks still profitable, is the common question.
We are happy to say that our  ebooks are selling better than ever (we operate in 3 different niche markets). We’ve also done more back-end work this past year (upsell courses, coaching programs, membership sites) and those are doing wonders for evolving our various lists and markets.
From our ongoing coaching and various interactions with other ebook publishers and entrepreneurs, we have had substantial experieince that would suggest there are 3 possible places to look when dealing with an ebook that has sold reasonably well inthe past, but may now be declining in sales.
1. Competition. If your numbers are approx the same (visitors to your content pages and click through’s to your ebook sales page) then a reduction in sales may be because new competition has come into the market. Many ebook publishers we know have been caught rather flat footed with an ebook that has done well for 1-2 years in the market and then tails off because there have been a bunch of new competitors come into the market. Always try and stay one step ahead of competition by coming out with new titles, continuing your marketing, getting more affiliates, and even changing the format of your products from ebooks into full-fledge courses, manuals, etc…
2. Lower Traffic – If the traffic on your blog has gone down (due to the Google changes that have occurred lately), then that should show up on your stats and could explain the lower sales. If you’re traffic has been cut by 40% you can expect as large (or larger) impact on your sales…you can thank Google for that :) Your alternative is to dig into other traffic generation techniques including content syndication, social networking, paid advertising and growing/nurturing your affiliates.
3. Lower Conversions – If oyour verall traffic is stable or growing but conversion are down you can look to either competition (back at #1) or that you haven’t kept your sales page design/copy up…sometimes a refresh will do wonders
The good news is that you have your ebook out there, have some customers you can poll (or may already have feedback from), have some feedback on your blog (I hope) in terms of popular posts, etc… that can help you develop/update new, in-demand products.
Here’s what I find helpful…always ask yoursself “What Else Do My Customers/Readers Need?”…keep a list going and validate it through blog posts until you have some actionable items you can help them with.
Finally, in a time when free sources of traffic (via SEO for example) is getting harder to come by, focus on two critical aspects of your business – affiliates (building our affiliate base) and conversions (making sure more people who click to your sales page actually buy your ebook).
