Your Own Ebook
I have been selling information online since 2ooo, we now sell everything from reports to high-end training and membership sites but our bread-and-butter products are ebooks.
Ebooks are terrific lead-in products that are quick to develop, still hold tremendous perceived value, help to brand you and your position in the marketplace and are typically priced in a range that makes it easy for you to get new customers who will continue to buy from you going forward.
Having your own ebook for sale online also gives you your own product that you can leverage to build an army of partners who become affiliates referring traffic, leads and sales to your site.
For those who read our blog regularly, we call this leverage. Having been an entrepreneur for many years now I can definitely tell you there is no more powerful concept or reality in business than leverage – where you put a few weeks into a product and then have a vehicle from which to not only create recurring profits for years to come but to attract highly motivated authority figures in your marketplace to help you promote your product in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Based on our experience, here are 4 tips you can use for selling ebooks online:
Start A Relationship With Your Marketplace
Starting a dialog with the market first through social networking, blogging, forums with a strong plan on drawing traffic back to your site in large part to continue that dialog. The vast majority of our marketing is designed to create content that is both valuable but also intriguing enough that we pull people back to our blogs, social networking accounts and list to continue. The idea here is to build a relationship with your market (even just 50-100 loyal readers each day interacting with content you post tells you a great deal about the HOT topics and language to use in your ebook title).  If you have decided or are considering an ebook on a certain topic, then begin by setting up your own basic blog (We show you detailed steps around each of these areas inside InfoMarketer’sZone) and producing content (articles, blog posts, social networking posts and videos) – you will find within just a few short days you will begin to get traffic, leads and build some strong, early relationships.
Create A Killer Sales Page
Too many ebook authors have a decent product but put up a crappy sales page. The sales page must be clean, have a terrific headline and intro paragraph, do a good job of describing the benefits the reader will get from your ebook (these should be OUTCOMES not just that they will get information) and get some testimonials early on. To write effective sales pages you want to understand the basics of copywriting…our approach early on (before we mastered copywriting) was to put up our best-effort sales page and pay a professional copywriter (be careful and get the right one!) to review and tweak the page. This was just as effective, but 1/4 the cost of hiring a professional to write a sales page from nothing.
Your Own Affiliate Program – Creating Leverage
Set up an affiliate program (either use Clickbank or set your own up using a shopping cart or script) – affiliates can ramp up your early traffic, leads and sales giving you momentum early on. This is especially true when you enter new markets, where nobody knows who you are. Leveraging the credibility, relationships and effectiveness of authority figures in your marketplace is a powerful way to build early momentum in selling ebooks online.
Train & Change Lives – Don’t Just Inform
A very important part of our teaching inside Information Marketer’s Zone surrounds picking topics, outlining your information products, researching and writing and marketing them in terms of the desired outcome of your audience…rather than informing them you want to empower them to change their lives – even if only in a small, focused way. Help your readers achieve a desired outcome…think of it as training more than information, this will help you get more sales, get a higher price for your information, get more champions for your product, makes it easier to market and allows you to follow up in the future with more add-on sales.
There are many tips we could share on selling ebooks online effectively – based on our considerable experience these are the top 4.
YOUR TURN…
Anything to add, questions — comment on this post and we’ll be happy to help in any way we can.
