Not generating the ebook sales that you had hoped to? Promotion and marketing are often more time consuming than writing the actual ebook. Here are some tips for generating those extra ebook sales.
Your primary means of promoting your ebook should be through a website built for that purpose and that purpose alone. In other words, the website should be built around your ebook and specifically designed to generate more sales of your ebook. Don't add the sale of your ebook to a website that was built for another purpose. Your ebook website is your home base or the hub to which all the spokes lead. With a solid hub in place, you can generate the spokes from several of the following promotional methods.
Promote your ebook in discussion forums of the same topic
Find discussion forums concerning the topic of your ebook. A friend and I created a classical guitar publication. I embarked on several means of promoting the product. On a whim, I started searching for classical guitar forums on the internet. I found several forums and posted messages in each about our product and where to find it. Of all the things I initially did to promote our product, posting in forums relating to the subject of the ebook was the most effective way to generate sales early on. The strength of posting in forums quickly fades as other forum threads bury yours but your thread will continue to generate some traffic to your website even after the initial burst has subsided. You don't wwant to wear out your welcome in forums either by continually posting advertisements of your product, but many forums will allow you to post your url with your signature. So if you can contribute to the forum in other ways, with each post you add, you will also include your web address to your ebook website for others to follow.
Sell your ebook in your ebay store
Offer your ebook for sale on ebay.com. If you have several ebooks for sale than open up an ebay store and add them all to your store inventory. Ebay is not the best way to sell ebooks but you can benefit from the added exposure. Consider selling your product fairly inexpensively on ebay and bundle it with a subscription to your product newsletter. Many ebook sellers do this in order to build a large mailing list in which they can promote other ebooks they have for sale to previous buyers. One other note about ebay. Your ebooks will get more exposure in a traditional auction rather than through your ebay store. One way to shortcut this, if you have many products, is to have an auction for one ebook. That auction page will also promote four of your other products in your store if you choose to cross promote them in that manner. By doing so, you get more bang for your auction buck without having to have separate auctions for each ebook.
Bundle your ebook with a monthly newsletter
Sell your product on your website and bundle it with a product newsletter. Or you can offer a means by which visitors to your site can sign up for your monthly newsletter. A monthy or bimonthly newsletter is a great way to keep your product(s) in the view of potential buyers and past purchasers. Past purchasers are valuable because they can also choose to buy your other ebooks and they can recommend your ebooks to others. A frequent reminder in the form of the newsletter often helps the referral process along.
I personally use constantcontact.com for my newsletters. As buyers buy my products, I add them to my subscription list. Constant Contact gives them the opportunity to opt out of the newsletter campaign at any time. It also allows readers to forward the newsletter to others. Constant Contact has several templates from which I can choose. It allows me to add links to my website. Its most useful feature is I can track who opens the newsletter, how many times they open it, what links they click on, what email addresses are no longer valid, and a number of other valuable statistics.
Over time, my subscription lists grows to a rather large number. If you have 5,000 subscribers and can write an engaging newsletter, you can almost guarantee a fair amount of sales every time the newsletter goes out. That's a lot of power when you can reach a huge amount of people at once.
Advertise your ebook using Google Adwords
Hopefully you have chosen a topic for your ebook that has a relatively low cost per click - perhaps around 20 cents per click or less. If you are selling an ebook for ten dollars then at 20 cents per click you will break even if you sell one book per every 50 clicks. Google Adwords offers conversion tracking so that you can determine what your advertising cost per sale is. You will need a better conversion rate than this but, as you can see, it's important to always be aware of how much money you have to spend to make a sale. Perhaps I should back up a little bit and explain how Google Adwords works.
Google.com is where web users go to find information on the web. In the not too recent past, Google came up with the idea of selling advertising on its search pages. If a web user types in the search words or key words, "ebook promotion," Google will theoretically return websites that, according to Google, are the most relevant matches for the key words, "ebook promotion." In addition to those organic results, Google now places paid results on the same page. Advertisers can have their ad placed next to the organic search results when the key words, "ebook promotion," are used as a search term in Google. The paid results are usually listed down the right hand side of the page and usually the first one or two results on the left hand side of the page are paid results. Advertisers pay Google when a web user like you or me clicks on their ad. If no one clicks on their ad then there is no charge. Where an advertiser shows up on the search results page depends on how much they have bid on the key words, "ebook promotion." Google later expanded the idea to allow related websites (those with content which relates to "ebook promotion" in this case) to display the advertising and offered those websites a cut of the pie.
If you decide to go this route, don't give up if your cost per click is high. Consider related key words or key phrases. Think out of the box. Oftentimes, you can find other key words that are more effective than the obvious choices for less money. Another strategy is to NOT go for the top paid ranking or even a top paid ranking within the first few results but to bid low on your keywords and concentrate on making an effective ad. I've done this in a number of situations and bought considerable traffic to my sites for less than a nickel per click. With a daily budget of $6.00, I've bought as much as 150 visitors. If your product is $10 then a sale every 150 visitors results in a profit of $4.00. So consider the alternative strategy of making an effective ad if cost is a significant factor.
How much money can I expect to make from ebook sales?
It's the $64,000 question in the world of ebooks and digital goods sales - How much can I expect to make? It's all factor of the quality of your product and how effective your promotion techniques are.
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