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A friend asked me how to sell ebooks, and I had to admit that I only barely made it into five-figures with my ebook profits last year. Fortunately it is not the larger part of our online business. In any case, he insisted that since he I had more experience than him I explain the process. Here is that conversation, as best as I could re-create it.
A: There are several models you can use. I promote my ebooks on my sites and have ClickBank actually handle the sales. They take a small amount from each sale for the service and I don;t have to deal with processing credit cards. They even handle refunds if I am not available. But you can set up a shopping cart if you want to be in control of the whole process. Another way is to sell ebooks through a site like Lulu.com, which takes a share as well. They charge nothing to get started, which is an advantage if you want to start really cheap.
With ClickBank you need your own website and it costs $50 to open a vendor's account. On the other hand, ClickBank has thousands of affiliates that can sell your books for you if you offer a decent commission (usually 50% or more). That can help sales.
Q: What about the marketing part?
A: It's all about marketing, which is probably why I don't do as well on any one ebook as many internet marketers. You have to learn these things or hire them out, and I probably don't delegate enough. I do very well at generating free traffic to my sites, but not quite as good at selling converting visitors into buyers.
Q: Can you get help with that?
Yes, and I understand that it can be as cheap as a few hundred dollars to have a sales page written for you, although that comes with no guarantees. It can also costs thousands of dollars for a copy writer with more experience to do it.
Q: Where do you hire someone like that?
Elance.com and other sites like that where you can post your project and get bids from several people.
Q: If you don't do that good a job selling your ebooks, how do you make as much money as you do?
A: By having a lot of ebooks out there and a lot of visitors to my sites. Even if I get only one out of every 300 visitors to buy a $27 book, I can make decent money on that book once I'm getting 300 visitors daily. Keep in mind that once you do the work to promote a site and develop the traffic, you can leave it alone for months on end while writing and promoting other ebooks. It all adds up.
Q: What about refunds?
A: All of my ebooks are sold with a eight-week money-back guarantee. Since there is nothing to ship back and the buyer only need send an email requesting a refund, it seems like there would be a lot of them. Fortunately my rate is below 2% for most of my ebooks.
Q: They like your writing?
A: I hope it means that. I do see a difference depending on subject matter though. The ebooks that deal with making or saving money in any way have lower refund rates. I suspect that's because there are objective ways to measure the value in those cases. Buy my book on luck, for example, and how can you measure the results. But buy my "Money Saving Secrets" and you only have to use one tip to save many times more than the price.
Q: What about those who claim to sell tens of thousands of dollars in ebooks in a day?
They do it. There's no doubt. They know how to sell ebooks. They often have high-dollar products, like ebooks or courses that sell for $97 or more, because it only takes a 103 buyers to make $10,000 in sales if your ebook is $97. They mostly have decent products, although I read about refund rates of 20% at times, and boast of refund rates double what my worst books have.
These marketers get good copy writers to create the sales page, they promote the books through affiliates and through large circulation mailing lists. There is a science to this that can be learned, but there is also an "art of the promotion" part that comes from experience. If you are serious about it you can learn this level of marketing in time. I am content at the moment to concentrate on writing about subjects that interest me and charging prices that are easily justified.
Q: How do you price the ebooks?
A: It is somewhat arbitrary, although I do look at what similar ebooks are selling for. I rice the books that have more measurable value (those money-making and money-saving ones) higher. My cheaper ebooks sell for as little as $5 and my "Secrets Package" goes for $27 at the moment.
Q: Now it seems that whether you sell well or not, getting people to visit the site is crucial. How do you get that traffic?
A: The same way I do it for all of our websites. I have at least a dozen pages of quality information, then I promote the site. The latter is done primarily with short articles that I distribute through article directories. I explain all of that in my ebook You Can Make Money Writing.
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