How to Sell Ebooks - My Experience
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.
Want To Know How To Sell Ebooks?
You can use many of the same tools you use to sell
promote a website.
Use the link here to go get the ebook:
You Can Make
Money Writing
Then read it and put the lessons into action.
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