Sell eBooks
Continuation of Lesson 20 from You Can Make
Money Writing
Why sell ebooks? I like the fact that e-books are downloaded
directly - nothing to ship. My own best seller at the moment
is found at The Secret Information Site. I also sell concise
reports on various topics at 99 Reports.com. Of course I sell
this e-book too, and I have my e-books for sale on several other
websites.
I like the fact that e-books are downloaded directly - nothing
to ship. My own best seller at the moment is found at The Secret
Information Site. I also sell concise reports on various topics
at 99 Reports.com. Of course I sell this e-book too, and I have
my e-books for sale on several other websites.
Although we make a decent amount of money with my e-books,
it is perhaps more because of the quantity of books I have for
sale than my marketing efforts for any one of them. In other
words, I am not an expert in that area. But I can tell you a
couple "tricks" I have learned from experimentation
and experience.
First, a "secret" that all good marketer's know,
is that you often will get higher conversions (making visitors
into buyers) if you first give something away. In the case of
both this and my "secrets" book, I give away a free
email course. Some kind of gift that gets the visitor's permission
to email them is always a good idea.
How much does it help? That probably depends on the quality
of the freebie. In the case of my e-book "You Aren't Supposed
To Know - A Book Of Secrets," those who sign up for the
"Secret Information Course" are about six times as
likely to buy the e-book as those who just visit the page without
subscribing.
The simplest way to create a "give-away" is to set
up an auto-responder to email out a series of excerpts from the
book you are selling. Once you have this in place you may not
have to touch it for years. A visitor subscribes and is automatically
sent a series of mailings which hopefully convince him or her
to buy your product.
Another trick I have had good luck with originated from a
idea-creation technique I was using. I was having trouble selling
an e-book on how to buy cheap homes, even after dropping the
price from $27 to $7, so I did a bit of brainstorming using a
technique called "assume the absurd." One of my "absurd"
assumptions was, "What if I could make more money giving
the book away?"
I worked with the idea and came up with a plan to give away
the entire e-book a chapter at a time by email. I set this up
in an auto-responder that sends out emails automatically once
a person subscribes - in this case 30 mailings total, one going
out each week. I actually hosted the chapters on my website (yourcheaphome.com),
so each mailing directed the subscriber to the appropriate page.
They really got the same e-book, and if they were impatient
they could buy it as a PDF download for $7 - plus get a couple
bonuses. Soon I was making more money from the advertising on
the pages where the chapters were hosted than I used to make
from sales of the book. But - this is the fun part - I also saw
an immediate increase in sales of the book. Apparently people
liked what they read each week and didn't want to wait thirty
weeks to get it all.
Continues here... Sell Services
Note: This is part of the book, You Can Make Money
Writing. There are links to all the all the lessons/chapters
on the home page.
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