28 replies to this topic

[kenny17]

I know that you were not implying that Jill I guess I was just stressing that because i wanted to try to give the most detailed desription and details as to my approach so that I could best help everyone to know what and where i was coming from! So that way, as everyone is so gracious and helpful in everything, they can offer the best advice with the best understanding of how everything was going and being set up.

I guess that is the one area as to where I am "stumped" the most ... and that is effective ways to promote the ebook or really "get it out there" It seems that besides the obvious choices of promoting it thru your newsletter, etc, I am confused as to ways to get some of the big dogs to take notice or offer "reviews" of the ebook. I know to offer high commission (as the ultimate motivating factor is $$) but has anyone found that by going after some of the "authority sites" and offering things such as article creation and submission to their newsletter, or other means of getting their attention have worked. It seems to me that a majority of these "authority sites" would be to busy upkeeping and maintaining their own site to bother or have the time to review a book or anything like that.

But that is just my thought .. I def. will try though and be persistant. I mean after all, if ones site is that good and provides such a great service, it should not be a problem to get other site owners to recognize this and link up to the site -- seeing that is will only provide a greater benefit to their own site visitors .. and if they can make a buck or two in the process, hey even better. But again, it all goes back to good quality content that after all is said and done, will make your site visitors happy.

But if anyone has any tactics they have used to go after some promotional stuff for their ebook, I would love to, and I am sure others as well, hear some simple steps that you may have taken.

[Jill]

I guess that is the one area as to where I am "stumped" the most ... and that is effective ways to promote the ebook or really "get it out there" It seems that besides the obvious choices of promoting it thru your newsletter, etc, I am confused as to ways to get some of the big dogs to take notice or offer "reviews" of the ebook.

I think that comes with building your own credibility. Are there ways to network with the big boys in your industry? Can you simply email some of them with a question or just an introduction to say that you like their stuff? It's really all about building relationships.

[train99]

Kenny,

I work on a process of attraction. I don't beg people to become affiliates. I provide tools and products that get people to come to me. Then I nurture them by helping them get better results.

You don't have that option. When I started I gave away hundreds of copies of my books in order to get affiliates. I used an email that told what their readers would learn, and how much they would make per sale. Specifics sell.

I've also done direct mail and telephoning to potential affiliates. Telephoning works better, but emails are more productive.

Currently, when I respond to emails asking me to promote products, my reply, and I only reply when the product is on topic, is always I am booked up for months and give preference to my affiliates. The fastest way to get my attention is to promote my products and make sales.

That's the hurdle you are going to hit. No one who is established will promote your stuff until you build a relationship with him.

Think of it like picking up chicks in a bar. Sure you can go into a club and walk around hitting on every woman hoping you can ignore the stream of rejection until you get lucky.

An easier way is to just go out and have fun. The girls will see you and they will come to you. If you get a few to hang around you, you'll be even more attractive to the rest of them. Having people around you is called social proof.

Start by stealing the smaller affiliates from other book authors. That's pretty easy - just offer better affiliate tools and a higher payout. When you get enough of them, the big dogs will come to you.

The small affiliates are more important anyway. The big dogs tend to promote something and then move on. If you are lucky they will come back in a few months, but that is rare in the niches I watch. The little guy is going to be overjoyed at making some money and will keep you in the spotlight.

Having a few hundred small affiliates constantly promoting you gives you a base. My average productive affiliate sells 2 products a month. I have a lot of them so it adds up. The super affiliates who come through now and then are just a bonus.

One thing to watch out for is prima-donnas. Right now you don't know your products or market well enough to know when a prima-donnas is leading you along. When they say things like "sure I'll promote you stuff but my readers won't pay $40," or "your sales letter needs work," or "you need to add an additional bonus," or whatever their hang-up is, you won't know they are full of crap.

With a base of small affiliates you will have time to fine tune your materials and actual sales results to help you feel confident of your entire sales path. You'll be able to tell these prima-donnas where to go.

You said you are building a website of articles. Reword the articles that are never going to rank well on search engines by removing or distancing the keywords, and then spread them around on submission sites.

Start TWO newsletter lists - one for clients and prospects and one for affiliates. Every month send the affiliate list something they can send out to their lists. A copy and paste preformatted email with "PUT YOUR LINK HERE" works best.

Get your product listed on the affiliate directory sites.

Ezine ads can be a good deal. There are a lot of ezines out there where you can run an ad cheap. Run ezine ads, but never run a solo ad with the words "solo ad" anywhere in the subject line or body of the message. You might as well send the people and email with a subject that says "delete this email now."

Watch your site traffic. That's a hidden goldmine most people ignore. I look at my referrers list every month. It's not uncommon to find an affiliate who is not generating sales. It's easier to send someone who is already sending you traffic some hints to improve results than attract a new affiliate. Depending on your affiliate program you might be able to find ineffective affiliates needing a little help in the stats. Clickbank doesn't do this so I use my server logs.

All these suggestions and what others have said are predicated on one thing. YOU ARE YOU. You are not me. You are not Jill. You are you.

If I ran my ebook sales like Jill does, I would starve. If she ran hers like mine, she wouldn't have time to do her SEO consulting. The skill sets are different because the attitudes and desires are different. Not better or worse, just different.

This is like a cafeteria, take what you want. When you want something else you can come back for seconds. Take something you don't like, you can throw it out after a single bite.

Fit your business into who you are and what your goals are. Decide where you want to go and start learning the skills that will get you there.

Terry

PS notice this post is a few pages long. Start writing long informative posts. It will help you build the one skill you must have. The ability to communicate ideas with text. Become active on the boards in your niche and save all your posts so you can use them as the basis for articles.

[kenny17]

All very god info and very useful for everyone and anyone selling ebooks!

It seems to me that my site setup for this particular web site is right on and I will be good based on the fact that I am establishing myself as a resident and am constantly looking to improve all my site "tools" that will attract people to the site and it services.

I will look to apply many of the tactics and tools you provided and I am sure things will work out as putting in time and work is no problem for me and when you couple that with the gracious help and advice from people on this forum it truly makes for a successful combination!

Anytime you can garner the help and advice from other who have gone down the path you are heading ... it certainly helps!

[kenny17]

I almost forgot to ask .... does anyone have any recc.'s on a good ebook software that they are using or would reccomend?

The ebook software I am currently using I am not that happy with so I was wondering what everyone else uses and was looking for opinions before I go spend money on anything else -- any advice or "thumbs up" for any particular type?

[kenny17]

ooops, I almost forgot that we obviously won't discuss any specific softwares or products -- can anyone pm me and make their recc.'s that way ... it would be greatly appreciated if they have any suggestions!

[train99]

Kenny,
Use adobe acrobat. You can buy older versions on eBay for 20-50 dollars. If you set your word document up with headers, acrobat will create the navigation during the conversion.

Don't mess with the other "cheaper" alternatives. Acrobat is one click from within word and then you open the PDF and set the security and you are done.

The older versions are actually better because while newer versions are backward comptatible they will put a "some features may not be availible" message in front of your buyer when he opens the PDF. This causes unneeded emails from buyers who don't understand the message.

Unless there is a specific reason for using an HTML/EXE compiler you should use a PDF.

I have more information that will help you on my Nal*oo website. I won't put a link here, but you can find it by using the signature link and then clicking on the copyright link at the bottom of any page on the IWANT site.

Terry

[kenny17]

Hey Thanks Terry!!

I will check that out in more detail right now ...

I am currently using a program that is fairly simple and has some unique features. When it downloads to the clients computer, it ask's to rigister with a username and password, and then they must sign in with that username and password and they can then view their ebook. It is a relatively simple process and I did like this program because it also enabled me to see who was using the ebook at all times and even disable their ebook from my main computer should there be "more ebooks being viewed" than the ebooks I have sold. I guess the primary reason I went with this ebook software was because of it's secutrity features.

I was afraid and trying to stop people from sending it to their friends, etc. so I was concerned about piracy. I know piracy will always exist and I am not going to spend hours upon hours trying to battle it, but I did want to incorporate as much security as I could ...

so with that being said, isn't the pdf file easily "sendable via email" or should I just forget about the piracy issue and create something that will not cause many problems. I know there are other ebook spftware programs out there that have very good security features but they are very expensive ... have you had any problems with the pdf (as I am not afraid to say that I have not looked into it that much because I always assumed that it was easily sendable to others who have not bought it via email) with your ebook ventures?

Kenny

[train99]

Forget about people passing around the books and concentrate on the usability of the book.

Once you start selling quantities of books you don't want to be spending your time answering "I forgot my password" emails.

Sharing and theft are distractions. I refuse to treat my buyers as if they are dishonest.

I shot a video today, and looked at the reasons people had refunded in the past. I found one genius who sent a video back because I wasn't wearing a tie!

What does this have to do with eBooks?

When someone buys an information product the first time they look at it they are trying to decide weather to keep it or not. Better said as they are looking for reasons to reject it. You need to minimize the number of reasons for returning or refunding. Hence the example of the tie. That guy couldn't find any real reasons so he made one up. Make your buyers make up reasons to be dissatisfied, and fewer will bother with the charade.

Terry

[WebFusion]

There are a number of different ways you can sell ebooks:

1. You write the eBook yourself - this is probably the best as you then have control over the content of the eBook, and you can manage the backend income (affiliate links etc).

In addition to the above, I would also add you can hire some VERY talented ghost writers (via elance, etc.) who, provided with a detailed and verbose blueprint, can write a super info-product about virtually any subject.

There is also a big difference between selling "internet marketing" type ebooks, or more niche / specific industry ebooks, and also between selling eBooks which have good brands or writers behind them, and eBooks which no-one has ever heard of.

As for the "how to make money" types of products - I agree. I think you'll find alot of these will come with a much higher refund rate than other niche areas.
As for the necessity of a good "brand" or "known writer"....I have 39 products currently selling on Clickbank, and have never had a problem making sales because I wasn't "known". This is further verified by the fact that several products that were geared towards women I actually published using my wife's name as the author - and she rarely even goes online!

The other issue is that when selling ebooks through merchant providers such as clickbank, their are 90 day refund options for the purchaser, which makes it very difficult to run a scalable business - as you might pay for advertising today, make the sale, and the buyer requests a refund 2 months down the line.

As far as I am concerned, that's a non-issue. If you create a quality product, and properly test your sales material etc., you should NEVER have an issue with refunds affecting your business growth. My refund rates across the board are less than 4% overall. Personally, I think anything over 5% means you need to rethink your product.

I do think it varies by industry, but even though I am somewhat of an expert at SEO, I tell ya, I'd never try to sell a product or service or ebook by SEO as the main form of marketing. No way, no how.

SEO was always meant to be a bonus, not a the sole or main form of marketing. What you get from organic results should always, always, always be your gravy, not your meat.

Hmmm....I have to disagree somewhat. I agree that relying on organic traffic as your majority marekting channel is building your business on sand, I have found that an enormous sales channel can open up when you build a content site around an info product.

In fact, I have about a half-dozen of my [niche] info-products for which I did just that. In fact, you might say I "reverse-engineered" the marketing for the product, as I built up traffic to the targeted content site first, and then simply created the product to plug into it. I'm now in the process of doing the same for the rest of my products. It's amazing what a 1000-1500 page site with tons of article targeting the market you're going after can do for sales of a good info product

Three years ago I could write an ebook and put a small site up with some basic optimization and get some sales. Today I wouldn't even try it. The things that have changed since then are Clickbank's 302 redirects cause my optimized sales letter to be assigned the URL of an affiliate by google, and the sheer number of scraper sites to compete with in order to get good rankings.

I fixed this (using the approach above) by simply moving the affiliate landing page to an interior page of the site, allowing me to focus on using the index.html as a gateway to the focused content.

On a side note....another benefit I've encountered when utilizing the content-based approach is that once the site in question starts to rank well for the targeted phrases, the other "players" in the niche frequently see the eBook I'm offering on the site, and start selling it as an affilaite on their sites. One site I have in particular (currently ranked 3rd in relatively competitive serps) has 5 other sites in the top 10 prompting my eBook.

One other note....although I disagree with the notion you need to be a "known" name to have a sucessful info-product....once your products become known to producing affiliates as stong sellers (with low refund rates), you'll find the same affiliates will promote just about everything you publish. I've seen an eBook of mine go "live" in the CB marketplace and have literally had the first affiliate sales within hours.

[kenny17]

Great to hear WebFusion! Thanks for the insight because that is exactly what I am actually doing.

I am developing tons of articles and resources to the site and making as many updates and providing as much information to my site visitors as possible. Knowing that when I provide them with what they want and keep them happy, that will only increase the chances that will then continue to come back (building relationships) and also buy that info product.

It certainly does not hurt that the others who are involved with the site, are some of the most elite professionals in their field, so I do have that going ... though it is great to know that you have had success without any "known author" I fugure it is just an extra tool I can use to build trust and credibility which is def. lacking and people are wary of in the weight loss and fitness industry.


Also webfusion, I am assuming that on the site with all the articles and resources, within every one of those pages you are providing people, (or pushing/helpfully guiding them) to that sales page with the ebook/info product that you are offering?


And Train99 very good points and I actually can beleive that about the guy returning the product simply because you were not wearing a tie! You made some good points about how people will look for any reason to make a return so make sure it is as "fail-proof" as possible!

[WebFusion]

Also webfusion, I am assuming that on the site with all the articles and resources, within every one of those pages you are providing people, (or pushing/helpfully guiding them) to that sales page with the ebook/info product that you are offering?

Yep...I look at every keyword-focused article as another part of the "sales funnel" to get people to the sales page for the eBook.

In addition, I think the "community building" feature is a great value-add to a content-based promotional effort. Everyone of my products (that are promted via this technique) contains a link to the forum that is incorporated into that content site. Those forums (once they really get rolling) add an additional 50-60 pages of rich content that the spiders eat up (make sure your forum is designed to be spider-friendly). In fact, I've gone a step further and insured all articles/forums are also available via RSS feeds.

[kenny17]

I'm curious webfusion ....

how long did it take for you to get the web forum rolling? The reason I am asking is because I know that it obviously depends on the traffic and the more you have, the more people you can get into the forum, but the one thing that will not attract them (or so I think) is when you pitch the forum and then people go in and see that there are 100 or so members only .... I have been to many forums where they talk about how good it is but there are hardly any people there -- so obviously I did not go in and join, because after all how good could it be. But when you go in and see that there are alot of people in there, it obviously sells itself.

How did you combat this and really get that to be a good information sourced portal for your site? How did you get that off the ground rolling?

[Jill]

Good info, Webfusion, thanks!