How To Sell Ebooks

If you ask an internet marketer who makes tens of thousands of dollars daily how to sell ebooks, he might lay out the following steps for you to follow. First, get a product to sell, whether your own or someone else's ebook. Price it high to increase its perceived value, and then offer it a discounted price that is still pretty expensive. After all you only need to sell 22 books per day to have $10,000 in sales each week if you have a $67 ebook.

Pay at least a few hundred dollars to have a nice site built for you. Pay a good copywriter a few thousand dollars or so to create a good sale's page for you. Pay optimization experts to create incoming links and otherwise make your site visible in the search engines. Pay a few hundred dollars for articles you can put your name on and pay to have those distributed to promote you site. Finally, pay for a bunch of traffic from a pay-per-click advertising service in order to test the "conversion rate" of your sales page.

If less than 1% of visitors are buying your book, redesign the sales page and test again. Once you get at least one in every one hundred visitors buying (a 1% conversion rate), you're ready for the launch. Now you need help contacting other webmasters and marketers who can help you promote your ebook. You will pay a 50% commission to them most likely. You need them to promote your ebook to their presumably large mailing lists. If all is done right, on "launch day" 150 orders will roll in for sales of over $10,000. You might do $50,000 for the week.

There is more to it than this, but you get the idea. It is expensive to start this way. That isn't to say that you shouldn't do it. Marketing at this level is a learnable skill in part. But don't believe that it is a step-by-step formula that you can succeed with on the first try. That's very unlikely. There is a science to marketing an ebook, and there is an art. People want to ignore the "art" part of all businesses because it comes from experience, which can take a lot of time and money.

The alternative? Plan for the big time, but get your feet wet with a simpler, lower-risk model. Here it is.

How To Sell Ebooks - Part Two

List all the subjects that interest you and/or that you know something about. Using that list, do some keyword research online (there are tools for this that are free to use) to identify a niche that has some demand. This could be people looking for a training manual for dogs or an ebook on how to build a survival shelter.

The intersection of one of your interests and a provable market is ideal. The "big boys" will tell you to forget your passion and go where the most money is, but in my experience (ebooks are a smaller part of our business, but I still do five figures in profits from them every year), it helps to have some interest in what you are writing about and promoting. It makes maintaining your enthusiasm and work schedule easier.

Write an ebook of at least 60 pages and publish it as a PDF. There are free ways to do this if you don't want to buy the software. Be sure to include the ten bits of information that are likely to be most important to your audience as well as those that are least likely to already be known by them. Ask yourself if you would buy the book (try to be objective).

Start a website and build at least a dozen pages of useful information. Some of these can be excerpts taken directly from your ebook. End every page by promoting your ebook and linking to the order/sales page - usually the homepage. Read all the free content online that teaches you how to write sales copy, write and rewrite your sales page until it looks as professional and seems as convincing as others that make you want to buy something.

Sign up with a processor like ClickBank (about $50 at the moment), so your sales will be handled for you without needing to process credit cards on your own. Now you are ready to start selling. Of course you need to get visitors to your site (and if only one out of 300 buys your book you need to work on that sales page some more). Getting traffic is perhaps the most important part of how to sell ebooks.

I generate all the free traffic I need using several methods, The primary way I use is to write short articles and distribute them through free article directories. People can read them there and click through to my site, or webmasters can take them and use them as content on their sites, increasing my exposure and traffic. Traffic matters, because even if you only convert on in every 200 visitors into buyers it adds up when you have many hundreds of visitors daily.

The steps I just laid out will costs you less than $100 assuming you already have a computer and internet access. In fact, you can even save the cost of a website if you use a free blog as your primary promotional tool. This is a great way to get started, and later you can learn how to sell ebooks on a larger scale.