If you want to make money online, then selling an ebook must be one of the very best strategies there is. When you sell an ebook, you are selling your own product which right away helps you to maximize profits. You’re not an affiliate or an advertiser; you’re now right at the top of the pyramid as far as selling goes and you don’t have to share your profits with anyone.
At the same time, when you sell an ebook, you keep people more attached to your brand. When you advertise, you are essentially being paid to send your visitors away from your website/pages. When you sell a product of your own, your visitors are engaging with your brand. If you sell an ebook and it’s good, then you’ll find it’s even easier to sell more ebooks and other products in the future!
And if that isn’t enough, ebooks also have the benefit of being virtually free to produce. That means that all the revenue you generate from your ebooks will be almost all profit.
The Challenge of Selling An Ebook/Ebooks
Of course no business model is perfect, and there are obviously always going to be challenges that you’ll face when creating any product and trying to sell it. The biggest challenge when it comes to creating and selling ebooks, is demonstrating that your ebook will provide value, and making sure that it’s appealing to the widest possible audience.
The problem with ebooks is that they don’t appeal to everyone, and it can be difficult to differentiate your ebook from other ebooks.
Choosing a Niche and Title That Will Sell
Let’s not beat around the bush any further, let’s dive straight into making your ebook, so that you can start profiting! And the best place to begin when it comes to creating an ebook is to come up with a title and a niche. In other words, what is your book going to be about? What will you call it? Who will it appeal to? And how will you market it?
This is perhaps the single most important decision when it comes to your book as it will impact on all the other aspects of your business. The niche of your book for instance will not only affect what you’re writing about and what you need to know, it will dictate your target audience and in turn, where you are going to market it. It will dictate the marketing strategies you can use to sell it and it will even determine how much you can sell it for. Some topics allow you to charge more than others, because they offer bigger changes to a person’s lifestyle, and more impressive possible benefits.
The book title is what you will use to convey the niche, as well as to convey the “value proposition” of your book.
Choosing Your Niche
When it comes to choosing your niche, there are a huge number of different factors to consider and a vast number of different ways you need to think about it. The first and most obvious consideration in many cases is going to be what kind of business you are already running. In other words, if you already have a website or a blog, then you will most likely want to create a book that is based on the same subject matter so that you can sell to your same audience. If you have a blog that’s all about fitness, writing/creating a fitness ebook is the logical decision.
If you don’t have a blog or a website already though, then you need to think about the type of subject matter that you might be interested in. You’re going to have to write at least 10,000 words to create your ebook, unless you outsource it, and even on top of that, you will need to create a lot of additional marketing material to promote your ebook. If this is a topic you know about, then you should find it’s easy to bring something new to the table, to create marketing materials that demonstrate your expertise and to find the right ways to market yourself.
This is even more problematic if you try and sell an ebook on Kindle, because people can read a free preview before they commit to buying it. As a result, they will see right away that you aren’t offering anything new/different, and they won’t buy your ebook..So, in short, you really should be an expert on the niche you choose. And if you’re not an expert, then at least pick a niche that you understand very
well.
You also need to decide whether you are going to be creating a definitive guide, or a book that offers a completely new perspective. The latter is harder to think up but much easier to create. Look at it this way, if you’re going to create a fitness ebook, then you have to compete with the thousands and thousands of fitness ebooks already on the market. How do you do that?
One option is to be 100% definitive. That means that you’re going to aim to do a better job than all the other ebooks on the same subject and that you’re going to write the official text that people will turn to when they want to know about that topic. You can pick a subcategory of your main subject, like- “The Mediterranean Diet”, “Functional Strength Training”, “Fitness Trackers”, “Yoga”, but ultimately your aim is still to offer something that’s better than anything anyone else is putting out.
The alternative though is just to offer something completely new and different. That might mean that you invest your own fitness training program or your own breakthrough diet. It might mean that you tackle the subject of training in a new and unique way. Or it might mean that you target an audience who isn’t usually catered for.
People don’t buy fitness books just because they want to be healthier. They buy them because they want to be confident in the way they look, because they want to feel attractive and because they want to wake up full of energy in the mornings. This is the emotion behind your product and it’s what will help you to sell your books.
If your book is about knitting though, then your value proposition is a lot less emotive and life changing. People learn to knit as a way to busy themselves in the evening and as a fun pastime, they don’t learn it to change their lives, their health or their relationships.
And for these reasons, you can’t charge as much for a book on knitting as you can for a book on fitness. But at the same time, books on fitness will face a lot more competition than books on knitting, because just about every internet marketer out there has a title on the subject.
Getting your ebook to stand out and get noticed is a big challenge then, which is why you need to use the advice given earlier to make your ebook more unique and to sidestep some of that competition. As mentioned before, you can do this by writing your ebook on a specific subcategory of fitness.
Examples might be: Fitness for the over 50’s, Fitness for Martial Artists, Bikram Yoga, The Mediterranean Diet Guide, Fitness For Diabetics, etc. Even then though, you will struggle to find a specific route to market to promote your ebook, and you will struggle to make it stand apart from other books in that niche. Therefore, many writers choose to tackle subjects that are less conventional and that don’t have the same large emotional appeal.
If you write about knitting for instance, then you will find there is much less competition and that it’s much easier to sell your ebook to a very specific group of people who will most likely gather in specific places, such as knitting forums. You just won’t be able to charge as much, and you’ll likely have a smaller market before you reach saturation.
The ideal scenario then would be to find a compromise. Choosing the “niche within a niche” is one option, but another would be to choose a niche such as a particular industry, career path, or a skill that can be monetized.For example, take the example of a book aimed at a specific type of industry: stage lighting, running a cafe, building apps, or making money as a personal trainer.
When you have an ebook like this, you have a very specific niche and a very specific target audience. This gives you some easier options to market your ebook to. At the same time, there are specific places where this audience will congregate where you can market yourself and sell your books. And on top of all this, an ebook on a career is something that can be used to help someone make money and that can potentially change/improve their lives. People will willing to pay a lot of money for an ebook about running their own restaurant, if that is their dream.
How To Choose An Ebook Title
With all that in mind, the last thing to do is to come up with your title. And what’s key here is that you choose a title that will reflect the content in the book and that will get people excited for it. This means that you need to express the “value proposition” we already discussed, you need to highlight what sets your book apart and you need to make sure that you mention everything that is going to be covered.
So don’t just call your ebook: A Guide to Functional Fitness
That really doesn’t tell people much about the book. Instead call it- Functional Power: How to Use Functional Fitness to Develop Real, Useful Crushing
Power. Conquer Sports and Transform Your Body!
Writing or Outsourcing Your Content
We devoted an awful lot of time to the niche and the title but hopefully you recognize just why this is so important. And if you gave this the proper thought that it deserves, then hopefully it should help you to populate your book with content and to understand precisely what will make the book a success.
In short, you need to focus on delivering that value proposition, or solving a specific problem, and you need to do this in a way that’s effective, that’s unique and that gets to the point quickly. This is how you make your book “meaty” rather than just a lot of waffle. What is it that your book is really doing? What is it that makes it different and unique? What value do you really bring to the table?
How To Structure The Contents of Your Ebook
A good place to start is with a rough outline of your book such as a table of contents. Note that this will likely change over time as you write. That contents should start with an introduction and this is one of the most important aspects of your ebook, especially if you’re giving away free previews. Your objective here is not to kill time treading water so that you can bulk out your word count. Instead, this should be where you hit home right away by selling the dream and outlining precisely what it is that your readers can expect to learn.
So if you have a fitness ebook, you start by telling why fitness is so important and by painting a picture of what life could be like if your readers were stronger, slimmer and fitter. If your book is more about solving a specific problem, then your aim is going to be to focus on that problem and to describe the pain point.
From there, you then outline the nature of your book and what makes it different. That way, your audience will right away see that you’re capable of delivering on your promises and will right away see that their money would be well-spent.
Finally, end by highlighting precisely what they can expect to learn if they keep reading and how that will help address the issues you’ve outlined. Next, you’ll launch into the first chapter. In this part you need to provide the foundation that your readers will need to understand the rest of the book. So, if you’re writing about internet marketing, then you should explain what internet marketing is and how it works.
That means explaining the basic business model and a bit of the history. Conversely, if you’re writing about this diet or that, then you should explain the essentials that your readers need to know regarding nutrition. That doesn’t mean you need to write an entire science textbook, just make sure that you are prepping the audience with the knowledge they need. You might also outline the “lay of the land” or the status quo in your particular niche.
Next you need to demonstrate your philosophy and what you’re bringing to the table. Do you have a unique “trick” that your audience can you? Do you have a better strategy than the one most people are subscribing to? This is where you differentiate yourself and put across the unique aspect to your book.
Now start outlining the precise steps and show your audience how to combine the basic knowledge with your unique approach and ideas. This might be one chapter or seven depending on the complexity of the topic. And of course, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a “unique strategy” as such, it might just as well be a unique way of displaying the information. If your book was a “10 step program” to launching a restaurant, then these chapters would be where you’d present that 10-step program. Finally, you would deal with any additional thoughts, concerns or tips and offer any appendix, resources or other additional information.
Outsourcing Your Ebook
If you absolutely cannot write the book yourself though, then you might still opt to outsource the creation to someone else. This is a perfectly acceptable approach but remember what we said earlier: you will struggle to find someone who is an absolute expert in the niche you want to write about, which in turn is going to create challenges when it comes to offering something definitive or ground-breaking.
Make sure you look hard then for a writer who really knows their stuff and ask to see a sample of their writing before you order the full thing. Don’t expect a writer to write for you for free of course. But consider ordering the first chapter or just one article before you pay for the whole book. It’s also a good idea to give them as much structure and instruction as possible. Allow them flexibility to move beyond the scope of your outline (the best structure for chapters etc. will evolve as they write) but at the same time make sure that they don’t just have a subject matter but that they also understand the key points you want to get across, the style you want and any specific tips, ideas or advice you have.
Note as well that you’ll obviously get what you pay for. It’s worth paying a little more to get a writer who has “the voice” and who really understands the subject matter, rather than paying less and getting something that has been outsourced overseas and is written in broken English. If you do decide to outsource the writing process, then you can find writers on sites like https://www.upwork.com/
Other Ways to Get Content
There are other ways to get your content too though! One option for example is to reuse content from your website. This is a smart trick that can be very profitable without rubbing anyone up the wrong way. Think about it: if you have a blog that you’ve been running for the last 2 years, then chances are that you have something in the region of 100 articles on there. If those articles are 1,000 words long on average, then that’s 100,000 words of content!
This means you can create a compendium of content using your old articles and include some extra material and that way profit more from the work you’ve already done. If you’re worried about complaints, you could even take down some of that old content. The great thing about ebook content is that Google isn’t going to index it. Google can’t look at PDFs that you don’t upload and that means you can’t get
into trouble for using the same content more than once. Again, these aren’t ideal strategies but if your intention is to make something you can use quickly, then it’s certainly an option!
Buying Books
Finally, one more option is to buy a book you like. This might mean buying PLR content, “private label rights”, which you can edit and resell (there are lots of ebooks like this that are designed specifically to allow you to resell them as your own) or it might mean just contacting the author of an old book and asking if you can sell it online. This might mean splitting the profits but if it’s a great book that hasn’t found an audience, then you can be the one to turn it into a success and that can be very profitable!
Length and Other Factors
When writing your ebook, the longer you take, the more it is of course going to cost you. A good writer will often cost as much as $3-5 per 100 words. This means that a 10,000-word ebook might set you back $300 or $500. Likewise, if you write the book yourself, you will be investing more and more time, money and effort as you take longer to complete the book. The length of your ebook needs to be as long as it needs to be. You could write your story/ideas in just 10-20 pages if that’s all it needs to be. You don’t want to add fluff, just to increase the amount of pages.
Writing Your Ebook
The next consideration is going to be your writing style. How do you go about creating a writing style that your readers will find gripping and that will convey all the information you need it to? What tone is right for your audience? How do you keep them reading?
There are lots of tips here. The first is simply to make sure that your book is well written. That means it should be free from spelling errors and other mistakes as far as possible. At the same time though, it also means that it should be written in a style that’s suitable for the subject matter. If your book is very technical or professional, then you should write with a professional tone. If your book is a little more light-hearted then a conversational tone will be fine.
Either way though, the most important aim is readability. The big question is: is the book easy to read and follow? Does it engage the audience and is it entertaining? Every decision you make should serve these points. Your book should flow quickly and be good to read, so you should never make decisions to try and “sound professional” or to impress your audience. Avoid jargon and always try to say things as efficiently as possible with the fewest words necessary to get your exact meaning across.
A good way to test the readability for your book is to try reading it out loud to yourself. When you do this, you’ll find that some sentences don’t flow as well as they could or that the meaning doesn’t come across easily. Rewrite those sentences to ensure that your book will sound right when it is spoken. If you can do this, then it should flow easily and should be entertaining for your readers.
At the same time:
Consider using a narrative structure which will make your book more compelling and engaging · Break large paragraphs up into lots of smaller sentences · Speak directly to the reader (use lots of rhetorical questions, “you” statements etc.) · End paragraphs and sentences on cliff hangers to keep the reader moving to the next section If you do all these things, then your book should be as engaging as possible.
How To Get Over The Dreaded Blank Page
Of course the other big challenge when it comes to writing an ebook is simply motivating yourself to keep writing and facing that dreaded “blank page”. This is something that you will need to fight to overcome as a writer but note that some of the most prolific authors in history struggled with this problem.
So, what do you do when you’re staring down that blank page and you’re not sure what to put there? Well, when you find it difficult to write, one tip is to consider changing the format, the way you’re introducing the topic or how you’re starting the subject matter for that chapter. Often if you find it hard to write, it’s because you find it boring and you can’t bring yourself to sit down and struggle with that topic for however many words.
But think of it this way: if you find it boring to write, then what are the chances that your audience is going to find it interesting to read? In this scenario, you probably need to rethink the way you are writing the section to make it more interesting and more engaging. That will make it easier to write and more engaging to read! Other than that, it comes down to discipline and to being able to force yourself to write for long periods of time without interruption. Try reading other books on the subject to put yourself in the mood and to let the writing style seep into your own your approach.
Formatting: How to Create Stunning PDFs
If you’re going to be selling your book on Kindle, then you’ll need to create your book in epub format. Otherwise, you’ll be creating a PDF which can be read with Adobe reader. Either way, the process is going to be largely similar and the objective is the same: to make your book look beautiful, to ensure it is easy to read and to get people to want to keep turning to the next page without getting bored.
Fortunately, creating great looking PDFs and epub books is a fairly easy process.
How to Create a Formatted Document
The first thing you’ll need to do is to invest in a copy of Word from Microsoft. While it is possible to make ebooks using other software, Microsoft Word will make it considerably easier than any other tool and will provide you with all the advanced formatting options and features that you will need to make a professional-looking product.
To star with, make sure that you pick a font that looks crisp and easy to read. Just as with your writing style, the single most important objective here is to make sure that your content is readable and that means having a large typeface that is a pleasure to read. Arial is very popular, as is Calibri. Pick one of these and use a good font size.
From here, you’ll want to separate your book into chapters, titles, headings, sub headings etc. Fortunately, Word offers an easy way to do this that has become the accepted industry standard. Basically, you are going to highlight any chapter titles and set them as “Heading 1” using the option found in the home tab. Any subheadings within this chapter you are going to use “Heading 2” for and any subheadings below that will be “Heading 3”.
This will look the part and will ensure that your book looks appealing when you zoom out. At the same time though, you can also use these headings to quickly navigate around your book. Press ‘Ctr + F’ to open the navigation pane on the left hand of the screen and from there, you’ll see that you can pick the headings and jump straight to them within your document. This will help you when writing your article, and many different platforms such as Kindle will automatically recognize these as being chapter headings.
Better yet, using these types of headings means that you can very easily insert a table of contents that will be updated as you go. Simply head up to the top of your book and then select the “References” tab. Now click “Table of Contents” and select the style of contents you want. This is a great way to make your ebook look very professional, with minimal work. Inserting a page header and page numbers is easy to do, as well. You can also use the “Title” style for your book’s main title and “Subtitle” for the subtitle.
Once you’ve done all this, you can also hit the Design tab in Word to find more options for changing the look of your book, based on the titles etc. This can make a fairly big change to the way your book looks and feels and if you choose the colors next to it, you can come up with something unique.
Images
Another tip is to make sure that you insert lots of pictures/images. Breaking up your text with images, paragraphs and headers makes it much more readable, but pictures/images can be used to make your ebook interesting and interactive/visual.
You can buy images from stock image sites, you can use free stock image sites like https://www.freeimages.com/ or you can create your own, by taking/creating your own pictures/images.
Of course if you’re willing to go one step further, then you can also outsource the creation of your images by using https://www.fiverr.com/ or one of the other freelancing sites.
While it might feel like a waste of time creating a unique design, adding images and generally creating a look for your ebook, but it can make a huge difference to your sales. Try to think outside the box and really think of your ebook as a real product. Give it a distinct visual layout and a unique style. If you do this, you can strengthen your brand awareness and at the same time make something that people will be excited to read and proud to own.
This makes a huge difference to your sales, even in the way your own enthusiasm for the project will come across in your marketing materials. If you’re proud of your ebook and excited about it, then it will come across in the text, and your readers will be equally excited to buy it and read it! Finally, save your ebook in PDF format or HTML if you’re planning on selling it via Kindle.
Designing Your Cover
Another important design feature that will have a big impact on your sales and your eventual success is the cover of your ebook. If you create an ebook with a great cover, then it will immediately stand out and people will be much more interested to read it.
Note as well though that your design will automatically have some unique differences due to the specific challenges of creating ebooks. For instance, it doesn’t pay to have anything too complicated for your cover. If you do, then you will find that it looks cramped when the image is shrunken down.
How to Create a Great Cover
The next question then is how you’re going to go about creating your cover. In terms of the best tools to use, it’s worth investing in a copy of Adobe Spark if you can. Here is a link to the website- https://spark.adobe.com/make/book-cover-maker
Next, you’re going to need what’s called an ebook action script. This essentially creates realistic covers. One great product that offers a set of action script is called Cover Action Pro, available at https://www.coveractionpro.com/
Installing is easy as it provides instructions.
You simply design your cover.
Once again though, there’s a good chance that all this will be beyond you. If you are someone who doesn’t consider themselves to be a designer, then consider outsourcing the process via a freelancing platform.
Some popular sites to go to are https://www.fiverr.com/ and https://www.upwork.com/
On Fiverr and Upwork, you’ll find many freelancers who can design book covers for as little as $5 to $10 dollars.
Selling Your Ebook Through a Website
Okay! So now you have your well-written ebook in a great niche, with a very compelling title and eye-grabbing cover. You’re well on your way to becoming very successful!
The next challenge though is to find an audience for that book and help it to sell! And the most common way that a lot of marketers will do this is through content marketing, which essentially means creating a website, creating lots of content and building a big audience that will trust you as a thought leader in your niche.
The general idea here is to gradually build trust and authority to the point where your audience will consider paying to get more of your content. You are offering free content in the form of blog posts, videos and more and this is then going to give them the confidence in your ability to provide information and advice.
To see how this works, it can be helpful to imagine the process that a new user might take when they go from discovering your website, to then buying your book. So, let’s say you have an ebook on home body-weight workouts. You then create a website and fill it with lots of new blog posts about working out and building muscle.
Then, one web user discovers your website while searching for information. Perhaps they’re looking for unique ways to train their pecs, or maybe they’re looking for diet advice for home workouts. Either way, they search on Google for that keyword and they find an article on your website. They then read that article and find your post, which they find entertaining and informative. At that point, they notice the name of your blog before leaving. Then they might come across your content again when doing a related search on Google another time. And perhaps they might find an article written by you on social media being recommended by a friend. Each time they see your content, they are impressed and make a note to read more of your writing in future.
Eventually, they become so familiar with your brand and they trust you so much as a resource that they start searching your site specifically for answers to their questions. They then might go on to subscribe to your newsletter, or to potentially bookmark your site. Either way, they are now officially a fan of your blog and of you as a writer. This means that they are more likely to see when you start promoting your
new ebook and they are more likely to be interested and to go ahead and make the purchase!
It’s a lengthy process as you can see, but by consistently generating high quality content, you can build a bigger and bigger following and potentially sell them lots of products over the course of that time.
How to Set Up Sales Through Your Website
All this of course also means that you’re going to need a means of selling your books and products through your website. One of the best ways to do this is by creating an online store of some sort and in that regard, you have two main options.
One option is to create a basic ecommerce store, which will work like Amazon or any other website selling items online, the only difference is that you’re going to be selling digital product rather than physical ones. Doing this is relatively easy too, if you have a WordPress website then you can sell digital products by installing WooCommerce which is a plugin that will turn your blog into an ecommerce store.
Another option is to set up a “sales page”. This is a single page that will be completely dedicated to selling one product. That means the page will contain no other information, no adverts and no distractions, the entire thing is designed purely to sell your book.
Selling Your Ebook Through Kindle
Another option for selling your ebook is to sell it on Kindle. This is a great option as it means that anyone who owns a Kindle can now search for your title and then download it. This also means that they can buy from a vendor that they already trust and where their details are likely already stored (Amazon). It streamlines the whole process and opens you up to a massive audience that will include a much broader set of demographics. This is ideal if you have an ebook on a specific career for instance.
Considerations
Before you go ahead and add your ebook to Kindle, note that there are a few considerations to bear in mind. The first of these is that you can risk cannibalizing your own sales. What this means is that if you are selling your ebook from your website for $35 and you’re also selling it on Kindle for $10, you might find that people buy the Kindle version instead of the one on your website. Often this will be the case, seeing as Kindle books tend to sell for much less than PDFs from websites.
Even if you sell the two books at the same price though, it’s important to bear in mind that Kindle takes quite a big cut (you choose between 35-70%). This means that you’ll still make more money selling the ebook on your own. So that means you will likely want to price the Kindle version above your own version, in which case you’ll make fewer sales. Again though, this all comes down to your niche and your target demographic. If your book is about knitting, price it low on Kindle and even lower on your website, aiming to sell primarily through Kindle where there are more older readers.
But if your book is on making money online, then you should price it high on your website and even higher on Kindle. You might not make many sales on Kindle this way, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the book on the site as you might generate the odd sale or two.
One other option? Make two different versions of your ebook! This is particularly smart if you plan on joining Kindle Select, as this program requires you to make your book exclusive to Kindle.
Prepping Your Ebook for Kindle
The first step is to get your ebook ready for Kindle formatting. This basically ensures that your ebook will be easily read and understood by Amazon.
You can read the full formatting guidelines here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A17W8UM0MMSQX6
Submitting Your Book to Amazon
To submit your ebook to Kindle Direct Publishing, go to: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/
The process is completely free and easy. Just click “Create New Title” to get started. From here, you’ll then be presented with some more fields where you can enter additional information. The required information includes:
1. The book name
2. Subtitle
3. Series title
4. Volume number
5. Edition number
6. Language
7. Author
8. Publisher
9. Contributors10. ISBN (if you’ve purchased one)
11. Categories
12. Publishing rights
You’ll also be able to add other information, such as a description and a cover on your listing. This is very important for encouraging maximum sales, and the main objective should be to convey the “value proposition” that you’re offering. Again, how does your ebook make people’s lives better? What can it offer that other ebooks can’t?
You’ll also be asked to input your price. Remember what we discussed earlier regarding competing with yourself and consider the commission that Amazon will be taking. Note that Amazon normally takes 35% for cheaper books but this goes up to 70% for more expensive titles. You can also elect to give away 70% commission for your sales in which case there are a few perks, for instance, this means that you’ll still gain the full price for your book even when Amazon chooses to put it on offer.
Maximizing Sales and Ranking
When it comes to maximizing sales on Kindle, the main objective is to increase your ranking on the Kindle store, which is an extension of Amazon itself.
That means you can increase your visibility and thus your sales by thinking about your title in terms of search terms and what people will be looking for. If your book is called “Fitness Masterclass” then it might not get too many people discovering it by searching for the phrase. But if your book is called “Home Bodyweight Workouts” then it might.
Of course the problem with that option is that it will be going up against a lot of competition. Again, the key is to pick something that is in demand and gets a lot of searches, but that doesn’t face virtually endless competition.
Other than that, what will affect your visibility in the store is:
1. The number of downloads
2. The reviews
Your objective then is to get as many downloads as possible and to gain as many positive reviews as possible. One way to increase your positive reviews, is simply to ask people to leave a review if they enjoyed your ebook. Don’t bribe them or try and trick them into doing this, as you can get penalized for this, and it’s sort of a shady thing to do as well.
More Ways to Sell Your Ebook
There are many more ways you can sell an ebook and this is something that a lot of people overlook. Once you’ve invested that amount of time, effort and/or money into creating your book, it makes sense to maximize your returns by selling it in as many places as possible. And each time you find a new platform to sell your book from, you will reach a new audience and create new opportunities to hit the big time!
How to Build a Killer Sales Page To Sell Your Ebook
If you’re going to sell your ebook from your own website, then the best way to do that is often with a sales page. As stated earlier, this is essentially a single page on your website that is entirely dedicated to shifting copies of your book and encouraging people to download. That means that the entire design of the page will revolve around the “Buy Now” button.
The objective of your sales page is to maximize conversions. That means for every person who visits the page, you want to maximize the likelihood that they’re going to buy your ebook. For example, if your sales page has a conversion rate of 10%, that means that you can send 100 people to the page using ads and expect to make 10 sales. 10% is a very high conversion rate, but it is possible! The reason this is so effective is that it means you can then come up with a solid business plan based on somewhat concrete numbers. If you were to create a marketing campaign using Facebook Ads or Google AdWords for instance, then you would be charged “per click”. That means you would only pay each time someone clicked on your ad, and that also means you would know exactly how much 100 visitors would cost you. Say your “CPC” (cost per click) is 0.50 cents, and you get 10 sales, for every 100 clicks. That puts your cost at approximately $5 per sale. If your book sells for $10, then that means you’re making a 50% profit! Not shabby at all!
Designing Your Sales Page
In terms of designing your sales page, the most popular approach is to make the design long and narrow. The idea behind this is that a long narrow page encourages the visitor to keep scrolling down the page and to keep looking further. This feeling of scrolling in turn makes them feel more and more committed to your product. By the time they get to the end, it will feel like a waste to go back to the start again without buying anything!
As mentioned, everything about this site should be pointing at your action button to maximize your conversions. That means there should be no other advertisement on the page and no links back to your homepage or any other part of your site. The only way to leave this page should be to click the ‘Buy’ button or to click back.
Another common aspect of these pages is that they utilize a red or orange color scheme a lot of the time. The idea behind this is that these colors raise the heartrate and make us more impulsive and more prone to action. This is a good thing when you’re trying to make sales as actually most things we buy we buy impulsively and based on emotion rather than logic. Your objective is to get a rapid sale and a big red button does this better than a big blue one!
Persuasive Writing for Your Sales Page
The next piece of the puzzle is to use persuasive copy to encourage your visitors to buy your books. The first thing to make sure you do here is to capture the attention of your visitors and then to hold it. Your aim is to reduce your “bounce rate” (number of people who leave your site after 2 seconds) and you do this by grabbing them right away with a compelling pitch.
One way to do this is with a “narrative structure”. That means that you’re going to talk about your product as though it were a story. Discuss how “you were once overweight” or tell visitors your rags to riches story.
Not only is this inspiring and effective at getting an emotional response, but we are programmed to listen to stories, and that means the story sales strategy is very effective at generating sales. From here, the focus is then going to be on that value proposition. We’ve addressed this concept several times before, but this is where it is most important of all.
Your aim is to make your book sound life changing and to get your readers to imagine and visualize what their lives could be like if they make the purchase. Talk about how it would feel to have incredible abs and endless energy or get them to picture what it would be like to have their own restaurant and to feel proud of their accomplishments.
At the same time though, you also need to show them how your book can make this happen. Explain what’s in the book and make sure to address any concerns that your audience might have. In other words, how do they know your book isn’t just another set of empty promises? What makes this different from every other book on the market?
You can do this by addressing concerns head on before your readers think of them and by using social proof, authority quotes and facts and figures. Another very good strategy is to minimize the risk involved in buying your product, by offering a money-back guarantee.
How to Promote Your eBook and Increase Sales
Now you have your book for sale on multiple platforms and you know how to really push that value proposition to make people want it. Hopefully you already know how to build a sales page and you should have an idea as to how you can rank more highly on Kindle. But there are a few more strategies you can use to drive more sales, no matter which of these strategies you are using. Here are some of the best options…
Set Up an Affiliate Program
If you set up an affiliate program, this basically means that people can sell your book on your behalf and keep a percentage of the profit. This basically means you can build an army of marketers to help you make more sales and when you do that, you’ll be able to double, triple or quadruple your
turnover!
JVZoo, Clickbank, and Commission Junction, are all sites that allow you to do this. The websites are worth checking out.
Use Google AdWords and Facebook Ads
We’ve already touched briefly on using CPC advertising to drive more sales to your products. This basically means that you’re paying for clicks on your ads and don’t pay anything otherwise. Making things even easier is the option to set a budget and to decide how much you’re willing to pay for each click (though if you don’t pay enough, your ad won’t be seen!).
Perhaps the best option out of the two here is to use Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads provides a lot of advanced targeting options that lets you decide precisely who sees your ads. You can decide which gender, which location, what interests, what job title and more and ensure this way that only people who are already likely to buy your product see it!
Find Routes to Market
If you have a specific niche for your ebook, then you should be able to find “routes to market”. This means finding a direct channel to the people who are most likely to buy your product.
Creating an ebook for a specific group/specific market, and then finding a way to reach them directly, is a great sales/business model, and can drastically increase sales.
Conclusion & Action Plan
That’s everything you need to know to start selling your ebooks and making a big profit from them. We’ve been through every single step, from putting together the initial idea/concept for your ebook, to choosing a niche and a title, to writing your ebook, and then trying to sell it in as many ways as possible.
Welcome to the world of digital publishing! I would like to wish you all the luck in the world!
Yours in success,
Michael “MJ The Terrible” Johnson
About Masters of Money, LLC.
Masters of Money, LLC., was founded by Michael “MJ The Terrible” Johnson, to create and sell how to information, to people looking for ways to make and save money.
The goal of Masters of Money: Provide the tools, resources, and strategies, to help anyone who wants to be more successful, create the life of their dreams.
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