So your E-Book isn't selling?

The first “own product” most bloggers offer is an E-Book. And after late nights preparing the PDF, editing and re editing it, and setting up the system to send it out, we’ve all had the experience of going to bed dreaming about the money we’re going to make from our new baby. Because it’s good, right? So we make the sales page live, write a post, email our subscriber lists and wait. And we wait. And then we sell two books. And then the disappointment kicks in.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The problem is we have been conditioned, by the mega launches our internet marketing friends do, to expect an avalanche of sales whenever we launch something new. Unless our blogs have a huge audience, or we have an enormous subscription list, that simply isn’t going to happen.

Selling an E-Book is like most things on the internet – a long, slow process, but one which can build significantly over time.

So don’t start tinkering with the book, don’t change the pricing and don’t move on to the next project. Put some effort into it and do some of these things:

Give it some traction

Now that the book is written and “out there”, your job is to get people to your sales page. It might be the best sales page ever written, but if nobody is visiting it, you’re wasting your time. Ask other bloggers to review the book and link to it, write some E-Zine articles with excerpts from the book and link back to your page, make sure you create lots of internal links to it on relevant posts, write some guest posts for others blogs and describe yourself as “the author of XXXX".” In short, market the sales page wherever you can. You already know how long it takes to build traction for a page, so set yourself the objective to do two pieces of marketing for your E-Book every day.

Bring some affiliates on board

Create an affiliate program for your book, but don’t just sit back and wait for people to approach you, go out and find them. You know the sites that are in your niche or a closely related one. Send them a copy of the book, ask them to review it and suggest they may like to make some commission by offering it to their readers. And if they do agree, help them by providing all the information and images they need to make things easy and give them a road map of how to promote an affiliate product. Getting other people to offer your book quickly multiplies your sales.

Put it in the affiliate market places

Whichever program you decide to use for affiliates, make sure your product is in the general market place, with a really good description. There are many people who sell affiliate products full time, and if one of those picks up your E-Book as a good opportunity, they will invest heavily into a website and advertising of their own. This happened with my Beginner’s Guide to Twitter, and sales really took off when an affiliate I have never met or spoken to did just that. He did very well as a result and made a significant profit, and of course, so did I!

Think of it as a five year program

If I gave you five years to rank number one on Google for pretty much any term, I’m sure you’d agree you could do that. So transfer that thinking to your E-Book, over five years of gentle but consistent promotion you can create a best seller. Just keep pushing it, keep getting links to your sales page and keep bringing new affiliates on board. E-Books can be hugely profitable, if you can just tap into the power of the internet. Even if your sales page conversion rate is just 0.5%, if you can get 500 people a day to read the page, you’ll sell 3 books a day. At $10 each, that’s getting close to $1000 a month.

I can tell you from personal experience, and I suspect many other established bloggers can, that the early months after launch can be intensely frustrating. But keep plugging away, and you’ll reach a tipping point where things start moving of their own accord. Hang in there!