Why an E Book launch went wrong

Paula started her blog a year ago. She’s worked hard and she’s done well to get to around 400 visitors a day. She’s just launched her first product, an E Book. And it bombed. She sold 4 in the first week. Earning just $78 for her hard work.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I asked her about her email subscriber list. Here’s what she told me:

“When I first started my blog, I put an email subscriber list on the back burner, all I wanted to do was focus on writing posts and getting traffic.

Then about three months in, I realized everyone was telling me I should start a list. I looked around at ways of doing it, but most seemed to cost more money than I wanted to pay. I decided to create my own list, using a simple opt in form, and setting it up in Outlook with blind copies, so people wouldn’t see each other’s email addresses.

After around six months of doing that, I had just over 150 subscribers, but I realized how hard it was to segment the lists, and I was also getting a lot of bounce backs. It was time to invest in a system to do it all for me. The trouble was, once people had to confirm their new subscription, I actually ended up with 87 people on my new list, and that was nine months into the blog.

I really focused on getting subscribers at that point, and managed to build back up to just over 200 by the time I launched my product.”

Her story is  common.

I asked her to calculate how many subscribers she would have had, if she’d pushed for the first nine months like she had for the last three.

She felt that had she been really going for it, she could have got to 1000, or five times what she actually achieved, by using a competition or giving away some free content.

Five times the subscribers? That would have been five times the sales? $390, no?

Not a fortune, but so much better than what actually happened.

Are you putting enough time and effort into building a community of subscribers around your blog?

Are you giving them great value all the time, and occasionally offering them products for sale?

Or are you leaving all that on the back burner?

By the way, are you part of the Mike’s Life community yet? No? You know what to do: