Aaron Hoos

Ebooks can be lucrative opportunities for your business. However, if you have an ebook that is not selling, it’s easy to get frustrated. Fortunately, there are only a few reasons why it’s not selling and in this blog I lay them out for you and give you some tips to fix the problem.

In general, there are only two main reasons why your ebook isn’t selling:

1. You aren’t getting enough people to your web site
2. You aren’t convincing enough of the people who are on your website to buy the ebook

I’ll take each one and provide some marketing strategy tips to help you solve the problems and sell more ebooks. The situation is different for every entrepreneur — it could be one or the other or both problems. Once you’ve improved your ebook sales, keep revisiting these ideas to continue improving.

MARKETING STRATEGY TIPS TO GET MORE PEOPLE TO YOUR WEBSITE
Before you can sell anything, you need to have web traffic to your site. That’s a given. Unfortunately, many brand new entrepreneurs underestimate just how many people they need on their site. In general, you need lots of people. Lots.

• Spend some time figuring out who your ideal buyer is. Get to know them so well that you can describe them perfectly to someone else. List the dreams and aspirations of your target market. Then, list the problems, challenges, and concerns they face. Don’t worry if it has anything to do with your ebook or not. Create long and detailed lists.
• Figure out where your target market spends their time and invest time and money in quality marketing there. It can be tempting to just blast out free internet marketing but you’ll have a better return on your marketing investment with a few carefully chosen marketing (even if you have to spend some money to make it work).
• Identify and focus on just a few internet marketing methods that can be carefully tracked. If you’re using web marketing that is a little more difficult to track (such as articles posted to free article distribution sites), add a question mark and code to the link (so your URL would look like this: http://example.com?abc) so you can drive them all to the same website but so you can also keep track of where your audience is coming from. Consider putting a different post-question-mark code at the end of each article so you can observe traffic easily.
• Think about who your target market’s influencers are. Consider starting an entire marketing campaign to the group of people who influence your target market. (This could include authority figures or family members, which each provide a different type of influence).
• Build relationships with your audience. If you’re tweeting sales-heavy messages, or if you’re sending out unsolicited emails, you’re going to drive your audience crazy. Start small and build relationships.
• Give away your ebook for free to a few people that your target market emulates and get them to review your ebook.
• Use AdWords. It costs money but even a small investment can provide you with enough data to help you shape a (free or low-cost) search engine optimized campaign.

MARKETING STRATEGY TIPS TO GET MORE WEBSITE VISITORS TO BECOME BUYERS
Getting traffic is just step one. Converting that traffic into buyers is what will keep you in business. Identify your conversion rate (the percentage of your website visitors who become buyers) and make it your goal to improve that number.

• Look at your sales page and see if there’s something keeping your readers from buying. Experiment with different elements: Shorter sales pages, longer sales pages, different content, etc. Take note of which changed factors increase sales.
• Look at your sales page and see if you build trust. If someone doesn’t trust you, they won’t buy from you so your page needs to present you as THE trustworthy vendor.
• Figure out where the majority of your traffic is coming from. Revisit the marketing at that source and see how it compares to your sales page. Consider aligning it so that your marketing asks a question and your sales page answers it.
• Add multimedia so that people can have a multi-sensory experience, which can help to lock your offer in their minds for longer.
• Reduce the commitment. This doesn’t necessarily mean lowering the price. Rather, it can mean changing the offer for an “easier-to-swallow” purchase at the beginning and a larger purchase later on in the customer’s lifecycle. (For example, if you sell a comprehensive ebook for $100 and people aren’t buying, try breaking out your ebook into a smaller, more focused $25 ebook. Then, once they’ve bought that ebook, offer those customers the $100 one).
• Add value by increasing what you give away. It doesn’t just have to be other digital information: Consider services or cross-promotional discounts as well.
• Shock your buyer with something outrageous. For example, offer a 150% guarantee if they aren’t completely satisfied.

Ultimately, improving ebook sales is about improving the leads and prospect stages of your sales funnel. Identify your actions, measure and modify and measure again, and you’ll notice a difference!

I’m frequently asked by clients where they should concentrate their efforts while marketing their business. They know that the right content in the right channels can make a significant and positive impact on their business but there are so many choices!

Of course, every business is different but here are a few that I recommend frequently (in no particular order):

• Blogs
• Articles
• Twitter
• Press Releases
• Reports

I’ve found that a significant effort in each of these options can help to grow a business with better search engine optimization, better positioning, more traffic, and higher sales. I’ll briefly touch on each of these content channels and how to use them in your business.

CONTENT CHANNEL #1: BLOGS
I think there is no better value for your business than to have a blog that you post on regularly. A blog provides you with a direct voice to your consumers that seems more intimate than an article while also offering a way for them to communicate with you (through comments) around the stories you tell.

Furthermore, a blog is like a laboratory where you can share your thoughts and develop ideas, even if they are not fully thought-through.

Here’s how to grow your business with a blog:

• Make sure you have a branded blog (a blog with a .wordpress or .blogspot in the domain name is okay but not as good as one that is entirely yours).
• Try to post three times a week minimum.
• Keep posts between 250 and 1000 words, but an average of 400 to 500 is good to aim for.
• Develop a list of topics you want to write about so that you are never at a loss for what to say.
• Identify 3 keywords that are important to your business and make sure they are in nearly every blog.
• Don’t be afraid to let your personality shine through. People visit blogs to read blogs with the full understanding that they are one person’s take on a situation.
• Each week or month, stockpile a handful of blogs in your “drafts” folder that you can publish at a moment’s notice if you find that you do not have time that day.
• Avoid overtly selling in your blogs but a self-promotional link or advertisement in the footer or sidebar of your post is appropriate.

CONTENT CHANNEL #2: ARTICLES
Even though there are millions and millions of articles out there right now, there is still space for you. Articles continue to be a powerhouse traffic-driver for many businesses.

You can use articles to position yourself as a leading thinker in your industry. That will drive highly qualified traffic to your site.

Here’s how to grow your business with articles:

• Create a publishing calendar so that you have enough articles to publish 1 a week for 6 months to a year. If you can hire someone to write your articles, you may want to consider doing more (say, 1 a day). However, most people don’t have time to write 1 article a day without the help of a professional. (You’ve got other things to think about!)
• Aim to keep your articles between 450 and 600 words. Some articles are suitable to use words like “I” and “me” but many articles are best when they use a more neutral voice. This helps them to appear more credible. Save the “I” and “me” voice for your blog.
• If possible, prewrite and stockpile as many articles as you can so that you have some on hand for when you’re too busy. (This is frequently a marketing channel that is neglected when things get busy).
• Look around for highly trusted sites to publish your work on. Consider who the target audience is first, but don’t forget to take PageRank into consideration.
• Write content that is highly valuable to readers. One easy way to think of topics is to consider a question your audience has. Make that question your title and then respond to the question in the body of the article.
• Use the resource box to promote yourself.

CONTENT CHANNEL #3: TWITTER
Twitter really burst into the mainstream in 2009. Soon, business was being conducted in tweets of 140 characters or less. Twitter will continue its strong position in the market in the near future but now that the “honeymoon” period is over, users are forced to make sure that are doing the right things to be effective.

Here’s how to grow your business with Twitter:

• Remember that Twitter is a social network. People don’t want to be sold. They want to build relationships with others. Leave your hardselling techniques for your website and instead focus on sharing yourself with your followers.
• Twitter is a microblog so if you’re not sure what to write, just think of it as a blog… only smaller. It’s okay to talk about what you’re doing or where you’re going or a movie you just saw. Contemporary business does not separate business life and personal life but finds a balance between the two.
• Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to compress long domain names into manageable ones.
• You can keep your social engagement manageable by engaging with a small handful of people on a regular basis and with your broader network slightly less.
• Although most tweets should be written in the “here and now”, there is room for some pre-written tweets which can be scheduled to post later at HootSuite.
• While you shouldn’t sell on Twitter, you should make sure that your bio points people in the right direction so that when they are ready to buy from you, they can find you easily.

CONTENT CHANNEL #4: PRESS RELEASES
Press releases continue to be a solid producer of results and, thanks to the way the web has changed how we do business, press releases are now a channel that can be accessed by the media (just like they’ve always been) but also by consumers. Press releases provide a way to get into Google News rapidly and get relevant backlinks.

Here’s how to grow your business with press releases:

• Make sure that whatever you are writing about is newsworthy. Too many businesses write about non-newsworthy content and try to pass it off as a press release.
• Keep your press release to 400 – 600 words. Much longer than that and people simply won’t read it.
• Make sure you have some contact information inside your press release.
• A press release should be written from the point of view of a journalist (so you should refer to your business in the third person). However, be sure to include quotes in your press release and those can be in first person and are ideal to promote yourself.
• Don’t be afraid to spend money on distribution. Businesses frequently hire me to write press releases but then release them through a free service which is often less credible and very limited. PRWeb is the best service with paid distribution services between $80 and $360.
• Typical newscycles are a month or less. So consider publishing a press release each month about your subject.

CONTENT CHANNEL #5: WHITEPAPERS AND REPORTS
Reports or whitepapers are highly credible positioning documents that businesses can use to demonstrate thought-leadership on a subject. While some reports may not generate huge amounts of traffic or be solely responsible for a sale, they play a key role in driving more traffic and more sales by compelling people with their credibility. A business that wants to rapidly achieve the status of an authority on a topic should produce reports or whitepapers.

Here’s how to grow your business with whitepapers or reports:

• Create a publishing calendar and plan to produce at least one report every quarter or, better yet, one report every two weeks.
• Aim to publish reports that are at least 3 pages (not including a cover). However, reports of 5-20 pages are better. Reports of a hundred pages or more are not unheard of but will need to be extremely valuable for customers to read them. (After about 40 pages, you may want to consider breaking it up into 2 or 3 reports).
• Reports need to strike the balance between being thought-leadership pieces and being relevant for consumers. It’s okay to produce a report that anticipates trends a hundred years from now… as long as your business is also producing reports that address immediate needs.
• Good report topics should combine high quality information with high value applicability so that readers can apply what they’ve learned.
• While not always necessary, reports may be considered more authoritative if they have links and footnotes.

There are, of course, many other content channels out there. These are my favorite and I’ve seen them produce good results for clients. The important thing is not to adopt as many content channels as you can, but rather to find the right mix of content channels to reach your target audience.

BMW created a series of 8 short movies starring Clive Owen (plus a number of well-known actors in sporadic roles and directed by big name directors). They were hosted at their own site for a while, then disappeared, and have resurfaced on YouTube. Although they likely cost millions to make, there is little doubt that BMW saw significant ROI on these videos; they helped to elevate BMW to a new level of cool.

The Hire: Beat The Devil

The Hire: Hostage

The Hire: Chosen

The Hire: Ambush

The Hire: The Follow

The Hire: Powder Keg

The Hire: Ticker

The Hire: Star

Growing businesses face a variety of challenges, from scaling distribution to hiring and training competent staff.

A knowledge center can help to minimize the pain that comes with growth.

A knowledge center is an offline or online area in your business where you capture and store all of your best practices, procedures, processes, and more. It is a single repository of information to enable effective operations.

It’s a place where your staff can go to find the latest and most relevant information and resources to help them do their job. Instead of running here for one thing and over there for another, you can keep it all together in a single knowledge center.

Your knowledge center might start quite humbly, with just a document or two, but as your business grows, your knowledge center can grow with it.

Hiring a technical writer to help you create and/or improve and/or moderate your knowledge center may seem like an investment in a non-core asset. However, with the right structure and attention, your knowledge center can deliver the following benefits:

• Less time wasted as staff go searching for an answer.
• Faster redeployment time when you change a process and need to change the instructions, guidelines, and policies that accompany that process.
• Lower training costs — knowledge centers support training and sometimes even replace it. Moreover, HR can rely on knowledge centers as a starting point for training that they perform.
• Improved managing: Management moves out of “how-to-do-it” training mindset into a “how-to-do-it-better” mentoring mindset.
• Processes become streamlined for an improved customer experience and potentially lower costs throughout the organization.

Here are some tips to build and maintain a useful knowledge center:

• Don’t start from scratch. You probably already have user manuals and job descriptions you can add
• Keep it simple: Create a blog but make it private (require a sign-in).
• Train your staff to refer to the knowledge center first, before they go up the chain of command.
• Record every question you are asked and add it to the knowledge center.
• Assign on person to be in charge of your knowledge center. Task them with the responsibility maintaining and regularly updating the information.
• Get your staff to record the procedures they perform and add them to the knowledge center.
• As your company grows, start dividing your knowledge centers up and give each department their own knowledge center to maintain.
• Over time, review the content and remove or modify obsolete information.

In this BCG On Strategy series, I go chapter-by-chapter through the book: The Boston Consulting Group On Strategy: Classic Concepts and New Perspectives (2nd edition). Join me each week for BCG On Strategy at AaronHoos.com.

OVERVIEW: STRATEGIC AND NATURAL COMPETITION
Boston Consulting Group’s Bruce Henderson wrote the chapter “Strategic and Natural Competition” in 1980. In it, he says that natural competition is an evolutionary force that most businesses (and the larger business environment) goes through over time. It is slow yet efficient. On the other hand, strategic competition is blazingly fast and very risky but can compel a considerable shift in the business environment. Strategic competition is a cataclysmic change to some aspect of your business to completely shift the competitive landscape in your favor. It’s a new business model, a massive repositioning, a new suite of services.

HIGHLIGHTS
Henderson outlines the basic elements of strategic competitiveness, and they include:

• “The ability to understand competitive interaction as a complete dynamic system that includes the interaction of competitors, customers, money, people, and resources.“
• “The ability to use this understanding to predict the consequences of a given intervention in that system and how that intervention will result in new patterns of stable dynamic equilibrium.“
• “The availability of uncommitted resources that can be dedicated to different uses and purposes in the present even though the dedication is permanent and the benefits will be deferred.“
• “The willingness to deliberately act to make the commitment.“

He goes on to write about the results of strategic competitiveness and how businesses not only create an entirely new dynamic in the business environment, but they have to sustain it against other competitors.

MY THOUGHTS
Natural competition is the easy way for businesses to operate. After all, there are plenty of other things that entrepreneurs need to do without devoting time and effort to strategic competition. But if your small business is going to be noticed — and become a marquee name — you need to stop letting evolution slowly transform your business and, instead, you need to influence the transformation yourself.

In the list above, Henderson gives a very clear step-by-step methodology for entrepreneurs to prepare to perform a strategic competition shift.

First, they must clearly analyze the business environment to see its current state and how all the “moving parts” work together. (Shameless self-promotion: My Business Diamond Framework(TM) is a useful tool for this).

Second, business owners need to carefully (and realistically) predict the outcome of their effort. This isn’t easy but also isn’t impossible. A consideration of the best case scenario, worst case scenario, and realistic scenario will help to give business owners a clear picture.

Third, business owners need to commit resources (money, people, time, effort, etc.) to this shift. If a strategic competition effort is in your future, start putting aside money right now and start thinking about how you can put a few minutes of time in each day to accomplish the shift.

Fourth, business owners need to act. This is probably the most challenging part because natural competition seems so easy while a strategic competition shift is so big and seemingly risky that it can seriously hurt the business if it is done wrong. Yet, as Henderson implies, although the risk is there, the reward is dramatically greater.