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:
- You aren’t getting enough people to your web site
- 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!