How to Sell eBooks: Four Steps to Sell More eBooks

by Chuck
(MD)

Are you trying to find out how to sell eBooks? If so, you are in the right place. Selling eBooks is quite simple, but people make it really complicated. In essence, you really have two choices. You can sell your own eBooks or you can sell other people’s eBooks, as an affiliate.

If you are just starting out, I recommend you spend some time learning how to sell eBooks by selling someone else’s eBook. The benefits of doing this is that you can teach your sell what marketing strategies work and what don’t, before you spend the time to write your own eBook.

Personally, I’ve been selling eBooks online for several years now. And I’d like to share four of my secret tips with you. These four steps will teach you how to sell eBooks. Let’s get started.

1. Identify Your Target Market: The first step in the sales process is to identify your target market. In other words, who will benefit by reading your eBook? For instance, if you are trying to sell a weight loss eBook, your target customer is someone who is overweight and is actively trying to lose weight. You wouldn’t want to waste your time trying to market your eBook to overweight people who don’t care about their weight. Instead, you would want choose overweight people who have invested money in diets, gym memberships and weight loss information products.

2. Advertise to Your Target Market: Once you clearly identify your target market, your next step is to advertise. My favorite way to advertise my eBooks is through pay-per-click advertising. In essence, you write short ads that appear in the search engines. When someone clicks on your ad, you get charged a set amount, based upon how much you bid for the word. The key to success is to monitor your results and make small, continuous improvements. Make sure you test everything you do. Find out what works and what doesn’t. Other forms of advertising include ezines, article marketing, video marketing, joint ventures, etc. It’s best to start with one form of advertising first, until you know what you are doing.

3. Convert Visitors to Customers and Leads: When people visit your website, they are visitors. When they purchase your eBook, they are customers. And if they give you their contact information, they are leads. Most visitors will not buy your eBook the first time they visit your website. If you are doing a good job with your advertising, you might get a 1-2% sales rate. That means for every 100 visitors, you might get 1-2 sales. However, a larger portion of your visitors will give you their contact information (name and email). A typical visitor to lead rate is 8-12%. If you keep in touch with these leads through email, a nice percentage will eventually purchase your eBook.

4. Follow Up with Your Leads: The money is in the follow up! Your key to success is to follow up with your leads on a regular basis; minimum once each week. Try to provide helpful emails that pertain to your eBook. For instance, you could email them a chapter from the eBook. Or, you could email them some of your customer reviews. The secret is to provide real value and get creative.

Let me give you a hypothetical example. Let’s suppose you sell an eBook that you earn $30 per sale. To sell the eBook, you use pay-per-click advertising. You purchase 1000 clicks to your website for $300. You average a 2% sales rate, which means you generate 20 sales. From these sales, you get $600. After you deduct your advertising expense, you keep $300 profit.

Even better, of the 1,000 people who visited your website, 100 of them gave you their name and email. You follow up with these people with your auto-responder and generate another 10 sales during the following four weeks, which gives you an additional $300. Now, you’ve made $600 total profit from your advertising campaign. Does that make sense?

Although these numbers are hypothetical, they are about what I average with my advertising. By following the advice in this article, you now know how to sell more eBooks. Good luck!