Before this website came about I was selling ebooks from a website. The idea was simple: automate sales of my ebooks and build an “autopilot income” from it. I even wrote my own ebook. It was about how to become a stuntman! I joined the British Equity Stunt Register in 2002 and thought sharing my journey would make for a good book! However I struggled to sell any of my ebooks even though I spent some time writing the book and building the sales page for it. The main problem was something I didn’t know about: marketing.
I found a course which taught me how to make money online. My thinking was that I would learn how to drive website traffic to my ebook. However, what I learned led me to another business model; one called affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you can sell pretty much anything online. You can sell ebooks, courses, trainings and physical goods without personally owning them.
So I abandoned my ebook idea and instead learned how to sell a course. My ebook was on sale for $10 and even though I could earn 100% from a sale, by selling affiliate courses worth $100 I could earn 40% commission: four times that of what I could earn selling my own ebook! Plus, the courses were more in demand than my book. This was to be the beginning of a long journey!
Selling Ebooks From A Website
I still like the idea of selling ebooks from a website. The idea is simple. You build an automated online “vending machine” of sorts. The ebook is a perfect example of an autopilot money making machine. It can be bought and downloaded instantly and without anyone actually being there to oversee the transaction. These kinds of transactions happen thousands of times daily online and many of them are made by affiliate marketers.
You don’t need to go to the trouble of writing your own ebook either, and in a way doing so might be a waste of time. There’s already ebooks, physical products, courses and trainings which are worth far more to sell than another ebook is. It’s far better to align yourself with one of the top paying products online as an affiliate and promote that.
The best products are already selling, whereas a new ebook is yet to be proven. So writing an ebook of your own comes with a certain risk. You risk losing the time it takes in writing plus also the possibility that it might not sell. Even if it sells you’ll need to learn the strategies of selling online; marketing.
Far better to take a proven product which is already selling, and learn a marketing strategy you can learn and implement quickly.
Selling Ebooks From A Website – Marketing
Yes marketing is the all important ingredient. Setting up a “selling website” is the easy part. You can do this through using automated business setup materials – see affiliate marketing mentors and sign up for the free course for details. But once you have a monetised website, your job isn’t over. You won’t make any sales unless people actually visit your website and buy. This is the more difficult part of making an income online. There’s all kinds of courses offering to set you up for a monetised site. But once setup you still need to drive traffic to it, otherwise you don’t get paid!
Driving traffic to a website can be fairly straight forward but there’s a lot you can get wrong too. For example, you need to start out knowing who you want to send to your product. Not all traffic is equal. You want targeted website traffic, not casual online browsers who aren’t going to buy! To know your target audience is the first step towards finding them.
Paid Vs Organic Marketing
Paid marketing is fast. With paid marketing you can reliably send target traffic to a website almost instantly. But it does cost you some cash! So at first you’ll need to test and measure different audiences and adverts until you find a campaign which works. This can take some time and of course marketing budget too. The good news is that once you have a campaign which works, you can scale up quickly by adding budget and driving more and more traffic to your “automated online vending machine”.
With organic marketing your traffic is free. The bad news is you’ll need to work pretty hard creating a lot of content to rive free traffic. Plus, you can’t scale up like with paid marketing. You’re not as in control of the flow of traffic with organic content and one day you might get a lot of traffic, the next day it might be only a trickle, or nothing! The good news about organic marketing is that it’s free! So it’s worth sticking with an organic marketing strategy for some time to see the benefits of this strategy.
For more on this topic see PPC vs organic marketing.
To find affiliate marketing coaches and mentors visit affiliatemarketingcoaches.com