Selling Ebooks via email marketing?

Hi

Yep, it still works exactly like that, and is a model I use

There is a lot more competition these days - more people are doing this.

Plus we now have to compete for people's mailboxes - everyone's getting dozens if not hundreds of emails a day.

But the basic principles still absolutely work. Find a niche, develop an ebook, get traffic, get their email addresses and educate them making references to the ebook. And they will buy.

Cheers
Greg

I think the business model you described in the first post is one that can still work.

But here are four additional things to think about, regarding that ...

(i) That isn't how it works out for most people (to put it mildly)

(ii) A lot's going to depend on the person's existing skills, when they start doing it

(iii) There's no detail there (this isn't a criticism, just an observation!), and the truly income-determining factors just about all relate to all that missing "detail"

(iv) In my opinion, it's far easier and safer and better, for most people, most of the time, to do that as an affiliate than as a product creator and vendor - and here are just ten of my main reasons for saying that.

I prefer to stay away from them, myself.

I think "enthusiasts' niches" are much better, in the long run, than "problem-solving niches".

I know all those awful "guidebooks" tell you to "find something that solves people's problems and sell it to them", but it seems to me that they haven't quite thought it through.

Once you've built your subscriber-list, established your credibility, formed your subscriber-relationships, and all the other basic, essential things you need to do to make marketing worthwhile, you're then going to promote your first product to each subscriber, according to the number of days for which s/he's been a subscriber and autoresponder emails s/he's already received from you (assuming that you have the sense to wait until then, and not lose most of the potential customers by promoting too early, as many people do!). A proportion of them will buy it.

At this stage, "in problem-solving niches", looking at it in very simple terms only, one of two things happens.

Either they like it, they think it's great and it solves their problem (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because they don't need to buy anything else, so you've just lost most of your potential future income) ...

Or they don't like it, they don't think it's great and it doesn't really solve their problem, (the result is that you can't sell them anything else because you recommended a bad product, from their perspective, and blew your credibility, and they don't trust you any more).

Not a great outcome for you, either way.

In "enthusiasts' niches", people gradually buy more and more and more, to feed their enthusiasm, so you don't have that problem to anything like the same extent. (Having bought expensive things from this summer's Louboutin collection won't stop me from enthusiastically buying more expensive things from their winter collection. That's a better kind of customer, really, isn't it?)

Be aware that for most successful marketers (unlike the extreme and unusual case mentioned in your original post, above), most of the long-term money comes from making repeated sales to the same captive audience (your subscribers - that's why listbuilding is so important!). That's why "enthusiasts' niches" are better than "problem-solving niches", and we're perhaps better off looking at those, rather than at how to solve others' problems.

TL;DR version - with a "problem-solving niche", once you solve someone's problem, they may not still be a customer at all; and once you fail to solve it, they may not be your customer.


.

Sorry if I'm just repeating what I said above, but again, my own belief is that for most people, most of the time, their chances of reaching the "hundreds of thousands" you mention are actually going to be significantly higher as affiliates than as product creators: that demands a far bigger skill set (not to mention the other ten reasons to which I linked, above, of course!).

It's apparently hard enough for perhaps 95%-99% of people to fail at it (depending on whose figures you believe). Of course, some of that's attributable to the fact that they try to do it through product-creation rather than with the increased safety and security of affiliate marketing.

Rather a lot, I suspect.

I've never tried, but it must help? (Or at least, you'd better be perceived as one, and "being one" must surely be one of the ways of making it a little easier to be perceived as one?).

I don't think there can be a simple or universal answer to that question?

It must surely depend on rather a wide range of factors, including the niche, the traffic demographics, the competition, the demand, your style and presentational skills, your credibility, your ability to attract affiliates, your other marketing skills, and so on?

And those immediately obvious necessary skills are probably just the tip of the iceberg, really?

.

Like everything else in internet marketing, it's a learning-curve, and a skill-set, and the people for whom it becomes profitable are those who acquire the requisite skills.

PPC and solo ads are just two of the multiple, different ways of attracting traffic. I don't use either. They may be beneficial to some people (though solo ad traffic opt-ins are typically of low responsivity) but neither is necessary at all, for successful list-building.

.

As Alexa said, making list building profitable takes a certain skillset. It's not rocket science or brain surgery, but it's not exactly "Easy Button" territory, either.

PPC and Solo Ads are both ways to get people to a landing page with an opt-in form for list building. Unless you are extremely dialed in (there's that "skill" thing again), sending ad traffic directly to anything but the most impulse offers is a good way to burn through a big pile of money.