Selling ebooks in 2012?

A lot has changed since 2006, with more people using video on their sales pages and optin form.

It could be that your sales copy needs to be refreshed to represent the current woes of your target market.

With advances in social media, people also want to see who they're dealing with before they buy.

Look at David DeAngelo from Double Your Dating, he does about $20 million a year from his ebook sales. In 2006, he had a simple website with a simple optin form, but even HE has to incorporate video and social media now to keep up with current digital marketing trends.

So my advice would be tweak the sales copy and incorporate more social actions into your website.

Abul

Have you considered converting the long salesletter into a sales video? and test that with the traffic you are currently getting?

agreed. Go visual over contextual.

I would recommend giving something for free to your potential clients and then to sell the main part. They must become interested in your product.

Mate, I can tell you straight, that selling ebooks still makes our clients some profits. Why? They're ordering e-books from us almost on a daily basis. After all, it's not about the length of your sales letter. Potential buyers only want to know what's in it for them if they were to buy your e-book. You should also go where your target buyers are. Market where your buyers are. Do they love to stay on Facebook? Be active on Facebook by posting relevant images and videos. Run a contest. Encourage them to like or share your post. Tickle your audience.

It would help if we could see the site...

I have only one site that sells directly and I sell an ebook. (This year I added an upsell with videos). And years ago the site was a single sales letter style as well. In Jan of this year I totally changed the site to using images and videos. I created a set of videos talking about the book, etc... My order page is still 'kind of' like a sales page, but pretty minimal. (I could probably use some split-testing on that page... I digress...)

The new site, with new opt-in and videos, is making sales still, so use you can still sell ebooks and make money there.

As long as the book's content is still valid and will still benefit your readers, then you are ok. Redesign and update your site, as others have suggested, to what visitors today want to see/read/watch/listen. Good luck!

You can still make money selling ebooks these days. Like someone said above, I'd definitely try a nice video on the homepage and start doing some testing to see if you can convert that traffic into sales.

In regards to your traffic dipping because of the Google update, On page SEO is HUGE right now (it's almost everything, not quite though) so you should also optimize your on page stuff to get your rankings back.

Selling ebooks still works for sure, we are selling more of them now than last year and the year before that.

Given the history you mention in your post, I would...

1. Check to make sure your niche and topic are still in-demand...topics and demand do change over time

2. Check your competition - I have had ebooks that did well in 2005/2006 that are now facing 10X the competition so I've had to tweak them in terms of title, positioning, sales page, etc... to refresh their sales in the face of current competition

3. Your sales page - it may not be that it is long-form (I still have text-only, long-form sales letters that do 2% + conversions), it may be that the design looks like 2006 and the copy just isn't that good...give it a refresh

4. Check your sources of traffic - are they quality sources (affiliates, contextual content, paid) or low quality where visitors are arriving without context and are not targeted very well

Definitely worth updating things to perk up your sales if the topic and niche are still relevant

Jeff