I wrote an E-Book, Now What?

I will love to get the course on Affiliate marketing.

Thanks

Mark Irabor

Sorry about that ..maybe its because I am a new member but on the lower right, I only have Quote, Multiquote, and Quick Reply Buttons

Hey Craig,

It's great that you have the content done. The bulk of the work is ahead of you, but at least now you have the possibility of reaching certain milestones (such as your first sale). You may be tempted to outsource everything, but if you don't much experience in article/email marketing, you probably want to keep hold of the reigns for now.

Winebuddy's advice is solid. Let me just give you an alternative that is NOT better that Wine's advice. It just reflects my first ebook selling experience, before I'd even heard of the WF.

I sold my first ebooks on a free Blogspot blog. I made an ebook cover in MS Word and got an e-Junkie account to deliver the PDF. Most people found their way there via articles on Ezine and other article sites. I had no capture page, no email marketing, and no freebie. I started making money surprisingly fast.

More importantly, I learned that my ebook would actually sell.

So, if you came to me tonight and said, "I want to see sales of my ebooks this week!" this is what I'd do:

1) Turn that ebook into a PDF if you haven't already, and make a quick ebook cover

2) Get a $5/month account on e-Junkie (free trial available) to deliver the book (this is optional -- you can also just make a thank you page with the file)

3) Decide the price and throw up a sales page (on a free blog if you have to)

4) Write a few articles (skip Ezine if you don't want to wait for them to approve), and comment on articles and blogs with the link to your awesome ebook. A helpful, non-spammy comment on a highly-ranked blog can bring a lot of traffic.

5) If your ebook truly is awesome, do what I did and embed the table of contents and first chapter into the sales page. If they want to continue reading, they know what to do.

If your copy is good and your book offers great value, you will get buyers. After you set that up, you can work on Clickbank, email campaign, etc., and eventually redirect existing traffic to your new, improved operation. Personally, I only started sinking money into it when I saw that it was indeed profitable.

One quick example to drive it home: My brother came up with an idea for a very short ebook (6 pages) concerning an Apple product. He wrote it up, I turned it into a PDF and put it up for sale (via e-Junkie) on a free blog for $4.95. I wrote one article, commented on a couple blogs, and later I built some backlinks to get organic traffic: The whole operation took just a few hours. It started selling within a week, and it will continue to sell until that Apple product becomes obsolete.

I'm not necessarily recommending that you follow this path. In fact, I'm developing a new ebook right now (unlike my first few, this one is almost completely outsourced), and I'm doing it more in-line with Winebuddy's advice! His advice is great for a long-term outlook. The way I described is good if you'd like to see some immediate results to inspire you (and finance you) as you develop it into something big.

edit: Sorry for the novel here

You've already had some good advice here. Also consider combining winebuddy's approach with some cheap PPC.

For instance, if you set up an opt-in, you could design it so that it would rank well with Adwords and obtain some cheap traffic to your opt-in page. That will also give you some quick results and enable you to test different pages for conversion.

You could promote your free giveaway, which would appeal to visitors as they respond better to a free sample than to a sales pitch.

Getting them onto your list also enables you to create trust with the new subscriber which, in turn, makes them more responsive to your pre-sell emails and your sales page.

As well, some PPC traffic could be sent direct to the sales page so that you could test it's conversion rate, as well as giving you a basis for comparing sales that come through your email messages.

This would get things moving while you are waiting for SEO and article traffic to build momentum.

I also suggest giving serious thought to your keyword research. You will need this for your articles, as well as for any PPC promotions. Selecting the right keywords is essential, otherwise it can be a waste of time and money. There are any number of threads on the forum which will give more advice on this aspect of promotion.

Ivan

I've written and sold a number of e-books before (as well as a few software applications, although I got out of programming a number of years ago). I love it.

I have found that it's important to have a unique URL for each of your products, unless they are very closely related in topic... and, even then, it might help if your long tail keyword is part of the URL.

The advice from both Winebuddy and Freeman's posts is solid, and can be used very successfully to sell not only e-books, but lots of things. For inexpensive e-books, I tend to lean toward the easier approach that Freeman mentioned: Article Marketing, Web 2.0 Backlinking, Link Wheels, etc.

Email lists are powerful and autoresponders are amazing, but article marketing and other linking strategies keep working for you day-in and day-out. It never sleeps, it never gets sick and never takes vacation. I tend to associate a barrage of autoresponder e-mails essential for BIG ticket items and hard-to-sell products. Inexpensive e-books, reports and mini-e-courses, on the other hand, don't necessarily need multiple touches to sell.

Commenting on blogs and in forums is also a very powerful approach. As long as the information you provide in the blogs is helpful and on-topic you should get some very targeted traffic. The nice thing is that your posts will be spidered, indexed and will continue to "sell" your book for a long time.

I've never heard of e-junkie before today. I usually just use Payloadz. They make it all amazingly simple. They only take a small percentage for processing the credit card payment, and they dump the rest in your Paypal account. They don't charge a monthly fee. They only charge you a small percentage if you sell a book... otherwise, you don't pay a dime.

Affiliate marketing is something that I have yet to explore... but, the idea is very interesting.

Have a quick look around for Adwords coupons as an example. My webhost has $50 vouchers available for all new Adwords customers. It's a good way to put your toe in the PPC waters without too much investment.

PS When I used the $50 voucher, it came up as $75 in Adwords, but I did need to put in $10 of real money for activation.

For inexpensive wordpress themes check out templatemonster.com.

Good luck, Ed.

Great list Chris.

Not forgetting pre-launch promotion for affiliates. If you can recruit a hungry and enthusiastic army of affiliates then you will benefit dramatically.

Garry.