How to Make $12,246 in a Day*, Part One: Finding and Wooing the Market for your Ebook

*This is actually how I made $12,246 in a day. You might make more. You might not.

So you want to write an ebook. Wicked. There’s money to be made in ebooks and unless you’re in internet marketing, the market is nowhere near saturated. With 1.4 billion people using the internet regularly, there’s a pretty good chance at least a few of them want to buy whatever crap you want to sell. So let’s get started, shall we?

There are people out there who believe that the first step in selling an ebook is writing an ebook. Those people are wrong.

The first step in selling an ebook is finding people to buy it.

Sound backward? It’s not.

Writing an ebook is at best time consuming and at worst incredibly difficult. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like doing incredibly difficult and/or time consuming things for no good reason. I have to know that there are people who want to buy what I’m selling before I put pen to paper.

Therefore, there are two parts to this lesson. First I’ll teach you how to tell if the people are there. Then I’ll teach you how to get those people to find, know and love you. Easy, huh?

1.) Analyzing The Market For Your Ebook

There are a few ways you can see if people need what you’re thinking of selling. This is no great or in-depth process, it’s just some digging around.

Check ClickBank for products in your niche.

ClickBank is where information product makers go to hawk their wares to potential affiliates. (Affiliates are the people who sell your crap for you on a commission basis.) Go to ClickBank and click on Marketplace, which should be in the top right corner. That’ll bring you to a search page. Enter a few relevant keywords, things people might search for if they were looking for what you sell. See anything come up? There’s a good chance there’s a market there. See nothing there? Try other keywords, and if you still don’t find anything, just move onto the next step.

Check Google for products in your niche.

Go to Google and do the same thing. Search for basic keywords associated with whatever it is you’re thinking of selling. Try to be product focused, not topic focused. If you’re thinking of selling a knitting ebook, search for “knitting ebook”, not just “knitting”. We already know people are interested in knitting. You certainly are, or you wouldn’t be writing a book about it. We want to know if they’re interested enough to put their money where their mouths are. (You can also try “knitting book” if ebooks are a newish phenomenon in your industry.)

Keep in mind, with both Clickbank and Google, we’re looking for products in your NICHE, not on your topic. Niche = knitting ebook. Topic = ebook on how to knit baby hats.

Find out if people are already selling something on your topic.

Contrary to popular opinion, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. When I wrote SEO School, Aaron Wall had already done a very good job of writing and selling SEO Book. But it was long and expensive and extremely detailed. (It’s also off the market.) I didn’t want long and expensive and extremely detailed. I wanted short and easy and about the same price as a hardcover.

If there are current products on the market that resemble what you’re thinking of selling, figure out why yours is going to be better for a certain demographic. (It doesn’t have to be better, period. It just has to be better for a certain group of people.) Is yours cheaper? Easier? Funnier? Is the other product out there but no-one knows about it? This is basically an analysis of your unique selling proposition.

Find out about free competition.

When I wrote SEO School, I got some people telling me that what I’d written was already available for free from other sources. Of course this is true. I challenge you to find me anything that isn’t available somewhere for free. (Um, libraries? Hello?) What you’re trying to find out is if it is available EASILY.

For example, let’s say I want to write an ebook about time management. (HAHAHAHA!) And let’s say that a huge portion of my readers also read Rock Your Day. If I try to sell my readers on a time management book, and if those readers had brains in their heads, they would say, “But Naomi, I can head on over to the Dave and get that shit for free.”

On the other hand, the information in SEO School is hard to get your hands on. It’s free, yes — how the hell do you think I learned it? — but it’s a bitch. By synthesizing it for my readers, I made the cover price cheaper than the time it would have taken to research it themselves. There’s nothing wrong with free competition, but you have to give people a reason to pay for your product.

Consider if people actually need it.

Probably the most important thing to consider is whether or not your readers need what you’re selling. While people have succeeded in selling things that are not necessary, it doesn’t happen a lot with product downloads. You’d have one hell of an uphill climb ahead of you.

The single most valuable resource on this topic is (and don’t you DARE click this link until I explain) Desperate Buyers Only by Alexis Dawes. I have to warn you, her sales page leaves something to be desired. I’m not a fan of the yellow highlighting, and I think we can all live without the eighty million screenshots of how much money she makes.

(And I quote, directly from the sales page: “Sometimes my sites are ugly - this one surely ain’t winning any design awards. Sometimes my grammar is bad. I only use the spellcheck when I remember.” Um, yeah. My personal favorite was when she meant to say “assess” and said “asses” instead. Not joking.)

BUT, it’s very valuable. It helps you learn to evaluate a niche, and it helps you to know what your competition is doing. She mentioned one potential sales venue that I hadn’t even thought of which made me about a thousand bucks. That more than made up for the $77 I paid for it, although to be honest with you, when I saw the sales page, I was mighty happy she had a 60 day money back guarantee because I had some pretty damn serious reservations.

Are These People BUYERS?

This is the part that most people forget. There are a lot of schnauzers in this country, and they are all very interested in how to smell the asses of other schnauzers, and there is NO competition in the market, but not one of them has a dime to spend on an ebook. If they don’t have any money, they’re not buying. End of discussion. The AVERAGE buyer in your demographic needs to have enough disposable income to buy your product and not even feel it. There will be exceptions, and there will be people who have to scrimp and save to buy what you’re selling, but in general, they have to have the fifty bucks or whatever.

2.) Finding and Wooing the E-Book Buyers

I’ll go against all of my Sleazy Marketer instincts and give you the most important part of this section upfront.

Finding specific, individual buyers should happen far in advance of your product going on sale.

For your purposes, the first interaction between you and another human being should NEVER involve you trying to sell them something. Yes, you CAN do it on the first date, and yes, you CAN make money from it, but it’s really hard and the learning curve is steep. You want to sell to the people who already lurve you.

For maximum return on investment, the best combination of ease of application and zero outlay of funds is blogging. (Microblogging can work, but it’s too new to call.) We will therefore assume that you either have a blog, or you’re willing to create one.

Tips for using your blog as a sales platform:

1. Your blog should relate to the topic of your ebook, even if only experientially. If you want to write an ebook about how to move to the UK, your blog should be about being an expat somehow. It doesn’t have to be Expats R Us, but the release of your ebook should NOT make your readers say, “Gee, I didn’t know they did that!”

1.1. If you’re writing an ebook on a topic that is totally different from your current blog and starting a new blog is too much of a pain in the ass, you have one reasonable option. Your best bet is to rewrite your “About” page to incorporate your knowledge on the ebook topic and tell everyone that you’ve done so. Fix the page, then write a post telling everybody to come check it out. If you suck at writing that kind of stuff, hire Men with Pens to do it for you. (Note: Your revamped About page is NOT the place to tell them you’re writing a book. Telling them you’re a black belt knitting master is sufficient.)

2. Guest post on blogs related to the topic of your ebook, not necessarily on the topic of your blog itself. For example, Chris Guillebeau writes The Art of Nonconformity. (Unconventional strategies for life, work, and travel.) His ebook is about finding discount airfares and generally making travel less shitty. If he were guest posting, he’d want to put his efforts into not only blogs like his own, but also on, say personal finance or frugal living blogs.

Don’t only do your niche. Do one step beyond, or away from, your niche.

3. Comment. Commenting is the single most underutilized networking activity I know. Comment, comment, comment. (Caroline Middlebrook likes commenting so much she’s written a blog post about creating a commenting strategy. Seriously, read it. It will blow your mind.)

4. Twitter. Twitter is a salesperson’s dream come true. Whether you’re active on Twitter or not, take a large chunk of time to mess around. See who other people are following. You’ll be amazed who you meet.

A few notes on Twitter…

Bigger bloggers generally have their new follower notifications turned off, which means that the original idea that people would follow you if you followed them is not necessarily still true. They probably don’t even know you followed them. If you want to get someone’s attention and your follow didn’t work, tweet to them directly using their username, @ittybiz for example. If it were me, I’d tweet them publicly instead of Direct Messaging them. Then again, my settings have DMs go to my inbox and just plain tweets don’t.

Also, you may not want to follow too many people all at once. Give them some time to follow you back so you don’t look like a total loser. If you’re following 1000 people and only 50 are following you, it appears to the general public like you’re not worth following. Try to keep your ratio from getting too skewed in that direction.

5. Forums. If you are not involved in forums you will not believe me when I tell you the difference they will make in your business. (Believe it or not, not everybody has a blog. Shocking, I know.) Like with guest posting, though, don’t only hang out with people just like you. Selling your Beginner’s Guide to Making Your Own Christmas Presents to a forum full of experienced crafters results in zero sales. Selling the same guide to a forum full of frugal moms results in lots of sales.

That’s it for today. Come back tomorrow for How To Write Your Ebook.

By Naomi Dunford - 30 Comments