Three things I’d like to add:

1) Watch out for piracy
If your ebook becomes moderately popular, people are going to upload it to bit torrent and other shifty sharing sites.

Luckily, I was prepared for this from day 1, but it was still a big problem for me — someone paid for my ebook and uploaded it to a shady site while I was sleeping. It was downloaded over 600 times before I put a stop to it. I found out who was responsible and sent an artfully-phrased email telling them not to be such a wazzock in future. Everything’s been resolved now, but it’s something others should look out for.

The best way to catch it is to set up a Google Alert for your ebook’s filename, including the .pdf extension. If you’re then alerted to the book’s release in the wild, go to the site in question and find their “copyright” policy, which will normally be linked to from the page footer. They all have a step-by-step guide to proving ownership of a copyrighted product and having all future uploads disabled, and all of them have worked for me so far, even if it took 3 days sometimes.

If anyone needs help with this, please email me and I’ll help you out for free. I’d hate to think anyone would lose out because they’re not sure how to stamp down on it.

2) Find out where your sales are coming from
This is especially important to do before you start advertising. How you do it depends on what traffic analysis tool you’re using and who’s supplying your checkout/download process.

With e-junkie, I coded a short piece of PHP that adds the referrer (the address of the site who sent you the customer) onto the shopping cart buttons. This gets stored in the e-junkie sales database, and I review it once a month when I’m deciding whether or not to renew paid ads. If other e-junkie users are interested, email me and I’ll be happy to help with this.

3) Calculate your conversion rate
This is as simple as measuring the traffic to your product page (I use Google Analytics) and comparing it to the number of people who bought your ebook. 100 visitors in a day? 3 sales? Your conversion rate is 3%. Obviously you should take an average over a month or so.

If you know that about 3% of visitors to your ebook’s minisite will show you the money, you now have an actionable formula for making cash. Let’s say you want to make $1000 this week and you get $20 net from each book sale. You just have to do this:

1) $1000/$20 = 50 book sales required per week
2) 50/3 x 100 = 1668 visitors required per week
3) 1668/7 days = 239 visitors required per day

Voila! All you have to do to make $1000 this week is to get 239 new people to visit your site every day. You can buy that traffic, or get it from affiliates (adjusting the net profit in your calc above), or drive it from a site you own, but you now have an actionable figure to work with. I’ve been doing this for the past 6 months (with different figures) and it really works.

If you want to make more money than that, you can either boost your traffic, increase your conversion rate, or put up the price of your ebook. It’s not rocket science, but it’s a massively undervalued idea that’s quite powerful.

I regularly work with people who obsess over their traffic without acting on the results. It’s a shame — if you’re going to waste your life measuring stats, at least use them to make you some vodka dollars.

I love this series. Everyone else in the universe tells you it’s easy so they can sell you something. You, on the other hand, make me feel better for my project only being a moderate train wreck.