How To Make $12,246 in a Day, Part Three: Selling Your Ebook

Hi again!

OK, so you’ve decided you’ve got a market and you’ve written an ebook. This is normally where the writer of the post would be all “good for you, what a tremendous accomplishment, pat yourself on the back”, but that’s not how I roll. There may be some esoteric benefit to writing an a novel and not selling it, but the same doesn’t apply to ebooks.

The only thing more lame than a book languishing in your drawer is an ebook languishing on your hard drive. Let’s face it, you could write the next Gatsby but if you can’t sell it, you stay poor.

There are two and a half parts to selling this bad boy. One, your landing page. This is where you send people when you want them to buy. Two, your promotional efforts and affiliate program. Two and a half is your pricing.

Michael Martine mentioned in the comments section of a previous post in this series that there was another way to sell ebooks, and that’s through paid search. He raises a good point and I’ll address it here. While there are other companies in the paid search game, we really mean Google AdWords because they are by far the biggest fish in the pond. AdWords are the results you see on the right or at the top when you Google something. They’re called “sponsored listings”.

You can make a hell of a lot of money selling downloadable products through paid search but I’m not going to teach you how. There are a few reasons for this:

One, it’s pretty hard. If you don’t write good copy, and “good” in this case is not the kind of good you’re used to, you’ll fail.

Two, it takes a while. Theoretically you could be selling by this afternoon. Practically, not so much. The learning curve is steep. You have to run split tests to see which ad copy converts to better sales. You have to monitor your progress. Generally speaking, this is not a short process.

Three, you have to pay for every click while you’re busy learning your ass from your elbow. If your ad copy is fantastic, everybody and their mama will click, but what if they’re not in buying mode? What if your landing page isn’t consistent with the ad copy? What if you’ve targeted the wrong keywords? It’s not a process I’d recommend for n00bs.

Now that we have that out of the way, I’ll get to the other stuff.

Creating a landing page for your ebook.

Landing pages strike fear in the hearts of most people. They’re scary. (This benefits me tremendously because I charge $1000 a pop to write them, but that doesn’t impact you in the slightest.) But honestly, they’re not as hard as people make them out to be.

There are only three things you need to put in your landing page:

1. Tell them what you’re selling. (John Carlton, internet marketer extraordinaire, calls this “Here’s what I got.”)

2. Tell them what it will do for them. (“Here’s what it’ll give ya.”)

3. Tell them their next step. (“Here’s what I want you to do next.”)

Frank Kern, another internet marketing millionaire, actually uses the phrases that I’ve put in quotes as headings on his pages. It’s seriously that simple.

“Here’s what I got.”

This is where you outline the very specific and very basic features of what you’re selling. To give you an example, Havi Brooks and I are doing a home learning course in September for people who suck at or are afraid of marketing, cold calling and sales. My sales copy for the “here’s what I got” portion will look something like this:

“Havi Brooks and Naomi Dunford have gotten together to create an telecourse about how to stop your personal issues from getting in the way of making your sale. You’ll learn everything from how to stop feeling guilty about charging for your stuff to what to do if you’re wildly successful. This is for people who are afraid that selling means selling out, or that they’ll get laughed off the internet because everyone will know they’re a fraud.”

(Granted, this was off the top of my head because I am a procrastinator and haven’t actually written the copy yet. Sorry, Havi. I suck. I’ll do it, I swear.)

All you’re doing at this point is introducing what you’re selling. You’re not going into how long your book is (or in our case, how long the lessons are), you’re not selling your qualifications, you’re not making it complicated.

The real purpose of this step is separating people into groups — those who want or need what you’re selling and those who don’t. That’s all. People who are deaf will not want this product because it is delivered by audio. People who do not have budding businesses will not want this product. People who do not speak English will not want this product. People who are selling just fine thankyouverymuch will not want this product.

All you’re doing here is setting the stage so you don’t piss people off by wasting their time.

“Here’s what it’ll give ya.”

This is where you do the actual selling. I’m not going to hit this too hard because I’ve written a lot about how to sell stuff in the past, but here are some tips:

1. Sell benefits, not features. (Read Features vs. Benefits, the Showdown for an in-depth discussion on this.) Do not tell them what you’re bringing to the table, tell them what they will take away from the table. This is probably the most important part of this entire post.

2. Be extremely clear who this book is for. This one always makes me laugh because people freak out. The more specific you are, the more sales you will make. Nobody believes this, but it’s true. This is for three reasons. One, if you’re honest about your audience, people will trust you more than if you’re all, “Everybody in the Western world needs this product!” Two, the people who you DID write it for will actually know that, instead of thinking it’s more general than it is. Three, people always want what you tell them they shouldn’t have.

3. Figure out what the hell you’re selling. Go read Are You Selling Love Or Money? before you really get into this step, cause it’ll help. You don’t have to read it now, but come and read it before you write your actual landing page. Basically, what you need to know is that there are only two things you can sell: money, and love, or other intense and positive human emotions.

(Rant: People will say you can sell time but they’re wrong. Selling time is selling money or selling all the fun and wonderful shit you can do with your time. Money or love, dudes.)

When you’re writing your landing page copy, zero in on exactly what your readers will get out of the experience. Your product can make or save them money. Your product can make them feel wonderful. Choose.

4. Do not beg for the sale.

5. Do not guilt your readers into the sale. (This is not the place for “you’ve been reading all this shit for free and now don’t you think you should pony up the cash?” Actually, nowhere is the place for that, now that I think of it.)

6. Use numbers. See the title of this post? Not a mistake, dudes. Use number wherever you can. Seriously. Numbers, numbers, numbers. I cannot stress this enough. (This also works with resume writing, by the way.)

How much money do they save? How many people are killed in preventable lawnmower accidents each year in the United States alone? How many buyers are there under the age of 30? Whatever, just hit them with numbers.

”Here’s what I want you to do next.

Do not overthink this step. Just tell them what they have to do to buy your product. The more wordy and lame this is, the more people think you’re afraid of your own product.

Other notes on landing pages:

* In a perfect world, your landing page should have it’s own URL, and it should not link back to your own website. The reasoning here is that you will make more sales if the reader only has one option, and that option is to buy. The more shit they can click on, the more places they can go that don’t involve them whipping out the Visa. I didn’t do this because I was lazy and on deadline, but it’s not a bad idea.

* Some people like to have a link at the top of the page which says something like, “Want to just skip to the price before you read all this? Sure!” It’s a nice touch, and it brings a human element to the whole nasty process.

* Unless you are extremely exclusive — and if you’re voluntarily reading this, you’re not — the more expensive your book, the longer your sales page should be.

* If long landing pages make you feel dirty, think of it like this. The objective of the landing page is to very kindly remove any objections to the sale. (What if it’s too short? What if it doesn’t cover blahblahblah? What if there’s no refund policy?) People are terrified that you will take their money and screw them. You need to prove to them that you won’t, and it takes as long as it takes.

Remove the most common objections at the top and work your way down to the weird shit. The exception to this rule is the refund policy. Everybody wants to know if you have it but you have to put it last. If you bring it up sooner, people start thinking about returning the book before they’ve even thought about buying the book. Not good for sales.

* Testimonials are good. Use real quotes from real people, preferably with real websites. If they don’t have websites, give them last names and hometowns or even ages. Make them living, breathing human beings in the minds of your readers.

(If you go with websites, link their URLs unless you’re using a separate landing page. If you’re going with a separate landing page, don’t do this because you don’t want them clicking anything but “buy”.)

Promotions and Affiliate Programs for your Ebook

I’m not going to hit this topic too hard because there’s not a lot of room for discussion, and I’m tired and I’ve had a migraine for two days. If you’ve made some decent connections, created a decent product and written a good landing page, the rest is pretty fucking easy, frankly.

You need an affiliate program.

There are only two possible reasons to not have an affiliate program and they both suck.

1. Your margins are so low that you can’t afford to give a share to your affiliates. This means your margins are too low. Period.

2. You have reason to believe that your own readers are more likely to buy on someone else’s recommendation than your own. This means your readers hate you. Some will buy because another person’s recommendation tips them over the edge but if your readers would rather buy your book after reading what someone else says about it than buy it after reading what YOU say about it, you have a problem that no blog post can solve.

If your product is an ebook, your affiliate payout should be 50%. If your product has higher production costs — audio, for example — you can get away with slightly lower. It’s industry standard and nobody’s going to bust their ass selling your shit for you for 10%. They’re just not.

You may decide to go with a private affiliate program before releasing it to the public. This is a nice thing to do sometimes because you can choose who’s whoring your stuff. You can do favors for people who you like. You can give an exclusive deal to bigger bloggers. You can control what people say because you already know them.

With SEO School, I gave my private affiliates a two week head start and then released the program to the public. There was no logic in this choice other than it seemed like the right thing to do.

There are a lot of companies that will handle your affiliate payouts for you. I went with E-Junkie because they were cheap and relatively low stress. I’m sure there are others but I don’t know much about them. (If I’m totally honest, I really went with E-Junkie because Dave Navarro told me to and he’s been doing this a lot longer than I have.)

A few things about affiliate programs:

* You’ll want to create a few banners your affiliates can choose from to use in their advertising slots. Unless you’re a graphic designer, pay someone to do these for you. I used Selene from iDesign. Men with Pens also do some awesome ones.

* Affiliates will use their own link to buy the book at a discount. It doesn’t happen a lot, and it’s not worth the administrative hassle of trying to stop them.

* If you’re contacting people directly to see if they want to be an affiliate for your product, send it to them free in the initial email. Don’t be a cheap ass about this.

How to price your ebook.

Here’s a little secret: All pricing on the internet is 100% arbitrary. Do not overthink your pricing. It’s a waste of time and energy.

Here are some things to think about when it comes to pricing:

* Consider spending caps. Some people have a mental limit of what they can spend without really putting much thought into it. Fifty bucks is common, as is thirty. Ask people you know what they could spend on an ebook they wanted without thinking too hard about it. It’ll give you a gauge.

* Figure out your personal comfort zone. Brian Clark said I should’ve doubled the price of my book, but that was outside what I felt comfortable with for a 52 page document. If you feel weird about your price, your lack of confidence will show through and you will lose sales because of it.

* People often mistrust cheap stuff. If it’s really cheap, you might as well make it free and get the PR benefit. Kind of like this series.

* You have to have enough reasoning IN YOUR OWN HEAD to defend your price point. This does not mean you will defend it — you just have to know in your heart that you’re not ripping people off. Do not defend. Do not negotiate. Your price point is not up for discussion.

* No matter what you charge, people will bitch.

* At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you charge because if you do enough of a sales job, people will buy it.

* When all else fails, charge the same price as a hardcover.

Tomorrow, we finish the whole thing off with all the random crap I forgot to mention in the other posts. See you then!

By Naomi Dunford - 21 Comments