In part one of this 2-part series on how to write an ebook and make money, I discussed the basic steps to become a successful book writer and/or author on the internet. In today’s blog post, I’ll continue with the discussion on how to write your ebook and take it to the bank in a matter of days.
Step
#9: Price Your Ebook
First, ebook pricing is a
function of many factors which I’ll briefly look into. In pricing your ebook, you’ve
to consider your expertise and credibility with your target audience,
demography and purchasing power of your target readers, and niche
responsiveness to similar books on sale, etc.
If you own a blog and you’ve been
regularly publishing content on it while focusing on your ebook topic, you
should have an inkling of the topic’s popularity and how to price an ebook
based on the information available to you. I’ve had situations where my readers
ask me to write an ebook on a particular topic instead of them frantically trying
to glean pieces of information here and there on the internet.
In this case, I can quickly whip
up a book in a day or two as a freebie around this topic and use it to start
building an email list for an ebook launch somewhere down the road. From there,
I’ll be able to use questionnaire to elicit an average price my list members
would be willing to pay.
But you’ve to be flexible in your
pricing by testing various price points and know what the optimal best price is.
This is where your sales volume bumps because it’s affordable to a larger
number of your target niche market.
Also, you can price your ebook
based on industry or competitors’ pricing. For example, if you’re self-publishing
on Amazon KDP, the most popular price ranges are between $0.99 and $9.99.
You’ll earn higher royalties when you price your ebook between $4.99 and $9.99.
What is the most important is the
perceived value of the book you’re selling. This can be measured by the unique
information and angle you’re providing your solutions from or by the content in
the ebook and/or complementary bonuses you’re adding to the main digital
product on sale.
Step
#10: Set Up Your Sales, Order, Thank You and Download Pages
At this level, you want to set up
your sales, order, thank you and download pages so that buyers can pay with
their credit card and be able to download a copy of your digital product. If
you’re using self-hosted WordPress blog platform, there are e-commerce plugins you
can install to complete this task effortlessly and seamlessly.
But if you’re using HTML landing
page template to sell ebooks on your own website, you may have to set up things
manually. To this end, you’ve to create a separate folder in the root directory
of your web hosting servers to house your digital content when you upload the ebook
for sale as well as the sales page, order page, thank you page and download
page.
However, make sure you exclude
this folder from being indexed by Google or other search engines in the
robots.txt file.
For you to do this successfully, you’ve
to register a domain name and buy website hosting from a reliable web hosting
company. Also, having a web host that supports WordPress hosting will enable
you to set up things yourself without hiring any web designer or freelancer.
I’ll recommend HostGator web
hosting for you if you don’t have a website hosting services yet. They are
affordable and reliable with an excellent support service. Click this link to purchase web hosting from
HostGator and get in touch with me for my premium blogging guide which will
help you to start a blog and make money in a matter of weeks. It’s a blogging
course you cannot afford to miss if you want to start a blog and make money
blogging.
Step
#11: Promote Your Ebook
Ebook promotion is where the
success or failure of selling your ebook really lies. Ebook marketing is
something you’ve to do consistently using variety of digital marketing
strategies. Some of the best ways to promote your ebook is through blogging, content
marketing, social media marketing, list building, just to mention a few.
You’re not going to look salesy
as you constantly engage with your target readers with high quality content. As
a matter of fact, your goal is to systematically take your readers through the
buyer’s journey and close the sale in the end. And whoever is satisfied with
the purchase will even become your evangelist to others who may have a need for
your ebook.
If you’ve integrated deep on-page
SEO (search engine optimization) in your blogging strategy and deliberately
target low-competition long tail keywords, you should be able to rank on SERP
(search engine results page) and get free targeted traffic consistently from
search engines such as Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com.
You can also use social media
marketing to engage your prospects and leads by creating accounts with social
media channels like LinkedIn.com, Facebook.com, Instagram.com, Pinterest.com, and
X.com (formerly Twitter.com) which are the major platforms you should target.
Social media marketing is a potent way to get targeted website visitors who are
willing to act.
This is a very effective strategy
if you’re able to set up an email marketing system on a specific landing page
on your blog website to collect leads as you direct them from your social media
accounts to your website.
Step
#12: Set Up an Email Marketing Software, Affiliate Program or Joint Venture (JV)
For you not to feel overwhelmed
at the beginning, it’s in your best interest to create an email marketing
system using a reliable autoresponder software like GetResponse.com email marketing software.
It will enable you to start
building an email list of subscribers from scratch as quickly as possible. Having
a list of at least 100 subscribers who are highly targeted can go a long way to
earn passive income online for you, month after month.
Statistics have it that email marketing is worth an average of $40 ROI (return
on investment) for every dollar spent. This is to show you how important it is
to build an email list of subscribers early enough for your ebook marketing success.
If you don’t create a sales funnel to offer gift like free PDF ebook, video,
email course, etc, you’ll continue to struggle to make money on the internet.
As soon as you start building an email
list, the next task is to consistently nurture your leads by drip feeding your
list members from your email marketing campaigns with unique, high-quality, shareable
and linkable content.
Setting up an affiliate program
is fast and easy if you go with affiliate programs networks like Clickbank.com,
Impact.com, CJ.com, etc. However, the digital product you’re selling will
determine the affiliate network you decide to sign up with. But I know that Clickbank.com
is popular for digital products downloads such as electronic books and training
videos.
As for joint ventures, you’ve to
scout and research the internet to know JV partners you should make proposals
to. However, having internet marketing clout and influence will make it easy
for you to strike a deal. This is why building trust and credibility early
enough on the World Wide Web are paramount to your success.
Step
#13: Track and Analyze Your Traffic Metrics
The good news about every online
business startup is that you can track and measure data such as sources of
website traffic, volume of website visitors, search queries used to find
specific web pages on your site, and so on.
And with the free Google
Analytics and Google Search Console, you’re good to go without spending a dime
to track, measure and improve on your website activities including content
marketing.
Step
#14: Make Money Selling Ebooks
If you’ve properly set up your sales
order page to receive payments, you can start promoting your ebook to your
target market as soon as possible. The best way to do this is to follow the
ordering process yourself and be sure there is no hitch or glitch in the
payment system.
With PayPal payment system, you
can easily test this out and refund yourself.
Step
#15: Scale, Rinse and Repeat in Other Niches
Writing and selling ebooks online
is straightforward after the first attempt. You don’t have to fret over it at
all. As a beginning ebook author, I was able to hit the ground running then and
I’m happy I got myself started without the bell and whistle of mega launches
you hear about online.
If you want to make $1000 a month online with certainty, simply
sit down and dedicate few hours per day to learn how to write an ebook and sell
it online. You’ll be glad you did!
As you can see, that is all to
ebook writing and making money online from your side hustles. I want to read
your comments, ask me questions and tell me specific topics you want me to
write about. I’ll be glad to do that for my community of like minds. To your
success!
