Forum Moderators: buckworks
Searching google provided me with a ton of "spammy" websites...you know, the one page sales-pitch websites that promise you the world for $19.95 or whatever. Quite a few of the sites even claimed that you can make a 6-figure income with ebooks, which is where I needed to question something: If ebooks really do make so much money, why aren't more people doing it? On the other hand, there ARE a lot of websites slinging ebooks, so does that mean they DO make money, or are they like spam - so cheap it really doesn't cost much to produce, and you feel lucky if someone actually buys what you are selling?
And to those of you who sell ebooks and are making $1000 a day (as many an ebook claims) ;), other than PPC search engines, where do you advertise to find people who actually pay $10-$50 to download an ebook?
SiL
Sure, there are a heap of charlatans peddling 'get rich quick' e-books out there, and if you want to join them then I suppose one more won't make a difference. They must be making someone money otherwise I suppose they wouldn't exist. I was reading one today that I had, ahem, downloaded and it was over 200 pages long with the footnote that you could distribute it freely on nearly every page. About 80% of the pages had some sort of affiliate link on them. I actually had to admire the guy for some lateral thinking :) Someone paid to get that information, sent it to all their friends, and it was basically just a bunch of affiliate links making the author money perpetually. Not bad going.
If you really want to get an idea of what to do for content, then think about it from the other angle - what sort of information would you pay for, and how good would it have to be to be worth paying for instead of researching it yourself? Spend a while thinking from the buyers point of view (days, weeks, months even) and you'll be surprised at what you can come up with.
Good luck,
2odd...
So set up a site that discusses, reviews and teaches writing on a particular subject e.g crime, murder mystery, work up a user base, get in touch with hobby authors have them write short stories and articles on their craft. Im sure theyd love to have you ebook their scribblings etc. Dont just limit the site to ebooks, authors need writing supplys, guidance (chat room)etc. So you see the site is expanding already.
Then and only then introduce Ebooks to the site, there must be thousands and thousands of really good authors out there who'd love the (ego boost) chance of writing for your site.
Get out and beat the bushes.
What exactly would I need to do or look into to get one or two ebooks to generate THAT much money? Even 1/2 that would be fine for me. Heck, even 1/4 of that...wow. Are you serious? I always thought it was mostly a scam.
SiL
The trick is to find a niche where you can offer value, the competition isn't too intense, and people are willing to pay to get the info. Which is actually quite a trick! If it was easy, everyone _would_ be doing it :) Don't give up though, you just have to be persistent and thorough in finding what to start.
SiL
1) Discussion forums online and off. Do not spam them, or you'll be worse off. Just include a link or short blurb in your signature.
2) Word of mouth and other organic marketing methods. Other people (not hired) speaking highly of your book and recommending it to others can drive huge numbers of people to you. I know I have done this for conventional book authors because in a couple of my fields there are a few books that are must have's.
3) Ads in Newsletters (online and paper) that deal with your topic.
4) Press Releases to magazines, eZines, newsletters, newspapers, etc. Nothing beats "free" advertising.
5) Content swaps for links. Give a teaser chapter or part of a chapter out to websites in exchange for a link and endorsment for your eBook. Depending on your topic you can probably get them on some high trafic sites because they are always on the lookout for more content. Especially with Adsense becoming so popular. This can also increase the PageRank of your site and improve it's search engine rankings.
These are just five off the top of my head. The key is writing about something that you know and can relate to so that you can fit yourself into your target market. The more highly you are recognized the more you will get people interesting in the eBook. Most of the above is free or very low cost, so you are just out the time if it is not a great success.
And an obvious question I forgot to ask: how do you handle payments for ebooks? Paypal? Credit cards? My main worry is that a lot of people will do chargebacks...you know, pay for it, download it, then say "I never authorized that" and get their money back. I heard if that happens too often, they'll give you bad credit and you'll lose your merchant account.
SiL
More than happy to send you these books so sticky me if you are interested.
Cheers
I'm about to set up an e-book and after much research have decided on Digital Vault which uses PayPal and ClickBank for the payment Gateways. I haven't installed it yet. Has anyone had any experience with this program?
Yes, I know what you're thinking: Everybody will just buy the book and then request a refund and keep the book. You'll have to live with that :(. Just think of it this way: The people who'd do that, would probably otherwise initiate a charge-back. Either way you lose the money, but in case of a charge-back, there may also be a penalty from your bank/merchant account provider. As a bonus, more people may buy the book if you offer a money-back guarantee.
I've seen a few courseware projects being developed at the local university. Like Linux these are largely projects developed first and foremost for internal use by the school. There are some projects spanning multiple universities, much of it is being developed under licenses like the GPL.
Collaborative writing efforts generally resist the idea of anyone person taking all of the profits from the writing; so there is a good chance that we will someday see a lot of it distributed on the internet free of charge.
Reselling: big waste of time. If you have the exact same thing as everyone else, all you can do is cut the price, which is what everyone else does, which means very quickly the product is worthless.
Payment: I use paypal and have very few problems. Occasionally someone will complain they don't like/can't use it, but then they can send me a check. Eventually I will get around to setting up a shopping cart, but I'm in no rush.
Returns: everyone is always afraid of this, but the truth is it doesn't happen that much, if you provide a wothwhile product. Most people are not out to screw you, but if you are selling crap, obvioulsy they are going to be unhappy. I also send a CDROM, as opposed to download only, so the buyer, if they want to return it, needs to be a little more motivated than simply emailing a refund request. But I honor every one that comes, and always ask why so hopefully I can improve over time.
Theft: This can be a problem, especially with download only products. I have caught one person on ebay trying to resell my products, but so far have been able to keep it under control. Uniqueness again is a big help here, so they can't just change the title of your work and pass it off as their own. But worrying about this is not a reason not to give this product type a try.
I decided that am going to do an ebook on real estate. Are there any guidelines as to how long the ebook should be? I want to sell it for $49.95 to start, and so far it is 14 pages long. I am detailing my own personal experiences, and I anticipate the final product to contain at least 30+ typed pages or so. Should the price of an ebook be proportional to how long it is, assuming the content is quality oriented and not just "fluff"?
I am sure I'll see my book on ebay; what can I do to prevent this or stop people from doing that? I want the final version to be in PDF, but is there a better format that is more secure or harder to edit?
SiL
Ebook length is much less important than the value offered-a 10 page ebook that reliably offered a way to make $1000 a month is worth more (assuming it works :) than a 200 page book on trimming nose hair.
Don't worry about length- just make sure that whatever you are offering is the solution to a problem people have. How to buy a home with no money and no credit is a problem people have- a story about how you bought a house is pretty boring and doesn't help people with their problems.
Clickbank charges a big chunk of money for being part of their program, so make sure you can really get affiliates if you decide to use their service. Just because you sign up there doesn't mean suddenly people will start pushing your product- you have to find affiliates and get them motivated yourself. There are 10000 products on clickbank and 98% of them have 0 affiliates in my experience.
The warrior forum is full of hopeful net entrepreneurs, but that doesn't mean they are idiots who will sell anything put in front of them. If your product blows, don't expect them to get you any sales.
Sorry- this all sounds kind of harsh. It's not meant to be- just don't want you to rush in thinking you suddenly found an easy way to cash in online. That hasn't happened since 1998 :)
If you have a truly quality product, and you put in a lot of time and effort, you can succeed. But it is not a get rich quick deal by any means.
Clickbank does take like 7.5% + $1.00 per transaction, but since selling an ebook doesn't really have any cost associated with it, other than web hosting, I don't think that is a big deal. My main reason for using clickbank is that they provide a convenient way to accept credit cards with no montly fee. A merchant acount would run me $25-$35 a month. I view their affiliate system as a bonus. It gives me the means of promotion to work with.
I would go so far as to say that the 98% of merchants on Clickbank with no affiliates do not have any because they are not motivated to find any. I think they are the people who thought that all they had to do was download an eBook off KaZaA or buy one off ebay for $0.01, copy someone else's website, and then sit back and wait for the $$$ to roll in. Of course, it never happened.
I may not rake in $10,000 a month, but if I can turn a profit at all, that'll be enough to put a smile on my face.
BTW- That website idea is good...but I think I may have better luck placing content-related affiliate links within the book itself. I never made much money slinging internet ads.
We sell our own e-books, although they are actually games but even so, they are - in the end - password protected .pdf files.
We sold about US$90,000 in the last 12 months and can't sell many more unless the company gets VAT registered here in the UK which will be a pain. We spent quite a bit on online marketing of course...
We use Mals-e with credit card payements, which allows us to email the password automatically on buying the book - which works just great as it means we wake up in the morning to see how many people bought the game from the US overnight. The BIG added advantage of Mals-e is that it comes with a free but acceptable built in affilliate program.
We have had to get a bit nasty with people that have tried to sell the game/ebooks on so it ios really quite important to set up your conditions of purchase right to make it clear that they are buying a passowrd for a file and that they may NOT pass they file on to third parties.
Reselling other people's stuff is harder I think. Your product is only valuable if nobody else has it, and lots of people want it. Finding such a product is your challenge.
In fact, it depends on your subject area. For me, I was getting only 10% of my traffic from paid search and 90% from free SERPs, so my marketing cost was ~ 3.5% of my gross sales. That has changed some since the last google update, but it is still pretty low. In real estate how to, I think it is pretty competitive, and you might have to pay $1 per click for your traffic. So, if you are converting at 2% (pretty good) and paying $1 per click for all your traffic, you are only breaking even on a product priced at $50, not counting the fees you pay to clickbank or your merchant account. So, you either need to recruit affiliates or get free search engine placement for results.
But here's the catch- for affiliates, if they get 50% of the product price- $25, now they have to figure out how to get traffic that makes them money for half of what you are trying to get traffic at. So, unless the affiliates you find already get traffic which may be interested in what you are selling, they are very unlikely to try and sell your product using paid advertising, because it is even less profitable for them than it is for you.
That is why ebooks (or any product really) are more likely to be successful in a niche category where you can get into the free search results, and you have less competition to worry about taking your customers and bidding up the keywords you want for paid advertising.
Check overture for the current price of the keywords you want and see what it will cost you, who the competition is, and how much traffic is searching for the keywords.
Then take a look at the google results for the same keywords and see if you have a chance of getting onto page one for your keywords. That basic research may help you decide whether the project is a go/no go right there.
SiL
