Whilst there are people making a good living from selling information products anyone who has ever created an ebook will attest to the fact that the writing of the ebook is the easy part. The harder aspect is actually marketing your ebook and getting enough “ready to buy” traffic to your ebook sales page in order to make a decent income from your work.
While each marketer has their preferred method of driving traffic over the years I have found four different techniques which consistently the majority of my ebook sales and it is these techniques that I’d like to discuss today. Almost as important as their effectiveness is that they are all free or very low cost to implement and your main investment will be simply that of time which makes them both effective and very low-risk.
Search Engine Optimization
Ebook sales letters can be surprisingly easy to rank in the search engines if you choose your keyword targets carefully. Try to look for keywords that both offer minimal competition but also suggest buyer intent. After all there is no point in targeting keywords that you’ll either struggle to rank for or for which seachers are looking more for free information than to actually make a purchase.
Let’s take the example of an ebook all about keeping tarantulas as pets. The best keywords, which would suggest someone is looking to make a purchase, might include phrases like “best tarantula book”, “tarantula keeping course” and “tarantula ebook”.
Lower quality phrases, which would likely convert fewer visitors into customers might include “how to keep tarantulas” and “caring for tarantulas”. Focus on the “long tail” and remember that it is often better to draw in a smaller number of pre qualified visitors than to attempt to flood your site with people who are unlikely or unwilling to actually make a purchase from you.
Find ways to subtly work these keyword phrases into the content of your sales letter and then build high-quality links to your site in order to rank quickly for keywords that perform.
Article Marketing
Whilst one of my main ebook sales sites manages to attract traffic from dozens of low-competition search terms it can be a struggle to target every potential keyword phrase that you find on a single page.
In these cases you can still make use of these keywords to drive traffic to your ebook sales site through the use of article marketing.
Take each of the keyword phrases you have found that show promise and write one or more articles around each of them. Follow the standard search engine optimization principles of mentioning your keyword phrase in the article title and body and then create a small “bio” file at the end of the article which promotes and links to your ebook sales page.
These articles can then be submitted to the high quality article directories and Web 2.0 sites (personally I like to use Ezine Articles, Squidoo and Hub Pages) before building some links to them in order to provide an additional boost in rankings.
Doing this can quickly multiply your traffic so I like to take a few days after launching a new ebook project to really go to down on creating keyword-focused articles to distribute which will drive high-quality traffic to my site over the long term.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging takes the concept of article marketing a step further by placing articles that you have written onto high-traffic blogs in your niche. Whilst the same principles of article marketing still apply guest blogging relies less on traffic from the search engines and more on subscribers and repeat visitors to the sites you submit your content to and as a result can lead to an instant boost in traffic to your site.
The following screenshot shows an example of what happened to the traffic at a new ebook site of mine after successfully having a single guest post featured on a popular blog that is closely related to the content of an ebook I sell.
So if guest blogging is so powerful, why bother to use standard article marketing at all? The answer is that high-traffic blogs can be difficult to find, can have very stringent rules in terms of the articles they will accept and so writing and submitting guest posts can take considerable time.
In contrast with article marketing it is possible to create shorter, less original articles and so you can create numerous standard submissions in the time it will take you to create a single guest post. A “hybrid” form of promotion therefore tends to work best to enable you to cover all the possible traffic avenues.
Affiliate Recruitment
In many ways recruiting your own affiliates to promote your ebook is the best way to drive ebook sales. Clearly if you have hundreds of websites in your niche writing about, and linking to, your ebook sales site you will have a never-ending supply of read-to-buy visitors arriving at your website.
Furthermore your affiliates create all the content, do all the linking and invest their own time and money in order to try and drive sales to your site in exchange for a commission on any sales they generate. And because you only pay for results, if an affiliate doesn’t perform they simply don’t get paid.
When you combine a profitable affiliate program with a carefully optimized sales letter, article marketing and guest blogging anyone should be able to drive a constantly supply of potential customers to their site and see significant sales as a result.
For online marketing advice visit the author’s lifestyle design blog.
