Can You Start Using Adwords To Sell Ebooks Or Any Affiliate Product?

Using Adwords to sell ebooks or affiliate offers? Like just Adwords? No. This could be any one of the paid advertising platforms. I just used Adwords as they are common and the same idea is behind all the rest.

For those who don't know, Adwords are the ads that you see on many websites and when you use Google properties.

Above is the first thing you see (well I saw) when I typed into Google search Adwords. It is Microsoft advertising their Ad system which is quite funny. The second none paid placement? Google Adwords :)

Anyway, you pay per keyword type (through Googles awesome Ad centre). When someone clicks on your ad you pay that money. The keyword amount increases depending upon the demand. So some clicks can be 10c- which are hard to find, others can be $50 per click and up. The higher the price roughly equates to a better person looking for what you may have. Maybe.

You can set the limit on how much you pay- so the cost won't go above that.

Now you can also choose whether you have your ads on Google or through Google partners- normal websites hosting ads which you can target. I have found better conversions through these than I have through Google search. Technically people are looking for a solution or more information through search. On a website the site is doing the preselling for you.

Sell an ebook with Conversion?

This is the buzzword when everyone talks about Adwords- conversion. How many people click on the link?

This is fundamentally flawed as it is not the metric that you should be following. What you are looking for is the conversion on your site- the person does something on your site that you desire.
You can get a 100% click through rate (CTR)- in other words, 100% of the people who your ad is shown to clicks through. But if they don't do what you want them to do, then what is the point?

Also, if your click throughs are dismal or you get poor reviews then your cost per click can be slightly higher.

What to do well before you start any Ad campaign

Most websites and books will tell you to use Facebook/ Adwords/ Twitter/ Microsoft Ads to make money.

Yes and no.

Most people lose money and lots of it trying to play this game, so be very careful as it can be very easily temping to pay for traffic.

What you need to do first. And I mean very first is to figure out how much you can spend.

If someone comes onto your site and they make a purchase then they have made you $X (remember you need to remove hosting fee, taxes etc to figure out how much your site needs to make to stay afloat. I am assuming that you have done that here.). Lets say $25 for an ebook.

But where did that customer come from? You need to figure out how to use Analytics to find out where people have come from and go through on your site. If you find out that most of your sales comes from free advertisement then those sources- where SEO, Pintrest, Facebook Posts are going to tell you:

how many people click through and then bought
how many people click through and didn't buy
how many people clicked through and stopped at the checkout
how many people clicked through and subscribed to your newsletter
how many people saw your first page and left
how many people came back
what wording they liked/ what colour/ what text- which can be changed to see if that increases or decreases conversion

It could also point to the fact that if you improve the free sources you initially might not require paid sources.

There are loads of different ways to interpret data and that is what you need to know.

Why?

Because:

it tells you what people like and what they respond to
what they dont like and what they stay clear of
what went wrong in your selling process
why did they abandon the shopping cart

Now you are getting a better picture and an even better improvment of effectiveness on your website.

If you start pumping your site full of paid traffic and no ones buys anything? Well, out of business you go.

What are you wishing for?

I saw an Ad once for someone to download an MP3 from an unknown artist- the MP3 was free and you didn't have to sign up for it. You have to ask:

What is the point?

There are much easier ways to get yourself known and spending money on Ads isn't it.

This is the same when you sell an ebook.

You have to know the deep down reason of what you want that paid traffic to do.

You have to know your money line.

Your money line is where you...make money

Remember that $25 ebook we sold? How about if it took 10 clicks on a $1 keyword to get there?

Now you have $15.

That is the whole reason why you must/ have to know what on earth someone does on your site and how do you make money.

If they buy an ebook
If they buy an ebook and then buy 1 other product
If they sign up to your newsletter which is designed to funnel them through a month long journey that eventually ends with them buying 4 products from you.

You have to know the journey. But you must must MUST know that conversion.

How many people buy an ebook straight away, buy 1 more product, sign up and buy 4 more products?

You have to know because then you can have a very calculated guess on how much money your could spend on getting more people into that area.

Adwords to sell ebooks then?

Now it becomes a mathematics issue.

If I spend $10 on ads and I sell an ebook for $15, I make $5.

If I spend $50 on ads and I get one conversion that takes me $35 down.

You see it is not always the case that you increase the spend you increase the conversion. It depends on many factors:

when your ad was shown
did it catch someone who wanted the product there and then
was it timed for a holiday season or news article
was it shown on a website that was the perfect mix
did you change the ad
did someone copy your ad, spend more and then get better placement?

That is where you need to be careful. It is not necessarily so that you ads will bring in tons of cash all the time. They can bring in many thousands quickly and make your business jump to the next level.

But they can drop just as quickly.

Paid placement is one that is not good to sell an ebook...but many?

Once you start messing with paid placement to sell an ebook it is widely addictive and terrible if it goes wrong.

I have always found that it works well when your site is up and going. When you know the processes, when you know how much each visitor costs and when you have a product line up that can support a money line.

What many placement companies have done is made it so you can't "directly" send people to a sales page, they need to go to a content Amazon style page on your site that does the converting. This then makes it a little bit more difficult. It also shows that you need to stay on focus with changing rules of something that affect your business which is out of your control.

For more info and news on eproduct and affiliate selling check out the Jasonera blog.