How To Sell An Ebook

How to sell an ebook has been done to death online. You can find our indepth resource of making and selling an ebook here.

But still people can not sell that many ebooks

Why?

Because people don't realise that there are only three factors that can sell your ebook.

Here are the 3 ways to sell and ebook:

Pay for ads and direct traffic to either your sales page or a payment processor (like Clickbank, Gumroad or Amazon)
Build your own audience over time with articles/ forums and intermingling with people in the niche you want to sell in
Find someone who already has the audience and then use that audience to sell your ebook. This is likely influencers or people with traffic/ a following

There are only 3 ways to sell an ebook. Payment processors like Amazon/ Clickbank/ Gumroad?

Well, they still require you to send them traffic. Amazon relies on its:

Simplicity
Name
Handling everything for you

...for you to go with them.

Placing your ebook on Amazon doesn't necessarily result in sales right away.

Clickbank?

They rely on affiliates.

But affiliates are hard to come by- especially the ones which can generate you sales consistently and with low friction and refunds.

How to sell your ebook: 1. Pay

Paying for ads is one of the quickest ways to sell your ebook. When you hear of superstars selling copies upon copies they usually bought ads. Facebook ads are usually the favourite because they are cheap.

Ads are:

Instant
Targeted
Can give you loads of traffic and sales

But the obvious also goes with ads:

They can break the bank
They are only targeted if you have targeted the right people with the right ads. This can take time to realise what works and what doesn't
Loads of traffic and sales only works if those sales pay for the ads.

How to sell your ebook: 2. Slowly

What most people do is to build a presence and a website. They fill it with articles and SEO the living daylights out of the articles. They backlink and intermingle with niche audiences. Facebook and social when updated frequently can be a free and accompanied with them is the spreadability of social. However you are still hosting on someone elses site.

Content works well over time and is not instant.

There are multiple benefits for this:

The audience is yours
Traffic is yours
You have a closer relationship with your audience
If getting feedback you will notice that you get more audience members "helping you" and becoming fans more deeply.

Again, there are negatives.

A lot of people are doing the same- same articles, same keywords and to a point same audience. So you really have to figure out your own niche and maybe even micro niche it
Traffic comes and goes and you have to figure out a way to capture those visitors as they can leave your site forever. So newsletters or some capture method is usually required
It can be a commitment and you have to balance updating the site, interacting and generating content for your ebooks.
SEO is low hanging fruit. Writing an article sometimes doesn't shift the traffic needle- or the people you want to your site

How to sell an ebook: Semi quick

One of the most effective ways to sell your ebook is through other people. It can be tricky because you need to give them positive stuff, help them out and generate content for them but the payoff can be big. MrBeast did this technique. He promoted and had fun with influencers/ Youtube celebrities that had a large audience- PewDiePie? This then rocketed his subscribers.

But.

You have to have a place where people can find you- MrBeast has his channel
You need to work at these relationships and help the people rather than asking to be mentioned. Most people ask to be mentioned or have copies of their ebooks sent. Doesn't work. Give first, then get noticed.

What we found.

What we found is the use of all the techniques.

Initially we:

Built a website and filled it with articles
Got people to subscribe to newsletters
This built up our audience and SEO reputation...but adding an article helped our audience but couldn't get us past 2k/day visitors
We bought ads, the minimum price at the start and then played with money that we could expend (keeping a very tight budget)- which is difficult to do willingly. How did we pay for this- through ebook sales and Adsense.
With low cost ads we could figure out what worked and what didn't (not with a huge sample but we could get an idea).
We built products and sold them through our audience and ads and figured out what converted the most- if it was a news,letter then we sent the paid ads to the newsletter sign up.
In turn this increased our ebook placements in rating and charts

And how did we generate traffic to the site?

We figured out what we liked to do then went with that and then once we got OK at it we found something else.

So initially it was article generation. Then it was Forums and then dabbled in graphical sites- like Pinterest. But we don't like to do graphics that much and you can tell. So our success then was lowered. We then used our social channel and cranked that up as it was article like work.

For additional 101 resource on making and selling an ebook check out our guide here.