Passive Ebook Sales And Revenue?

Its been a while. Why? Because We were testing something. Is there a thing called true passive ebook sales?

What happens when you just leave a content website (that has links to ebooks) and do nothing to it?

Well, that is what we did. We took a hit so you don't have to :)

Here are our results...and then our reasoning.

Just a side note:

• we are not disrespecting anyone, just our observations
• we didn't add any content- nothing, not even a blog post
• we have not added any additional links or external marketing
• we only did ebooks
• the site was "inactive" for 1 month

Your Ebook seller is vital to any passive ebook sales

We have been using Amazon and Gumroad. Both have their positives and negatives.

Gumroad is super easy to set up. Like ridiculously easy and quick. Giving you quick access to a payment processor that also handles your files.

Amazon on the other hand does both but the set up takes longer and there is more fees attached when you sell a larger (memory sized) file.

We used the same sales pages for both and just replaced the link to Amazon or Gumroad. So the only real difference is the actual payment processor and "sales page".

And when we come to fees. It doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things. You want to use their technology? Then you need to pay for it. And total 10% is not really that big. So don't worry about it.

And our results.

• We got no sales through Gumroad
• We got sales through other channels
• More sales through Amazon directly
• We got sales through Amazon indirectly from our website.

Is this really a good test?

Well, it actually goes with what we already know. When you have a payment processor it depends upon traffic, generally. We explained it here.

If that payment processor is known and being used frequently then the amount of traffic that you generate can be a bit less.

Opening this up even further we can see that

• more sales triggers Amazons internal ranking. As long as you get sales you don't have to rely too heavily on traffic to generate more sales
• Gumroad will place you on their preferred list and do some marketing, but you have to signup for this and reach a certain amount of sales

You can also rightly (or wrongly) assume that Amazon has more trust then Gumroad. Their payment processor landing page is not hugely inviting to "buy".

But, the checkout is really nice and simple.

Compared that to Amazon.

Sure, your sales page needs to warm up people but the landing page needs to have something behind it as well. Trust and ease of selling are important.

Side sales

We noticed that we got sales from products that we don't necessarily promote on our site. Draft2Digital (once Smashwords) gives us more sales than Amazon without having to promote anything on our site. Why is this?

It could be our site is promoting content and people see the respective ebook or author and associate that with our content. It could be that some people don't use Amazon but they hunted for the ebook. This is possible but unlikely. The most likely version is that they were searching online, found some of the content, went away and then when searching through other sellers (like iTunes) they found our ebooks.

So it is important to actually allow your ebooks to tick all the distributors as best as possible. Draft2Digital does that quite easily. You can check them out here (no affiliate link etc) as this is actually true passive ebook sales.

Side positives and negatives

What we also noticed was something positive. Our traffic either stayed the same or increased. It didn't reduce, not once. Which was odd. We were writing regularly and had some uptick in traffic. But when we left it for a bit then our traffic increased/ stayed the same.

But. We also noticed that some of our backlinks reduced. But other links have started to increase- we are now being picked up by AI.

Now we can dismiss Gumroad and say hello to Amazon? Actually no.

The ease of which you can set up sales pages in Gumroad opens up a large amount of possibilities for smaller products that you want to test, courses or even membership sites. Look at the picture below, this is how easy it is to set up membership sites. It's a couple of clicks:

See other things there? Scheduled calls and even "coffee tips". So to dismiss Gumroad is not being practicable in figuring out what revenue streams will match your audience.

But in some cases Amazon has brought less sales to us than Clickbank.

So.....

The whole idea of this post is to pose the idea that:

1. Depending on your ebook/ eproduct, the passive ebook sales will only be present if that payment processor is something that they use and can relate to
2. Clickbank sold us quite a few products that were more complicated and a bigger package. Doing something similar is difficult on Amazon because you have to educate people that it is a larger product than what they are used to. With Clickbank it is simple because buyers are used to those packages on that site
3. Gumroad has got many fans and we can see why. it is massive simple and easy to sell products. The main ones we have noticed are picture books and things that are quite visual. Unsure why, but it fits that sort of website
4. If you want passive then you must either go to a payment processor that has internal systems to promote your product when it gets sold. And...has the mechanism to sort our returns/ delivery that doesn't add to your cost. It might also be that you promote on multiple websites like Draft2Digital and Amazon- where you cover most of the digital sales. In this case we have heard that Amazon will discount your ebook when it notices a competitor. Unsure if this is true but that can only help sales.

Also note that ebooks and all products have a poduct life. They reduce over time. So you need updates, editions etc. So in reality there are no true passive ebook sales in the sense of set it and completely forget it. But, you can set it and forget it over many months, maybe years depending upon the topic.

Make and sell your ebook? Check out here

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