Internet Marketing For Profit – How You Can Create A Successful EBook
By John Alexander
Taking a little break from the topic of SEO Training, I was thinking back to 9 years ago when a friend of mine, Michael Campbell, encouraged me to write my first e-book. Never having written one before, I guess I thought to myself, but who would want to read my e-book?
I had just shown Michael some recent keyword research and that’s how it all got started. I took his advice and he provided me with some great insights on everything from how it needed to be written, the language and even the graphics and pricing. My first e-book was created in 2003 and I called it “Wordtracker Magic.”
Basically, it contained my personal methodology of using the tool called Wordtracker, to research user search behavior. How to save literally hundreds of hours of time and quickly tap into pure gold. Last year, I finally took the book off the market, since Wordtracker had changed their metrics.
Let’s talk about how you can create a successful e-book of your own.
Your e-book deserves to be seen by everyone in your niche, but unless you have an effective internet marketing strategy no one will ever know about it. The difference between your e-book being great and being successful is your ability to get it in front of the people. Once you have the e-book completed and to your high expectations the battle is only half over.
The rest of your work now is finding how to market it online.
The most important thing that you can do is make sure that your e-book is the best that it can be. Make sure that your ideas are crisp and clear, that it is error free grammatically and everything is spelled correctly.
Also ensure that all illustrations help emphasize the points you are making, and that it is pleasing to the eye.
It is easy for bad illustrations to become a distraction, so make sure they are done well. If you need to, get people to review and critique it for you and you take their advice seriously. The better your product is, the more
excitement will be created around it.
Between 2003 and 2005 that little e-book called “Wordtracker Magic” had earned over $50,000.00 and it sold for just $29.95.
Around the year 2005, I decided to re-write my original book and I added more examples and more methods for instantly finding the hottest phrases in Wordtracker’s keyword tool. I renamed it “Keyword Forensics 2.0 for SEO” and nearly everyone that had bought the first version, came back to get the second version and it continued to make money every day, whether I was in the office or whether I was away teaching an SEO Workshop somewhere.
A couple of important points here:
1. Wordtracker, the tool had very few instructions back in 2003 and in speaking with others, I had learned that many people were spending hours just trying to find good keywords. I learned that not too many people used my methodology to quickly find search behavior.
When you write your e-book, it needs to be an eye opener. If it is instructional, then whatever strategy you are writing about must really help the reader in some useful way.
Ask yourself:
- Will your book help save people time?
- Will it help them make money?
- Will it help them improve results somehow?
- Will it help improve their performance in some way?
- Will it somehow fill in a missing gap in a product?
Give it some thought, because this is crucial to building the readers desire to read it. It must be something truly useful. Strive for excellence and people will strive to get what you offer them.
2. Make sure your sales letter is well written and that it spells out all the benefits in the book. I was fortunate to have the very skilled help of Michael Campbell to watch over my shoulder. He actually helped write the original sales letter and that’s where I learned a lot about how people think when they are reading a Web page.
Once everything is published online, you can let your subscribers know that you have a new e-book. But also use word of mouth to spread the word about your e-book. It would be best to supply your customers with a form that they can recommend it to their friends and associates.
If it becomes hot enough, remember to put a “buy now” link right at the top of the sales letter so people can buy right away if they’re hearing good things.
Another marketing strategy that is going to be incredibly helpful is providing short articles full of good information to e-zines.
The internet is full of these type of sites and used by a wide range of people to seek out this kind of information. What this can accomplish is you make yourself known on a wider audience as an authority or expert on the subject you are dealing with. This will only help you, though, if you provide a link to your site or your e-book.
Don’t let them know everything that you know. Leave them with only part of the answers or snippets of information that you want them to know and that to get the rest of it they are going to have to pay for it. If you do this part right, they are going to buy.
A key strategy is to create a group of customers who will keep coming back and buying what you offer in the future. Offer free incentives for them to buy your e-books like an e-zine, newsletter, or even an e-book that you have written earlier or one that you have rights to.
The benefits of the e-zine or newsletter is that you are seen as a constantly good source of information and you stay on their radar. When you have your next e-book, you will have your first group of customers ready to go.
These ideas are only the tip of the iceberg but enough to get you going. If you have something excellent to offer people on the internet with your e-book, then have a marketing strategy that will bring it the attention it deserves.
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