I should start with the statement that as one of my passive income streams, I have decided to write an eBook. It is now out and this is how I try to sell my eBook by self-publishing online.
My idea for selling the eBook went as follows:
- Pick a platform for a safe way to sell the eBook
- Create a website/blog to act as sales page and lure potential customers to the eBook
- Run ads and improve visibility of the website via SEO
- Generate revenue via the eBook and achieve positive returns
If you already read older articles on this blog, you should know that by now I only have one sale of the eBook and that I am at a loss (shown in my quarterly report) due to the costs of work put up front in order to achieve the 4 items listed above.
Contents
How to pick a platform to sell the eBook
I evaluated several options like WordPress website hosted on Bluehost (I already have a subscription) and speed up via Cloudflare (free option) or use an existing platform where I can manage all the bills, user subscriptions, etc.
I have decided to accept a cost (though process was that my sales will generate enough to cover it, even if I am not making a profit) and self-publish the eBook on the Teachable platform. The reason why I picked this platform was because I also want to start selling online courses related to my niche from it.
The platform manages my users, my sales and sales tax based on buyer country and has the options for payment in installments. These types of payments can extend my audience to emerging markets even though that I sell my eBook for under 20 EUR with tax.
I was lucky and benefited from a 6 month free basic subscription and as long as I am still in the free period, I am not affected by the monthly cost versus the extremely low volume of sales.
Even though I could have used some nice add-ons and configured my payment and invoicing system on WordPress, It would have increased the volume of work and admin required to keep it up.
I am happy with the decision taken to use Teachable, but I must find what is wrong and do something to increase my sales so I can sustain the platform cost from the eBook sales in early 2020.
How to create a blog to boost eBook sales
This one is simple and I merged my company website with a blog for my niche that covers articles linked to the eBook. The blog is on WordPress and hosted on Bluehost just like this form and has an active CDN (good for speed and that is good for SEO) via the free version of Cloudflare.
I currently have 30+ articles that follow the below template:
- SEO optimized articles
- Relevant key words for my niche
- Article is based on extracts from the book
- Scribd embed of the pages of the book relevant for the article
- Youtube video of the article (to be updated and added to the articles in the next months)
How to run ads and improve website visibility with SEO for selling your eBook
It is not enough to have an eBook and some articles that guide your customers towards it. You need some ads to drive traffic or some SEO to make sure that you appears in the first pages on Google for your niche.
My ad campaign by targeting specific niche related people on three platforms has only generated one sale. This is how things looked at for my ads:
|
|
Target |
Average Cost per Click |
Impressions |
|
|
74,000 |
0.5 USD |
17,000 |
|
|
11,000 |
2 USD |
8,000 |
|
|
130,000 |
1.5 USD |
6,000 |
Because I had no proper luck with ads, I changed my strategy and moved to SEO as the keywords that I use have under 10,000 impressions (in total) on the countries that I target on average per month. The keyword difficulty is not that tough and I expect that the return on investment for SEO would be better than ads.
If this does not work, then at least I will know that the problem is not the traffic and the customer engagement, but the actual product or sales page that does not convert.
For SEO I started doing the following:
- Yoast plugin on WordPress (free version) to make sure that my content is OK from on page SEO point of view
- Applied WP Rocked and used Cloudflare in order to improve the speed of the website which I measured with PageSpeed Insights
- Desktop: Target > 95 Achieved
- Mobile: Target > 90 Not achieved, only at > 80 (I may change the hosting later or the CDN)
- Used services from Fiverr to help myself with:
- Web directory submission
- Profile link creation
- Searching for a SEO agency that can help me rank on Google
Currently I do not rank in the first pages, but I am hoping to start my work with the SEO agency and see some results in the next 2-3 months. After this experience id done, I am thinking to dedicate an article to Fiverr and my experience with the sellers from there.
How to generate revenue vie an eBook for Passive Income
Unfortunately this is a part of this article which I have to update on a later date as currently I do not have enough sales to provide any guidance on this.
The idea is simple, change the approach, use SEO and add Youtube videos to my content while constantly sharing the articles from the blog that guide to the eBook via Linkedin and Facebook groups that are related to my niche (1 article shared in all groups per day).
Once a video is done for each article I will update and redistribute via the social media the updates in the hope for some additional visibility and boost to SEO.
If this does not work and in 3-4 months I have nothing, then my last stand is based on getting someone with marketing experience to edit my sales page so that I can start promoting it with a more marketable view.
Hopefully I can turn this article around in 6 months in order to not read How I try to sell an eBook to something like How I managed to generate passive income from my eBook.