How To Sell An EBook II
I wrote about Steven Aitchison’s (BlogConsultant) affiliate marketing results, here.
Steven is working on some search engine marketing campaigns, where he’s using Adwords to send his customers directly to the affiliator’s page.
Although, so far he’s losing a little money, I think he’s on the right track. He hasn’t lost a ton of money, which you can very easily with Adwords, and he’s learning a lot, fast.
My first real foray into internet marketing is selling my ebook, The Harold Cole Method, a book I wrote about how to quit smoking.
When I was a kid, my dad, Harold Cole, came up with an incredibly easy way to quit smoking. It worked like a champ. He had always wanted to write down his method so others could use it. Unfortunately, he never did.
I wrote the book, myself, last winter.
Other than placing the book on Lulu.com and Payloadz.com, I did nothing to market the book, other than put a link on this blog.
As a matter of fact, I got so busy blogging I sort of forgot about the book for a couple of months.
Imagine my surprise, when I decided to check my Lulu account and it actually had money in it due me from someone buying the book!
I checked to see how many page views my “How To Quit Smoking” page had had. Only 64. Out of 64 views, I had a sale.
That got my attention.
I decided to get serious about marketing this book.
I wrote a sales letter, used NVU to create a webpage, bought a domain name from my server, Blue Host (aff.), then uploaded the webpage.
“If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work on the internet.
So, I got a basic book about Google, Building Your Business With Google For Dummies (aff.), read it, then signed up for an Adwords account.
I did the same with Yahoo! Search Marketing.
Not wanting to blow a bunch of money on ads before I understood the metrics, I started with Google. I had a limit of $5 per day, and an initial keyword bid of $0.10.
I created a list of about 100+ keywords. I did this from reading my competitors sites and looking at their ads.
I did the same with Yahoo!, except I initially started with $0.15 bid on keywords, but still with $5 a day cap.
So, with both programs, my daily average exposure is $10.
Here are my statistics from my first week of marketing.
As you can see, my ad was shown 9122 times, I had 29 clicks in all, and from this I had one sale.
Doesn’t sound too bad.
Unfortunately, 29 clicks is not statistically enough clicks for me to really understand the numbers.
What’s cool about internet marketing with Adwords, or any of the other PPC programs, is you can develop a completely numerical understanding of selling your product.
If I knew how many clicks I needed to make a sale, then I could work backwards and calculate the maximum amount I needed to bid on a keyword to make a profit.
Unfortunately, I don’t know how many clicks it takes on average to make a sale.
It took 64 page views (clicks) to make my first sale, and 29 to make my second sale.
I think I would need to make about 20 sales (at least) before I can really get a real sense of what’s going on.
Granted, this is the first time I’ve done this, but I can already see how people lose a ton of money on PPC advertising.
After four or five sales, you might be tempted to decide you get a sale every 85 clicks, and adjust your campaign accordingly. Well, if the real ratio is one sale out of 120 clicks, you’ve got a problem! You’re about 50% out of the ballpark–the wrong way. (By that, I mean the money losing way.)
So, to summarize, the deal in a PPC campaign must be to judiciously sell enough product to understand what the real ratios are. By judiciously, I mean using things like the cap on daily spending (which is only an average cap, by the way), and starting with low bids on keywords in order to greatly limit your exposure.
The first part of a PPC campaign is not about making money so much as it’s about understanding the numbers.
Once you understand the numbers, you can decide
1) To continue to sell the product or not.
2) If you do continue, how to massage daily limits and keywords bids to maximize your profit.
But you can’t do this until you understand the game.
I’ll keep you posted!
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Also, if you smoke, now's the time to quit! Buy my book, How To Quit Smoking: The Harold Cole Method! It's 100% guaranteed!