Sell Ebook Online

When you are first starting in this area and just have an idea of the ebook, but don't know exactly what to do, it can be quite confusing to start writing it. The purpose of this page is to provide a guide as to where to start and how to get going.

Here are the basic steps that you need to sell ebook online

Step 1: Coming up with an idea for an ebook

There are lots of potential products out there, which is the best one for you to choose? Well, there are three things to consider when coming up with an idea of an ebook which you want to sell online:
1. Are you going to enjoy being involved with it?
2. Will people pay for it?
3. Are there already lots of merchants who try to sell ebook online out there on the same topic? Or, is your product in some way unique?

Only you can answer question number one. Remember that if you are really enthusiastic about something then you are much more likely to be successful at it. If you are just doing something for the money, then success is still possible but can be more difficult, and not as enjoyable.

To answer question number two you may need to do some market research. Ask people who fit into your target market if they would buy the product. Don't ask them if they "like your product", because most people will say "yes", just to be nice. Ask if they would buy it, and how much they would pay. Also you need to research what people are searching for on the Internet. Are they searching for information on your product? You should work on keyword research and answer this question.

The last thing you need to know is if there is a lot of competition in the same area. Search on google for your product area. What sites come up in the top 10 search results? Are they all competing products to your idea? If so, can you develop a slightly different niche that will make you different from all the other products out there.

Step 2: Writing the ebook

For some people writing the ebook can be the hardest part, but it doesn't have to be. There are a few options of how you can do this. You can actually hire someone to do it for you. A good way to find someone for this is on Rentacoder. You will find freelance writers that will do articles for you much less expensive than you would be able to do yourself. You can also write the book yourself. And this could be the best thing, because you're the expert of your topic!

Step 3: Compiling the ebook

Once you have created the text of your ebook, then you need to compile it into a form that people can download and read it. This is a crucial step, and there are a few things to look out for when you are selecting software to compile your ebooks:

1. Is it in a form that is easy to download and for people to read?
2. Can you protect the ebook with a password? Or even better, the eBook Pro software package actually lets you to disable the ebook from a remote server, in the case that someone uses a false credit-card or asks for a refund, so you have complete security protection.
3. It look professional, and doesn't have the logo of the ebook software on the finished ebook.
4. Easy to use with help pages plus technical support available if you get into trouble.

Step 4: Designing your site to market the ebook

There are two basic options to create your web site:

1. Build it yourself.
2. Get a professional designer to build it for you.

The problem is that most web designers based in the USA or other first world countries charge large amounts of money to build the web site. It might cost you $5,000 to build the site, and you don't even know if they will build something that meets your needs. There are much less expensive ways to do it, and get the same or better results. If you have the time, the best option is to learn how to do it yourself. It doesn't take long, and you can have a web site up and running within a few days. You could also buy an existing template from somwhere like Template Monster (which has hundreds of professional looking designs) which you can add content yourself. If you have no knowledge of building websites then you will need to get a software package that does the whole thing for you.

The best package for beginners who want to create a web site is Site Build It. This software builds the whole site for you automatically, so you don't need any knowledge of HTML, and it does lots of other stuff too, like registering your domain name, hosting your website, optimizing your pages so that they get to the top of the search engines, submitting to search engines, statistics of traffic to your site and some other stuff as well. It saves you a lot of money because it does all of these things for you, and so you don't have to pay separately for hosting, registering your domain name ... and all the other stuff that goes with designing a site. Alternatively you can get a software package like Dreamweaver or Frontpage, but these packages are much more difficult to use, and they won't submit to the search engines, host your site and all the other stuff that goes with Site Build It. For more information on this have a look at this review of the Site Build It software.

Remember, the purpose of the site is to sell ebooks online, and make you money, not to look nice and pretty. This is a crucial point. However you build your site, you need to make sure that your site is easy to navigate and explains your product or service clearly. Keeping this in mind, the thing that you should focus on with your site is the words, and the overall strategy for generating sales of your product. Don't worry too much about the design.

Step 5: A way to accept payments to sell ebook online and its importance

Step 6: Get traffic to the site and sell ebooks online with help of affiliates!

And once you have done all of these steps, the next thing to do is to lie on the beach while your bank account fills up with cash!

If you ask an internet marketer who makes tens of thousands of dollars daily a simple question "how to sell ebooks?", he may lay out the subsequent steps for you to follow. First, get a product to sell, whether your own or someone else's ebook. Charge it high to increase its supposed value, and then offer it a discounted price that is still expensive. After all you only have to sell 20 ebooks per day to have almost $7,000 in sales each week if you have a $49 ebook.
Get a good looking website. Pay at least a few hundred dollars to have a nice site built for you. Pay a good copywriter a few thousand dollars or so to create a good sale's page for you. You can pay optimization experts to create incoming links or else make your site visible in the search engines. Pay a few hundred dollars for articles you can put your name on and pay to have those distributed to promote you site. Finally, pay for a bunch of traffic from a pay-per-click advertising service in order to test the "conversion rate" of your sales page.
If less than 2% of visitors are buying your ebook (conversion rate is below 2%), revamp the sales page and check again. Once you get at least two in every one hundred visitors buying (a 2% conversion rate), you're ready for the launch. Now you need help contacting other webmasters and marketers who can help to promote your ebook. You may pay a 50% commission or even higher. You need affiliates to promote your ebook to their most likely large mailing lists. If all is done right, on "launch day" 150 orders will roll in for sales of over $10,000. You might do $50,000 for the week.
There is more to it than this, but you get the idea. It is expensive to start this way. That isn't to say that you shouldn't do it. Marketing at this level is a learnable skill in part. But don't believe that it is a step-by-step formula that you can succeed with on the first try. That's very unlikely. There is a science to promote an ebook, and there is an art. People want to ignore the "art" part of all businesses because it comes from experience, which can take a lot of time and money.
Is there an alternative? Plan for the big time, but get your feet wet with a more simple, no-risk model.
List all the subjects that interest you and/or that you know something about. Using that list, do some keyword research online (there are tools for this that are free to use) to identify a niche that has some demand. This could be people looking for a training manual for dogs or an ebook on how to build a survival shelter.
The intersection of one of your interests and a provable market is ideal. The "big boys" will tell you to forget your passion and go where the most money is, but in my experience (ebooks are a smaller part of our business, but I still do five figures in profits from them every year), it helps to have some interest in what you are writing about and promoting. It makes maintaining your enthusiasm and work schedule easier.
Write an ebook of at least 60 pages and publish it as a PDF. There are free ways to do this if you don't want to buy the software. Be sure to include the ten bits of information that are likely to be most important to your audience as well as those that are least likely to already be known by them. Ask yourself if you would buy the book (try to be objective).
Start a website and build at least a dozen pages of useful information. Some of these can be excerpts taken directly from your ebook. End every page by promoting your ebook and linking to the order/sales page - usually the homepage. Read all the free content online that teaches you how to write sales copy, write and rewrite your sales page until it looks as professional and seems as convincing as others that make you want to buy something.
Sign up with a Affiliate Network like Click2Sell, so your sales will be handled for you. You'll get money straight to your PayPal, Moneybookers or any other Merchant account. Now you are ready to sell ebooks online. Of course you need to get visitors to your site (and if only one out of 300 buys your book you need to work on that sales page some more). Getting traffic is perhaps the most important part of "how to sell ebooks".
I generate all the free traffic I need using several methods, The primary way I use is to write short articles and distribute them through free article directories. People can read them there and click through to my site, or webmasters can take them and use them as content on their sites, increasing my exposure and traffic. Traffic matters, because even if you only convert on in every 200 visitors into buyers it adds up when you have many hundreds of visitors daily.
The steps I just laid out will costs you less than $100 assuming you already have a computer and internet access. In fact, you can even save the cost of a website if you use a free blog as your primary promotional tool. This is a great way to get started, and later you can learn how to sell ebooks on a larger scale.