Archive | March, 2019

Whether you’re selling ebooks to make immediate profit, to build your list of buyers or to position yourself as an expert in your field, here are 15 simple ways to get more buyers.

1. Know your target market, find out where they hang out and then be there. Whether it’s forums, blogs, websites, etc., find out their favorite haunts and then figure out ways to get your book seen and talked about without spamming. Frankly, half the battle of selling more ebooks is knowing where your best customers are. Far too many marketers and authors are promoting their goods anywhere and everywhere, rather than concentrating their energy where they will gain the highest return for their efforts.

2. Use video. A 2-3 minute video about your book can be the perfect lure to use in social media to get people interested and heading over to your sales page.

3. Give away the first 1-3 chapters of your ebook. People want to know if they’re getting quality and the fastest way to prove they are is to give them the first chapters for free. Include a detailed, benefit-laden and curiosity provoking table of contents, as well as a cliff hanger at the end of the last chapter you give away. Be sure to place the order page link at the end of the free chapters as well, along with instructions to click the link to immediately get the rest of the book.

4. If you don’t want to give away the first few chapters, consider creating a special report that includes some (not all!) of the best information from the book. In the report you’ll mainly tell them what they should be doing, but not ‘how’ to do it. This way they need to buy your book to get the results they seek.

5. If you haven’t launched your book yet, build up anticipation for it. Build a wait list, use email and video to disseminate information, and basically get people excited to get the book when it arrives.

6. Offer a discount for a specific time period when the book is first launched to quickly ramp up sales and get testimonials.

7. Get testimonials before you launch. Give your book to prominent people in your niche and to people in your own network asking them to review it for you.

8. Make it super easy to order. Regardless of how you distribute your ebook, make the sales process as seamless and easy as possible. The more hurdles they have to jump through to get your book, the more likely they are to click away before completing the sales process. If you are selling the book from a sales page, make the sales page match the ebook cover with the same colors and same type of graphics for a seamless experience.

9. Use keywords in your book title and your website URL. This can make it easier for prospects to find your book.

10. Run contests via social media to give away free copies of your book.

11. Do webinar joint ventures. Find list owners, bloggers and affiliates in your niche who will promote a webinar to their readers. You provide free training on the webinar and then sell your book at the end, splitting the profits with the list owner.

12. Offer a free coaching course in conjunction with your book. This course is delivered automatically via autoresponder, and helps the purchaser to get the very most out of your book. This can get some fence-sitters to act, since they can see how this will make the book more useful and increase the odds they’ll get real value from it, instead of letting it gather cyber dust like so many other books they’ve purchased.

13. Hold an affiliate contest. Some affiliates will go all out just to get the bragging rights of having won the contest.

14. Find bloggers in similar but non-competing topics whose readers would benefit from your book. Send them a free copy and offer a special deal just for their readers.

15. Hold a challenge. Ask for volunteers to go through your book, implement the information with your help, and report the results. This can gain a lot of social media attention, depending on your topic.

Want to sell more of your amazing and life-changing product? Do one or more of these 21 things and customers will start beating a path to your physical or virtual storefront. 😉

• Talk about your customers, not about you. “Make the customer the hero of your story.” – Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, Marketing Profs 

• Respect your customers. In the words of David Ogilvy, “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”

• Be exclusive. Make it a privilege and a proud moment to purchase from you and join the ranks of your customers.

• Long copy outsells short copy because it tells more. But no matter the length of your copy, prospects will only read it so long as it’s interesting and relevant.

• Stay in contact with your customers. A lot. All the time. Everyday. Your goal is to stay in your customers’ minds until they are ready to buy your next product, and your next, and your next. He (or she) who communicates most wins in business.

• Let your customers take your product for a test drive. If you sell software, let them try it for 7-10 days before they buy it. If it’s information, let them see the table of contents and the first 10% of the content, whether it’s written, audio or video. Spend as much time on each item in the table of contents as you would on a headline, and make that first 10% of content totally awesome.

• Teach as you sell. You’ve seen the advertorials – ads that look like editorials. If done correctly, they teach as much as they sell. If you’re giving benefit through your sales copy, your readers will reason that you give a great deal more in your product.

• Write as though you are writing to one person, not a crowd

• Use emotion in your marketing. All the logic, stats and facts in the world won’t sell as well as emotion, so use it.

• Ask for what you want until you get it. Whether it’s a sale, a referral, a tweet or anything else, keep asking until you get it.

• Bloggers and graphic artists – make the image match the words. Otherwise the reader is left wondering what the image has to do with the copy instead of getting engrossed in the message.

• Don’t use the same stock images as everyone else. You know the ones – people in suits sitting at a conference table, having a meeting, on the phone, staring into a computer monitor, etc. Tests show those stereotyped pictures can actually hurt your conversions.

• Don’t just tell – show. Use your words to paint vivid pictures in the readers’ minds. “When you use abc product, you wake up feeling like you’re 20 years younger, vibrant, alive and knowing this could be one of the best days of your life so far.”

• Use incentives for any action you want people to take. It doesn’t matter if it’s joining a list or buying a product – give them an incentive to do it and to do it right now.

• Treat your prospects and your customers as you would good friends and that’s what they’ll become.

• Give prospects choices. Instead of ‘yes’ they’ll buy or ‘no’ they won’t buy, offer your product in different sizes, formats, colors, etc. This way you can get them to choose (Red or Blue? Small or Large?) which takes their mind of off whether or not to buy and onto how they should buy.

• Don’t reinvent the wheel. Time and again marketers are trying to find new ways to do things, while someone else has already laid down a proven method that marketer could simply follow. When you need to do something new, find someone who’s already done it and model what they did. Once you get good at it, then you can refine it further to suit you.

• Use “because.” If you are giving a freebie to your list, tell them why. If you are stipulating a deadline or offering a bonus, tell them why. If you don’t, you’ll leave an unanswered question in your prospects’ minds that could make them hesitate. “I’m limiting my coaching to just 10 people because I want to have the time to absolutely ensure the success of every one of my students.”

• Give reasons why what you claim is true. If you say your toothpaste whitens better than any other, tell them why. “14 years of clinical research culminating in a breakthrough discovery of 3 specific proteins that leave your teeth shiny white.”

• Test. If you have a successful campaign that yields $50,000, but with a little testing it could have been double that, you’ve just lost $50,000.

• Read your copy out loud. Whether it’s a sales letter, blog post, email or article, read it out loud. You’ll discover what works and what needs fixing.

True story: A student attends a strict private school that decides to ban a multitude of books. These books are classics such as The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, Animal Farm, The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy and many, many others.

The student – appalled by the administration’s actions – uses her own collection of books to start her own lending library out of an empty school locker. She keeps an inventory log and gives students due dates. Before she started the locker library, she says, “Almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading!

“Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, they go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on” she says. She and the other students are risking getting into trouble to read books, all because the school banned them.

The first marketing lesson here is loud and clear – the scarcer something is, the more people are interested in it and the higher price people are willing to pay. In this case the price paid is having to sneak around and risk getting into trouble, possibly even getting detention or being expelled from school.

The second marketing less is that taboo sells. How many times have you heard about a film only because some group was boycotting it? And what almost always happens? The more the film is protested by some people, the more others want to see it. Heck, if you have a movie that’s failing, get a group to denounce it and your ticket sales will almost certainly increase in direct proportion to the publicity your film’s adversaries are garnering.

And while you might not be able to incorporate the second lesson into your marketing, you can certainly use the first. Decide to sell your products for a limited time or to a limited number of people. When you hit the limit, pull it immediately. Do this each time and your customers will become trained to purchase your products the moment they become available or risk losing out.

Do you have a product that’s not selling well? Announce it will be disappearing forever in 7 days and see what happens. This psychology doesn’t just work on kids, it works on everyone.

One has to wonder if the administrators of that school were shortsighted for banning books, or geniuses for finding a way to get kids to read. It’s certainly a lesson other schools could use – perhaps giving a list of books to students that they “shouldn’t” read, placing those books in a special locked section of the library, and then having the librarian lend the books only on the condition that they tell no one. What a brilliant way to get kids reading. 🙂