How do people make money writing and selling e-books online?

Before the Internet, there was a “mail order” niche that sold books (mostly on how to make a fortune in mail order, oddly enough). Mostly, the folks buying them were business opportunity seekers.

The internet brought with it a new wave of the same sort of people who wanted to make a fortune online. Now, instead of mail order pamphlets, there was the ebook explosion, with an outsized proportion of works on the subject of how to sell ebooks.

Most of what’s being sold to beginners by the pros is internet income and information selling. A minority of the books are broader sales and marketing topics. Almost none of the books are about non-business subjects.

The System

The first step of the system is a product, and as the gurus tend to sell things online, the product will be an e-book for would-be Internet millionaires. It will be in the form of a downloadable PDF.

In the second step, the guru takes a long persuasive sales letter and posts it on a microsite.

A microsite is about as unlike a normal website as you can get. A normal site has menus, links to all the pages, and a confusing array of buttons and options. All those things are absent from the microsite, which just contains a long, scrolling sales letter. There’s usually no link to a home page, no navigation or anything else. Just the letter, and an offer to click here to order.

As an aside, note that it’s usual to offer a thirty day money-back guarantee with a digital product. Even though there’s nothing to return, you refund the customer if they ask.

Step 3 of the system involves traffic, and this can come from several places. An effective way to get customers is to advertise in the e-zines of others. It may also be useful to write articles that others will reprint. In addition, although banners, co-registration, CPA deals, and direct affiliates may be fruitful, you’ll probably want to build your own list and email your prospects. Renting e-mail lists that “opt-in” to such ads usually costs too much for e-books, however.

Affiliates are another traffic source: anyone who has an e-mail list of would-be online millionaires might be interested in your product. If they advertise your book to their list, you give them 30 to 50 percent of the sales price. Joe Vitale, author of Hypnotic Writing, claims that his affiliates have been his best sales channel.

Joe Vitale suggests finding affiliates by searching the web for marketers who are already reselling other people’s products.

Fred Gleek, an online information marketer, has a particularly useful suggestion: the best affiliates to recruit are satisfied customers of your e-book.

Practically speaking, if you sell downloadable products, you should always put a link to an affiliate sign-up page inside every e-book you sell.

Beyond affiliates, e-book author Jim Edwards reports that the best way to sell a new e-book fast is to pitch it to your existing list, and that prior buyers are far more likely to buy again than fresh prospects.

E-books on Selling E-books

Do a search for e-books on selling e-books and you’ll find tons of examples. Jim Edwards and David Garfinkel wrote the quintessential ebook about how to write ebooks, called eBook Secrets Exposed.

The model is very profitable.

Jim Edwards says that his two best titles each gross between $10,000 and $12,000 a month. He also says that another one of his titles brings in $3,000 a month in sales, and two more of his titles each bring in $1,200 a month in sales. And one e-book he wrote made him $43,000 in thirty days.

The Best Topics

David Garfinkel says that the best topics are those that meet an urgent need that the prospect already recognizes. In addition, topics which can be marketed to groups that already exist online are preferable.

Garfinkel says that the kind of groups he’s talking about can usually be found among the readers of e-zines, the members of an affinity site on the internet, or forums that allow product promotion. He says that how-to books on marketing and on making big consumer purchases such as haggling for a car or buying and selling a home are usually likely to sell well.

If you set out to write an e-book that wouldn’t sell, what would you write? Garfinkel says that the kind of information that no one buys is helpful stuff that no one feels an urgent need to have.

An example of the kind of product that doesn’t sell is illustrated by David Garfinkel: he once told an author not to write a book on how junior managers could sell their ideas up the corporate ladder, because he could find no community of junior managers paying for career advancement material. They just don’t urgently need it very often, he said, though there are exceptional times.

The common knock on e-books is that much of what’s available at $19 or $29 is shoddy rehashed material. That’s because the barriers to entry are low and a slew of amateurs flood the market with PDFs. As with everything else, it’s buyer beware.

Ultimately, the best bet would be to buy the e-books sold by people who have been mentioned here, such as Jim Edwards and David Garfinkel. Others to look to include Fred Gleek, Joe Vitale and other Internet sales authorities like Terry Dean, Corey Rudel, Jeffrey Lant, and Jim Straw.