This tip for selling eBooks online is a money-making technique that works just as well on eBay and your own independent websites and blogs, as it does on ClickBank and Amazon and hundreds of other Internet marketplaces.
This entire idea is based on promoting your eBooks using sample chapters to overcome a common reluctance to buying from new and little known publishers.
This will entice people to join your mailing list for information about one of your products and to continue receiving emails promoting your other products potentially for many years to come.
Giving free samples when selling eBooks online
Let me start by explaining why offering a free sample of an eBook you’re selling, be it your own eBook or one you’ve obtained with selling rights, is such a good idea. The reason is that many people, especially newcomers to using the Internet, are sceptical about placing orders online. They fear they’ll be scammed; they’re concerned their personal information and credit card details will be stolen or passed on for unauthorised individuals to use.
New Internet users and old hands alike also worry about not liking what they receive, or finding it unsuitable for their needs, and subsequently being refused a refund.
This is true for all products and services a person may order online but it’s especially true of eBooks. The fact is eBooks, primarily business opportunity titles, sometimes receive bad press, as do their authors and publishers and firms promoting those products.
That’s because a great many such products make unrealistic and often impossible promises. So those eBooks, and their creators and sellers, get bad publicity in ezines and Internet forums, and at least some of that publicity rubs off onto genuine eBook writers and sellers.
So if you’re selling eBooks, regardless of their subject, there’s a good chance at least some of your target audience, even people desperate for the information your book contains, won’t ever purchase your product online.
So what can you do to calm people’s fears? How can you get them to trust you and can you avoid limiting your market by at least fifty per cent, and maybe a great deal more?
One way is by giving a free sample chapter of your product!
Let us begin our journey to discovery by saying what a sample chapter is and how it can catapult your sales.
Most importantly, a ‘sample chapter’, by definition, is one chapter from a publication containing several chapters. The chapter will probably be provided intact, exactly as it appears in the product from which it came. It might be the first chapter of the book, it might be the last, it could be any chapter.
Regardless of which chapter gets used, offering sample chapters will tempt people to join your mailing list to receive information and advice and eventually get them to trust you and your product recommendations.
Having your own list also means you can continue selling to enquirers and buyers for as long as they remain on the list.
There is no easier way to make money online!
The best way to make your sample chapter
I’ve created sample chapters, reports and also sample highlights of an eBook, and gone on to sell that product with amazing success. I’m convinced the reason I have been so successful is that I’ve always created the sample chapter LONG BEFORE I start work on creating the product itself.
I typically do this by studying other people’s sales letters for similar products to the one I want to create. I’m particularly looking for websites for products I know are getting lots of orders, on ClickBank, for example, or Amazon, and generating the most interest from affiliates at the site. For obvious reasons I don’t want to research sales pages for products that don’t sell particularly well and for which affiliates are thin on the ground.
What I want is proof that my proposed new eBook could make lots of money for me, and what better way to do that than by studying eBooks on similar subjects which are already best sellers?
When I find those eBooks, and their sales letters, usually from studying ‘popularity’ and ‘gravity’ figures at ClickBank – my preferred selling site – and indicating the product’s success rate with readers and affiliates respectively, I study their sales pages in very fine detail. I’m looking for order pulling words and phrases, attention-grabbing symbols and images, fear defeating promises and guarantees.
I’m also looking for clues as to what the book contains. Clues that although incredibly exciting, do not tell the full story and very often leave readers curious and keen to learn more. This element of teasing readers and creating curiosity while preserving some mystery about the book’s contents is one of the most powerful ways to generate orders. And it’s this technique that also turns a sample chapter into a major order-pulling device.
Next I make written notes and take screenshots of the most attractive features of each of my chosen websites, sometimes also blog postings, articles and email promotions for whatever eBooks I’m researching.
Finally, I use the best features in my own sales letter, suitably rewritten of course and using only ideas and concepts belonging to other writers and publishers, not their actual wording and images. That’s because ideas are not copyright protected, so you can copy ideas as long as no trademark or privacy rules are broken. But words and images used to convey those ideas are copyright protected and must not be used by others for gain.
When I’m happy with whatever ideas I’ve gained from sales letters – sometimes by purchasing currently successful books on a subject similar to my own – I begin writing my sales spiel by converting all those other people’s ideas – one by one – into my own words and images.
When my sales letter is finished, it’s turned into a website, and it’s also used as the basis of the first chapter of my book. That first chapter will be as enticing and thought provoking as my website. It will include all the mystery elements from the sales pages I studied earlier and it will urge the reader to finish the first chapter and work fast on reading the rest. And that first chapter will also be used as the sample chapter for growing my mailing list.
So the more enticing, the more cryptic, the more mysterious I can make my sample chapter, the more likely people downloading that chapter will buy the paid-for version by clicking on a link in the sample chapter that takes them to the order page for my product.
And there you have it, a task that probably took just a day or so to perfect, now means you can create your eBook in almost certain knowledge it will make fantastic profits for you!
11th May 2011