Quick, easy and affordable tips to marketing your ebook!
by Scott Rauber
Leverage Your Time With Affiliates (and sell more ebooks)
One of the most exciting breakthroughs ever on the World Wide Web was the capability of selling products through others, and paying a commission if and when the product sold. It’s called affiliate marketing. Affiliate programs exist for almost every product under the sun. However, in this chapter, we’ll focus on selling your e-book through other affiliates.
This type of marketing allows you to offer your e-book to the world of affiliates who agree to place merchant promotions on their website(s), e-mails, signatures on forums, etc. They do this in the form of graphic or text links for the purpose of selling a merchant's goods and/or services. In return, commissions can be earned, which vary by merchant, on click throughs, leads, or purchases made through the links.
Affiliate marketing is simply this: The point of affiliate marketing is two-fold. What’s in it for you? You’ll sell more of your products because others, as affiliates, sell them. What’s in it for them? Your affiliates now have an opportunity to earn income by simply placing a coded link to your product. (The link tracks the sale). It’s a win-win for both parties. Your efforts are duplicated substantially by affiliates placing links to your product on their website, in forums, in outgoing emails, etc.
Imagine for a minute that you have accumulated 10 affiliates who offer your e-book on their site. Now your product is exposed 10 times more than it would have been if it were just on your site. That’s potentially 10 times the exposure of your product at no cost to you. Imagine if you had 100 or 1000 affiliates! Shoot, I’m getting excited just writing this!
Your affiliates will be enthusiastic about the earning potential, without any financial investment, by simply placing links on their site. You’ll see exactly what I mean if you visit my site where I sell others’ products as an affiliate for them. In each case, I am the affiliate and will earn a commission if the product sells. Click on this link: http://www.fishforfree2.com/other.html
You’ll see the products I currently offer. If you click on any of these, you’ll see they take you to a different page where the individual can complete a purchase, but the link to their product is tracked to me by an affiliate code. If the sale is made, I earn a commission. If no sale is made, I don’t earn anything and more importantly I haven’t invested anything more than the time it took to create those special coded links that track to me on my site.
On to you and affiliate marketing.
You’ll need to have your website completed. Next, make your product available to others so they can sell it and earn a commission. There are two services you can use to make your e-book available to thousands of potential affiliates. In either of the two recommended sources, you will have to determine how much an affiliate can earn if and when they sell your product. Let’s say you are selling your e-book for $37.00.
You predetermine how much of that $37.00 you are willing to part with in the event that one of your affiliates makes a sale. Whether it is $5.00, $10.00 or $18.00, the more commission you offer, the more affiliates you will attract.
1) Paylodz.com
By now, you’ve probably signed up for a Payloadz.com account. If you haven't yet, click HERE
This is the most logical option to using their affiliate services. Anyone who is interested in selling your e-book as an affiliate only needs a Paypal® account and an email address to sign up. Be sure to read the free Payloadz.com Users Manual for details. To see how simple the process is to become an affiliate, you can check out my affiliate sign up link by visiting this page on my site: http://www.fishforfree2.com/earn_income.html I don’t expect you to sign up as an affiliate for this product but you can see exactly how easy it will be for YOU to offer the option to others who may have an interest in selling your product so they can earn some extra money.
A code is generated which will track your affiliates. In turn, they will copy and paste that code wherever they like and when a visitor clicks on it, the Payloadz.com system will trace the click to them and to your product.
If and when an affiliate of yours makes a sale through the Payloadz.com program, you and the affiliate will receive an email notification that a sale has been made. It’s exciting to get those types of e-mails! This is where you come in. It’s your responsibility to save the “affiliate sale” email so you can pay the commission promised.
It’s important to note that even though the Payloadz.com affiliate system is very simple to use for everyone involved, you are responsible for paying your affiliate. Payloadz.com handles the immediate download, corroborates the payment through Paypal® and sends you a notification instantly when a sale has been made, but you must deliver the payment to your affiliates because Payloadz.com does not do that. I pay my affiliates on the last day of each month so I don’t forget and my affiliates know when to expect payment because I have that system in place. Having a set day to pay your affiliates may help you as well.
2) Clickbank.com
Another very popular option where you can obtain affiliates to sell your product is Clickbank.com.
Clickbank.com is huge! Not only do they offer you a platform for making your product instantly downloadable, but they also attract affiliate opportunity seekers by the hoards. Website owners, who take advantage of affiliate opportunities, flock to Clickbank.com. There they discover electronic products they can offer to their site visitors. This is exciting for authors like us because we can instantly place our creation in front of these affiliate marketers.
As mentioned earlier, in order to sell your e-book through Clickbank.com you’ll need to set up an account and then pay a set up or activation fee of $49.95. You can check out the details by clicking HERE
There are similarities between Payloadz.com and Clickbank.com. However, one thing that Clickbank.com does is they take care of paying your affiliates. You don’t have to be concerned with that aspect of affiliate marketing and selling.
Whatever option you choose, or if you choose both, affiliate marketing offers can dramatically leverage your time and income. Give it your attention.
For information on affiliate marketing check out http://www.associateprograms.com
and http://www.abestweb.com/ .
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Marketing with an E-newsletter
Who? Me?
I had heard about this venue a number of times, but what kind of content did I have for an e-newsletter? Then all of a sudden – BAM! An idea hit me. When it did, a friend of mine recommended Vertical Response to me. I’ll tell you more about their product and services near the end of the chapter.
Most of us are signed up to a number of e-newsletters. I know I am. Have you ever thought of their selling potential? Probably not. Why? Because you’re reading them—not using them as a sales tool. An e-newsletter is often referred to as an e-zine – short for electronic magazine. Instead of publishing and printing an actual magazine that is delivered by the United States Post Office, you simply deliver it through e-mail periodically. E-zines can be delivered to your e-mail inbox on a monthly, bi-monthly, weekly, and sometimes even daily basis.
Before I delve into the specifics of creating an e-newsletter you should sign up for the Small Business Brief e-newsletter at http://www.smallbusinessbrief.com . You should also sign up for the Site Pro News newsletter at http://www.sitepronews.com Both newsletters are loaded down with good, solid helpful information.
Now, on to the power of e-newsletters…
Have you ever seen those ads on a site where the author claims to have made $42,356.47 in 24 hours? Me, too. Well, the truth behind the promise to a get rich advertisement is, it actually may have happened, and if it did, it more than likely it happened by using an e-newsletter. Skeptical? Just stay with me for a minute.
If someone has a subscriber list of over 90,000 e-zine subscribers (yes, there are some that big and bigger) and someone else has a product to sell which just might fit the profile of those 90,000 subscribers, a joint venture may be feasible. Simply put, an arrangement is made to split the profits 50/50 from the sales made. Can it really be that simple? Read on.
The owner of the subscriber list agrees to offer the other individual’s product in his next monthly newsletter. If 2% of the 90,000 subscribers purchase the $79.00 product, that works out to be $142,200 and half of that is $71,100 Quite enticing – don’t you agree?
Can you see how the possibility of making that kind of money—quickly—can be possible with an e-zine? I know you may not have an e-zine just yet, but others do. And others have subscriber lists in the thousands. Is it possible that they may be interested in offering your product to their list if they can make that kind of money? Obviously if they were interested, you would be, too!!
You’re probably wondering how, where, what, when, etc., etc. right? Hang tight.
The power behind an email newsletter is simply this: you can contact your list of subscribers with a click of the mouse. It doesn’t get much easier than this! Of course, first you’ll have to build a list of subscribers.
In order to create your own e-zine and attract subscribers, follow the steps and tips below.
1) An e-mail marketing service that creates and delivers email marketing solutions. I have found the services of Vertical Response (http://www.verticalresponse.com) to be very comprehensive. They help build your email lists (subscribers), publish your newsletters, and manage your email marketing campaigns. But don’t take my word for it, visit their website and take the tour – I did. Before I made a decision to use Vertical Response, I took the entire tour. These are some I’ve heard of but have not utilized their services for my e-newsletters: - http://www.constantcontact.com - http://www.aweber.com - If you have a web site with Godaddy.com they have an email service as well – http://www.godaddy.com Check out all of them and choose whichever one you feel is the best fit for you.
2) Subscribers
The first thing I would recommend is signing up for Christopher Knight’s e-zine and getting his Top 16 Ways To Grow An E-mail List - http://emailuniverse.com/subscribe
You can also submit your e-zine to an e-zine directory: http://www.ezinelinks.com/indexu/index.php
You can submit your e-book here as well: http://www.jogena.com/
When you submit your e-zine to a directory you stand a chance of others visiting the directory site, scanning through the lists of e-zines and possibly subscribing to yours.
The way I have attracted most of my subscribers is through message boards or forums. In most, but not all, I was a paying advertiser on the site so I was pretty much allowed to post whatever messages I wanted – as long as they were ethical. Using this technique, in the first 2 months I signed up over 650 people to my SPONSORSHIP NEWSLETTER (pertains to the fishing industry and sponsorship). That’s 10 per day! So if you participate on message boards and forums, you can always email the webmaster and ask permission to make a post announcing your new e-newsletter or e-zine. It’s a great way to increase your exposure.
3) Content
What the heck is content? I asked that question when I first began. Unlike me, you may already know what I’m talking about. Content is what’s IN the e-zine. It’s the information, the articles, the pictures, the tips, - it’s the words. What you are reading right now is CONTENT.
In order to have content for your e-zine, you can get it pretty much without any trouble. The way I create content for my e-zine is by interviewing others and posting my questions and their answers in the body of the newsletter. If you don’t want to conduct interviews, that’s fine. You can write articles. You can elaborate on certain points in your e-book without giving away the farm.
If you don’t want to do any of the above, you can take the easy way out and print others’ articles in your newsletter).
That’s right. As long as you don’t change any of the information or contact information in someone else’s article – you can use theirs. Just be sure to give them the credit for writing it.
There are hundreds of sites that offer free articles for you to use. Just go to the three major search engines (MSN, Yahoo, Google) and search for free e-zine articles and you’ll have enough content to last for years to come. You can view and obtain articles from these huge article sites for beginners:
http://ezinearticles.com/
http://www.contentarticles.net/articles/
http://www.articlegeek.com
Now, it’s time for you to ask the BIG question: What’s in it for me?
Have you had that thought cross between your ears yet?
When you have your own e-zine, you have the opportunity to sell your product. Case in point. When I send out my monthly e-zine—THE SPONSORSHIP NEWSLETTER—I always include links to my e-books: http://www.fishforfree.com http://www.fishforfree2.com
Usually I will include links to others’ products that I am affiliated with. In other words, an e-zine provides the opportunity to contact several hundred, possibly several thousand, of your subscribers in a click of a mouse, presenting them the venue to purchase. Almost forgot…one more thing…………….. You can sell advertising space to others in your e-newsletter! Cha - ching!
Maybe one day you’ll have so many subscribers someone will contact you and ask if you would like to split 50/50 on the products you sell for them through your e-zine! It can happen! I told you this e-newsletter thing was BIG, didn’t I?
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