How To Sell Your eBook Online

Hi there, if you are reading this it is probably because you are either in the middle of writing your eBook, finished writing it or just getting started and you are wondering about the next step – how to sell your eBook online. Well, you came to the right place. In this post, I’ll show you how to set up your own blog that will be your tool for creating a raving crowd.

.

 Why Do I need a blog? Why not just (only) use Amazon?

If you haven’t published your eBook yet, you probably wonder why not JUST publish it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or any other major eBooks platform and let their huge traffic do the work for you…(if you tried it already, you do not wonder anymore… 🙂 ). And the answer is simple – check the numbers!

According to TechCrunch, there are more than 3.4 million! eBook on Amazon and there is one new eBook on Amazon every five minutes. Even if you narrow down to one category there are 1,000’s that you need to compete with and overcome in order to be on the first page.

For example, check the following search for eBooks about ‘Gardening’:

There are 400 pages with 20 books on each page!

So what do you do? You promote your eBook online OUTSIDE of Amazon using your own blog and either sale the eBook on your blog directly, steer the interested buyer DIRECTLY TO YOUR EBOOK PAGE on Amazon or preferably…both. You see, even the famous best-selling authors are still going on a roadshow promoting their new book once published, needless to say, that you need to do so as well.

Luckily for you, you do not need to go on an expensive roadshow in order to promote your eBook since you can harness the power of the internet to promote and sell your eBook online for free.

In the next few lines, I’ll walk you step by step how to set up your own blog in less than five minutes. So you will be able to generate leads for your eBook. If you already have a blog, you can follow as well or skip to the next part where I explain the main big mistake authors do while writing in their blog and how to avoid it.

For setting up the blog I’ll use SiteRubix which is part of the Wealthy Affiliate platform (you can get your free account here).
The main two reason I use this platform are:

1. It is free!
2. It has a huge friendly community that responds to ANY question submitted (technically related or marketing related) in matters of minutes! Which is very important if you are just getting started in marketing online. You don’t want to wait days to receive an answer when you’ll get stuck or want some advice.

How to set up your blog on the SiteRubix platform – step by step guide

1. Register to get your free account here.
   .
2. Choose a name for your blog. Obviously, you’ll want to use your eBook name or your pen name (if you have more than one eBook to promote).
   .
3. Login to the platform, go to SiteRubix menu and choose SiteBuilder to setup your blog:
   .
   .
4. On the next screen choose the left option – “On a free domain” (as a free user you can build up to 2 websites for free):
   .
   .
5. Choose a domain name and a title for your website (‘gardening for beginners’ in the example below) and choose a theme. You can narrow the available themes for just the relevance using the search box (I used ‘garden’ in the example below):
   .
   .
6. And that’s it! you are ready to create your blog – just click the green button!
   .

The main big mistake authors do while writing in their blog

Now, before you start writing posts promoting your eBook, I want to explain something. Although writing a post is very much like writing an eBook, there is one slight (crucial) difference.

In your eBook you need to be interesting, so your readers will be engaged, read the eBook completely and write good recommendations on Amazon (or any other platform you are using).

It is the same when writing a post – you need to be interesting and engaging so the readers will decide to buy your eBook.

BUT, you ALSO need to be “interesting” enough for Google/Bing/Yahoo search engines so they will index your post and show it in a relevant place on their search results. Otherwise, no one will even get the chance to read your post, needless to say, prompted to buy your eBook.

If you already have a blog and it doesn’t yield the traffic you were hoping to get, that might be the reason.

How do you write in a way that Google/Bing/Yahoo will show you their love

The good news is that you do not need to change your writing style for that. You just need to be more aware to the keywords that you choose for your post title and for the keywords you use in the post itself.

Let’s continue our former example – say that your eBook is about gardening, and it is called “Gardening for beginners”. Most of the authors will use the name of their eBook as the title of their post. That is a valid option, but you have to check two things first:

1. The potential traffic – how many people are actually searching for this term.
2. The competition – how many websites are out there already with this exact term.

In our example, using the eBook name (“Gardening for beginners”) will be a huge mistake. I will use a tool called ‘Keywords tool’ (which is also part of the Wealthy Affiliate platform) to show the potential traffic and competition:

.

As you can see although there is a massive traffic (searches) for this term there is also a huge competition (QSR – How many websites you need to compete with and overcome in order to be on the first page). For a just starting blog, you don’t want to go over 100 in QSR and the lower the number – the better.

But if we scroll a bit down the list, we’ll find a very similar term with less competition:

Keep digging and you’ll find:

You might argue that it has much smaller traffic, but keep in mind that huge traffic won’t help you if your post is ranked on the 3rd page of google search results. And by the way…any keyword term with at least 50 searches a month is good enough to start with (don’t forget you can use more than one keyword in your post).

The ‘SiteRubix’ platform and the ‘Keywords tool’ that I was using here are just two tools from the Wealthy Affiliate platform. You can register for free (no credit card needed) to this platform and enjoy from more training and tips like I shared in this post. You can register for free at the Wealthy Affiliate platform directly over here. Or if you want to learn more about this platform first, you can read my full review over here.

If you have any question, you are welcome to ask in the comment below.

To your success!

-Nahum

* Image courtesy of Stuart Miles’s at FreeDigitalPhotos.net