While you are creating e-books, it’s important to write a quality e-book. Thin, skimpy e-books aren’t effective - you want something meaty to offer your readers. A truly great e-book is filled with information, with enough bulk to keep your audience satisfied.
Skinny e-books that have little information are often returned, eating away at your profits. On the other hand, an e-book with strong content increases reader satisfaction, which means more profits and fewer refunds. You want to offer a strong, beefy e-book, one that is loaded with value for your clients. So how can you put your PDF e-books on steroids for better performance? Read on, and I’ll show you!
To start, add a table of contents (TOC). This helps your readers to find the information that they want, while adding two or three pages to the total length of your document. Not only is a TOC valuable to your readers, it’s easy to create one - most word processing programs can generate one automatically.
Second, add a list of resources in the back. All of the web sites, blogs and forums you visited to research your ebook should be put in a resources section in the back. You can also put all of the print books that you find helpful as well. Face it. There are tons of resources dealing with the topic of your ebook that you know and your customers don’t. List those and you will provide a valuable service for them.
For your readers, I suggest you include a list of:
- List of books on your topic
- List of magazines on your topic
- Videos online at YouTube and similar sites;
- Web sites;
- User forums and user groups; Blogs (your own or those of others);
For each link, include a short description of the resource to help your readers further. Tell them what information they can find using that link, and how it can help them. This adds more value than a simple list of links, with no rhyme or reason.
Stay tuned for my next article, when I offer three great strategies to bulk up your e-book, increase customer satisfaction, and improve sales. By publishing ebooks with loads of content, you make it an irresistible value.
Consider the products and services offered by your website and then use your imagination to create a fun contest that will appeal to the average customer you will be targeting with this promotion.
If your website is devoted to parenting issues, you could hold a contest where entrants describe their funniest parenting mishap or the most embarrassing thing their children said in public, etc.
Contests can also be used in conjunction with the release of a new product. Suppose you had a website for busy women which offers tips on how to manage time better and that you were preparing to present a new product that discusses what to do to make it through the holidays. A possible contest that you could hold is asking for funniest Thanksgiving food disasters or best tip for holiday shopping time-saving.
Contest prizes can be arranged by owners of other websites or can come from your very own products and services. If you choose to go with a different website for prizes, you won’t have to spend any money on them and the other website’s owner will probably be happy to receive some free publicity. If you do this, be sure to mention the name of the provider of the prizes on your website.
For the less creative, simply asking for visitors to submit their personal information and holding a giveaway choosing a random winner from the submissions is still a great idea. You can use the same system for prizes that was outlined in the previous paragraph.
A giveaway can also be used to increase your customer retention. If you have a service- based business, such as virtual assistance or graphic design, you could hold a monthly drawing and each time one of your customers paid for a service that month, they receive an entry form. For example, if a client paid for three graphics that month, they would be entered three times. Your customers may want to win a prize so bad, that they keep buying your services each month just to have a chance at winning.
To be successful, you’ll want to promote your contest as much as possible. You’ll want to send a notice to your mailing list as well as putting information about the contest on the main page of your website and blog. If you offer a podcast, make sure you mention it to your listeners.
A large number of other sites will allow you to advertise your contest with them as well. Google “contest submission sites” to get a hold of some good possibilities. Press releases can also be well utilized to stimulate interest for your event.
Giveaways and contests can boost the amount of traffic your website receives, greatly benefiting your business. As you use them, think about the results and how you can adjust your ideas in an attempt to match your customers’ interests as well as possible.
Listening to some internet marketers lately, I get the impression that a lot of people are feeling discouraged over the results they are getting (or not getting) and wonder if they should give it all away.
Usually, the first thing new marketers come across when starting out, is all the hype about how much you can make online - IF - you buy this or that e-book or course. There are so many sales pages, email lists/newsletters and sales pitches coming in to our lives on a daily basis. It is a natural tendency to believe everyone else can do it, and do it well, but we struggle by comparison.
If you are feeling like this, I can empathize. I have felt that way lots of times. Then I realized what I was doing to myself. I was comparing myself to those marketers in the ‘Internet Marketing’ niche. It’s a huge niche, but it is also very competitive. They are the marketers that are hitting me everyday with this or that offer of the latest and greatest way to make money on-line.
The thing is, they are mostly selling me products FOR the IM niche and unless you are really into that niche yourself, they are not the products that relate to what you are doing.
They show you pictures of stats, transaction details and testimonials to try and convince you that they know what they are doing, and how you can do it too.
But, does what they are marketing help you right now with what YOU are doing?
Comparing ourselves to these marketers is counter productive to our motivation and mindset. We don’t need to do any comparisons, because they are not relevant.
2008 is the year of Web 2.0, selling REAL products to REAL customers. It isn’t going to be an instant million dollar business that we build. Just like in the off-line world, it takes time to build a following, trust and respect from prospective customers. We need to look at branding ourselves, becoming the person-to-go-to for the particular advice, information or product in OUR niche. Using all the Web 2.0 tools and applications to help us establish ourselves in the on-line market place.
It really upsets me when I hear the discouragement of others who are really working hard to make a go of it. The Internet is a worldwide marketplace. In other words, it’s unlimited. We have the tools and knowledge to make a very profitable business with our own niches. Stop looking at what the IM’ers are doing in their niche and concentrate on your own business.
Stick at it, add quality content - people WILL find you if you are honest, consistent and have a quality product. Don’t get discouraged just because you didn’t make your fortune this week. Your business and customer list will grow in time if you work at it.
Too many people give up and leave a potentially successful business in the sandbox. Stay focused on what you believe is a good niche, add to it, grow it, develop it over time. Above all, DON’T compare your efforts to those of the IM’ers who are hitting your inbox every day raving about their results.
We all need and want help and advice. We all need to learn. Things never stay the same on the internet and this year is a new learning curve for all of us.
There are plenty of FREE learning resources out there - and tools too. Spend an hour a day learning or using something new and see if you can apply it to your marketing efforts. Then spend another 2-3 hours developing your products. Stick at it and you will be successful.
I want to start sharing some information about using the great resources that are out there over the next few months, so stay tuned. There are some killer (free) tools right under our noses!
Til next time,
Stay Cool,
Sharon
If you have been in the Internet Marketing game for very long, you will have heard a lot about how important it is to TEST different elements of your landing and sales pages to get the most out of you traffic.
There are some good programs out there that will help you to do that, BUT did you know that GOOGLE has a FREE multi variate testing tool that does an excellent job of this for you?
Why purchase expensive software when the tool you need is already available for FREE???
What does this tool do you ask? Well, it allows you to set up a main page, and rotate different sections of that page to test to see which combination is more effective.
This is what Google tells us about it:
Website Optimizer works by testing different versions of the content on your live site to see what will lead to the highest conversion rates. We’ll guide you through the process of setting up an experiment to test your content by following these steps.
- Pick a test page and a conversion page.
- Tag both these pages with experiment tags we provide.
- Push the tagged versions of your pages live. (Your users won’t see any changes yet.)
- Once your pages are tagged, you or your marketing team can make the rest of the changes without technical help from within the tool.
- Add different variations of content you’d like to test into the Website Optimizer tool.
- Preview the variations on your test page within the tool. (You can have your team preview them too.)
- Launch the experiment.
- When your test page is opened in a browser, the experiment tags on your page will contact Website Optimizer and request for a set of variations to display on the test page.
- When a user visits your test page, they will see one combination of your content variations. (We make sure users will see the same combination even if they visit the test page more than once.)
- If the user proceeds to your conversion page, we’ll record a conversion.
- Soon after your experiment launches, we’ll begin to provide you with reports about performance of your test content.
Use the results to make educated decisions about your test page. When we have collected enough data, the results will be available within your account.
You can test different headlines, layouts, elements of the page etc and you get extensive reports on which combinations result in the best performance.
Check it out now by going to Google and adding Website Optimizer to your account.
Why pay for something you can get for free?
Internet marketing legend FRANK KERN grills Clayton Makepeace to discover …
- How he creates e-mail sales campaigns that generate up to $80 million in online sales each year …
- Two essential components of every great e-mail sales campaign …
- The missing ingredient that makes his e-mail copy up to four times more profitable than even the top online marketing gurus’ …
- The massive business opportunity the biz-op experts are completely missing now — and how it could make you millions in 2008 and 2009 …
- And much more!
Dear Business Builder …
I’ve been hearing about and watching Frank Kern work for over a year now and so has pretty much everyone else.
The guy is astonishingly prolific … a leading light in the Product Launch Formula arena … and a darned good copywriter in his own right.
Plus, Frank is known for having the most outrageous sense of humor in the entire online marketing space.
You’ll hear at least one idea in this interview that could make you richer than Midas in the next 12 months.
So, pour yourself a cup-o-Joe, crank up your computer speakers, click the play button below, and then sit back and enjoy!
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 6 or above) is required to play this audio clip. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Attribution Statement: This article was first published in The Total Package.
To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package and claim four FREE money making e-books go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.
The Fastest, Easiest Way to Launch Your New Info Product, Send conversions Through the Roof, and Multiply Your Opt-ins. All at the Same Time!
Getting a new product ready to market is just the first step.
Then you have to actually create a sales site that will handle payments and automate the delivery of your new product. There are more pieces to a good sales system than most people realize.
- Do you need a payment processor? (or a merchant account?)
- Do you have a way to protect your downloads?
- If you don’t already have a HUGE, responsive list…
Can you recruit and pay affiliates?
What about JV Partners? - Do you have a way to collect follow up info from customers?
- Do you have a back-end product - or a One-Time Offer?
- Will your Sales Page convert? How can you test it?
It could be a little overwhelming! (gross understatement)
That’s why you need to check out this new software that just a few people have even discovered yet.
It’s called Rapid Action Profits, and it’s an all-in-one marketing system that controls lead capture, split-testing, payment processing, affiliate payment, secure downloads, one-time offers, and much more. It installs easily and you can put it on as many sites as you want!
I’m going to keep this short, because I have no doubt that you are going to want this the moment you see it… especially when you see the price!
Whether you have your own product, or a hard drive full of PLR or Resale Rights products and have been looking for a way to get them out into the marketplace making you money… the answer is as plain as the nose on your face.
RAPID ACTION PROFITS
Do us both a favor, and check this out right now!
To your success.
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