Help Stefan CampaignCeltnet WebInfo eZine
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
In This Issue
- Window on the Web
- Featured Article:
eBooks — a Cornerstone of Marketing Success - Classified Ad Board
- Comment
- Business Tip
Top Sponsor
Window on the Web
Most of my income currently comes from AdSense and from adding new content to this site. As a result I almost constantly have to add new 'stuff' to the website, which leaves little or no time to add new content and to advertis the elements of the site. Much of my income is also going to aid my wife and child in Africa so I have little enough money to spare to advertise or to purchase anything for this site. What I have is a true shoestring budget and I need to perform some serious marketing (with no starting capital) to make my life more comfortable. In some ways this is an extreme experiment in how effective various intenet sales and marketing techniques can be.
As you recall from previous postings, I've been converting my site to support my Help Stefan Campaign to gain the money to save the life of the woman I love's father. You can learn more about this in a previous issue (September 04, 2007) of this eZine. What this means for you is that I'm effectively beginning a range of internet marketing strategies 'from scratch'. I'm not a hoarder of information, so I'm more than willing to share the information I glean with you. Everything I find and do will either be published in My Blog, on the Internet marketing information section of my site, in the latest Affiliate Information and Marketing section of the site and in various Celtnet Revews.
The complexity of the site and the use of more extensive linkage between elements of the site has meant a re-design which is why this page now uses PHP rather than HTML as it's coding. This allows my site to be more interactive, and hence better for you, the user. I've also started on a major new venture: Celtnet eBooks Sales and Advertising this section of the site offers cheap eBooks, information products and software for purchase (many for only 99c). I've spent a lot of time designing and re-building the site and if you have an eBook to sell you can upload your information to the site for free (all ask is a link back to http://www.celtnet.org.uk/ebooks/. Why not go to the eBooks advertising registration page now so you can register and upload the sales information for your own eBook? You are allowed to upload an image and a brief description of your eBook as well as a link back to your own sales page.
The entire eBook source code and is also available to you so that you can start your own eBook store. Get the Celtnet eBooks Store code from the link on the left.
Why do this? What's the point you may ask. Well you will see part of the answer below. But for the 'Big Reason' (and it's a very big reason, indeed) you will have to wait until next week's issue of this eZine, when all will be revealed.
Dyfed
Editor/Publisher
Email me @ editor@celtnet.org.uk
To celebrate the launch of my Celtnet eBooks Sales Store I'm offering this week's subscribers to this eZine a very special offer. Subscribe to the eZine and recieve 5 internet marketing eBook free. Each with full resell rights. Just sign-up to this newsletter and announcements below:
Mid Sponsor
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Feature Article
eBooks, a Cornerstone of Marketing Success
by Dyfed Lloyd Evans
E-Book sales remain a booming area in internet marketing and it's one of the main ways by which many internet marketers gain a significant portion of their incomes. Indeed, estimated eBook sales in 2006 being $220 million. This is still small potatoes compared with taditional book sales, but current growth in the eBook sales market leads to an estimated sales value for eBooks of between $3 billion and $5 billion in five years' time.
The arena of eBook (electronic book) publishing, actually of electronic publishing in general is a booming one. The market is ever expanding and the number of new products being introduced is increasing at an exponential rate. Electronic books are also becoming more accepted and understood. This means that the market is maturing and potential purchasers are far less wary than they were of such 'virtual' products. After all, you can download an electronic book to your hard drive, save it to a DVD or CD for safe keeping you can even up-load to your phone or PDA or you can (horror of horrors), print it out on paper at home.
This acceptance of electronic media by end users is what's driving the boom i eBook publishing and sales.
So, how do you get yourself a slice of this lucrative (and growing) market?
There are two main ways here. Firstly you can create your own document. This means researching a market area, writing your ideas into your favourite text-editing application and then turning that document into an electronic book of some form. It can be as easy as writing everything in MS Word and then exporting or saving your final document in PDF format. PDF stands for 'Portable Document Format' and is a standard originated by Adobe corporation for the free exchange of documents over the internet. As long as you have Adobe's free 'Adobe Reader' software on your system you can read PDF documents. PDFs also allow you to lock your documents so that they are still readable but the content cannot be copied or altered in any way without a password or permission. Very important if you want to protect your intellectual property rights.
If you are more serious about creating electronic documents then you may want to splash-out on professional quality page layout applications such as Quark Express or Adobe's In Design. These are expensive but they are worth it in terms of how the final document behaves and feels. These are the applications to go for if you want a truly professional look and feel for your final product.
Once you have your document written and exported in PDF format then you have a real product that you can sell or give away... Give away? I hear you ask in horror. Yes, give away... Remember you're in the area of internet marketing now and you've probably heard of something called 'Viral Marketing'. Here you embed links to your products and sites within the electronic document you've just generated. You then give away the eBook to subscribers to your newsletter, for example or you give it away to site that allow cheap or free eBook downloads. This way the information about your site and products is disseminated through the document you've just written. This is a very cheap form of advertising that can be very effective.
If you have written a large eBook, possibly a novel, an analysis of a marketing area, a recipe book construction manual or any kind of document that you think has a large and lucrative market then you will want to think about selling this product of yours for a profit. You can obviously create a 'splash page' on your website and place sales copy there. But if no-one knows about the product you're attempting to sell your sales will be disappointing at best. This is where certain eBook sales sites can help. Many of these sites offer free advertising on their sites. Usually for the cost of a link to the site you can upload information about your electronic product as well as a link back to your sales page. This means that your eBook gets seen by people who are looking for such products and you get a link back to your site (always good for Google ranking). Of course you will still need to market your product by the usual methods such as PPC advertising.
Many eBook sales sites also allow you to upload your product to their sites. They either ask for an insertion fee or they ask for a profit sharing system where part of the proceeds from any sale made on their site goes to them and part goes to you (some ask for both). This can bee good for you as these large sites have more advertising muscle than you do.
Even if you're not into eBook production and marketing in a big way setting-up a small store on your website (even if you're almost give away your products) remains a good way of gaining a residual income for yourself.
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About the author:
Dyfed Lloyd Evans
Do you wirte eBooks? Do you market eBooks? Do you want your own eBook store? If you have answered 'yes' to any of these questions then you have to visit the Celtnet eBooks. Here you can get the code to set-up your own eBook store, you can market and publicize your eBooks and you can even get help to sell your eBooks. Every resource for eBook authors all in one site.
Classified Ad Board
Is your ad out yet? Subscriber and co-op ads are listed on the Classified Ad Board. The board is refreshed every issue with a new batch of ads.
Comment
Marketing with Information Products
Much of this week's eZine deals with eBooks and information products. These are turning into the cornerstone of many marketers' sales initiatives and the basis for many products. This is especially important if you have a content rather than an affiliate-based website because you can turn your content in to eBooks. In effect you can make them into marketable products. This way you don't have to rely on revenue streams such as Google's AdSense as you can market your own products yourself (and keep all the profits).
As part of my Help Stefan Charity campaign I've been doing just this with various regions of my site. This has led to the following information products:
- The Recipes of Africa. This eBook takes you throug the recipes of every region and every country on the continent of Africa giving you over 800 recipes and covering more than 60 countries and/or regions.
- Cooking with Spices eBook. This is a guide to 57 spices from around the world (some common, some not) which includes 233 recipes on 303 pages. You also get a guide to creating restaurant-quality curries at home.
These eBooks are also available in my Recipe eBooks store.
- Build and Upgrade your PC eBook. This is a pictorial guide 144 full-colour pages with a full index that gives you a guide on how to upgrade your PC and what each and every component in you PC does.
Again, this eBook is also available in my Computers and Internet eBook store.
- The Secret of Mazimizing your Web Traffic. An eBook that tells you in plain terms the strategies and secrets that I've personally used to dramatically grow (almost 30x increase) the traffic to this very website.
Again, this eBook is also available in my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) eBook store.
- 'Memories of Myth and Man' Poetry eBook. I'll admit that this is a bit of an oddity as it's a selection of my various poems (the ones which are most popular) offered for $5 as part of the 'Help Stefan' campaign.
Again, this eBook is also available in my Poems and Poetry eBook store.
Why am I giving you this sales pitch? Well, for one reason I want to show you the types of eBooks that can be produced by a content based site (I'm currently turning my Dissasembling the Mororola Razr V3 into an eBook and I'm doing the same with the contents of my Guide to Herbs into another eBook.
Once you have your eBooks you need to sell them. This is one reason I generated an eBook Sales site so that I could sell these eBooks myself and pocket all the profits. Then, using my Blog and my Celtnet Reviews site (which has an automated RSS feed which is pinged to the main Blog sites) as well as submitting to article sites I'm getting some nice publicity.
As you can see, there's a strategy here and it's all aimed at generating maximum profit. Though I must say that it's not with minimum effort as I've basically poured my heart and soul into these eBooks. They're proper books with content pages and indexes as well as images and decent layout (OK, I used to be a magazine editor so I know about these things!). My problem is that I'm obsessive about these things so what I've really produced are publication quality books rather than the run of the mill ebooks. But you don't have to use my production values!
But you're not limited to these kinds of high-quality products. You can write small how-tos and you may even give these products away. This can help disseminate information about your site and your products. Remember you can even embed links in PDF books so you can sell affilate products through these links. Large eBook sites (such as mine) may even allow you to submit these free eBooks or leaflets to then for dissemination (mine certainly does).
Business Tip
Running an eBook Store
As with any store or shop the main strategy with an eBook store is to keep adding new content as regularly as possible. I aim to add at least 10 items every day (at least 50 a week). This keeps the store growing and keeps the visitors coming to find new things. But how do you find new products at attractive prices?
This is a real problem. You can get your basic inventory from sites selling store code (my Store Code Product comes with 0, 25, 70 or 150 products for you to buy. But once you've purchased your initial base products it becomes more and more difficult for you to get new content. Part of the solution lies with generating your own content. Whether that's eBooks, code snippets or graphics. But this is long and laborious.
You can grab free content from a number of sites, be that eBooks, poetry, or software. Just make sure that these are PLR (private label rights) products or come with full resale rights.
You can join a niche site such as: Get Fresh, Professional, Effective Content Here: niche-content-packages.com
You can buy individual products (for as little as 99c) from my Celtnet eBooks Store.
You can use eBay to search for PLR Products and/or Resell Rights Products (and you can usually buy products very cheap).
A search on Google for terms such as 'Free eBooks' or 'resell eBooks' will also reveal a whole host of potential products. The same is true of places such as 'Project Gutenberg' where you can find the text of out-of copyright books that you can use as the basis for generating an eBook that you can then sell on your own site.
