Advantages of Selling from Your Website
1. You get to improve your daily business cash flow. The Booklocker for example, pays royalties every month. When you receive royalties from Mightywords and most of the other eBook sellers, you usually get paid quarterly. Some eBook sellers only pay you semiannually. I like instant gratification, don’t you?
After all, that is why your readers are downloading your eBooks. They want instant gratification, too. By having your credit card processor deposit money into your business bank account every day, you get instant gratification with each and every sale. This is a great motivator.
2. Your personal website allows you to collect address information of each customer. Once you sell your customer their first eBooks, they are more apt to purchase more eBooks. You collect their e-mail addresses and send them updates. If you are a public speaker as well as an author, you can invite them to hear you speak when you are in their area. You are a celebrity.
3. Collecting data on which kinds of eBooks are of interest to your website visitors will increase your income. I found that by tracking my page hits, I could find out what information my web visitors were interested in and what kinds of eBooks they would actually purchase.
You can set up on-line forms, messages boards, and forums that allow your visitors many reasons to go back to your website. As your web visitors develop confidence in you, they will be more encouraged in placing orders with you.
4. You can offer free updates and information to your readers and distribute that information inexpensively with a website. Having a website is a very low cost proposition. I spend less than $100.00 per month when I include my website costs as well as having two different credit card processors.
When I had an office in Scottsdale, Arizona my costs were almost $1200.00 per month. Now I get so much more for 10 % of what I use to pay and never have to leave my home.
5. You can set up “secret” places on your site that you charge a subscription fee for people to enter. You can have levels of newsletters for example. You can send out a free one and offer a more advanced newsletter or content site on your website that give the reader a great deal more.
You can set up this area to be password protected. Once the reader pays you the subscription fee, permission is granted to enter and download your unique information.
6. Offer free classes and fee classes to your readers. This is a variation of the above point number five. Free classes will allow the reader to get to know your style. Web visitors will be more apt to buy from you or take additional on-line classes, training or telephone consulting.
7. You can offer virtually unlimited text and graphics in describing your eBooks. You can record your voice and give author readings from your website. Many times I have found that the author reading was the key factor in getting the eBook sale.
8. You Can Realize A Greater Return on Investment. Even during the best of economic times, no one eBook seller or eBook publisher will be able to reach all of the eBook buying markets. When you offer eBook selling from your site you get instant feedback on what is working and what is not. You can experiment with offering “specials” that will instantly affect your bottom line sales and profits. Even though operating your own site can be a great deal of work, you can sell a ton of eBooks and keep a bigger chunk of each and every sale.
9. You can react quicker in the Market Place. For example, let’s say a new company called YouandI eBooks comes out with a new software program that compresses video, sound files, and graphics in such a way that your file size never gets over 200k. That will allow you to create eBooks that are full multi-media productions. File size will not be an issue. You will be able to instantly offer a tremendous product to your all of your readers. Maybe the other booksellers and eBook publishers that are selling your eBook have no interest in formatting and using that product. So you can generate a large number of sales by offering it through your newsletters and your website.
I personally sell more eBooks from my site than any combination of all of the other eBook sellers I use put together. People want to obtain their material right from the source if they can. You are the source.
10. You can offer your own affiliate program. With your own website you can offer your own sales affiliate program. Affiliate programs are the reason why Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com do so well selling on the Internet. For more information about offering Affiliate Programs, go to:
clickxchange.com/
www.linkshare.com/
You may purchase Affiliate Program Tracking Software to start your own affiliate program, track purchases and pay commissions by browsing to Marketingtips.com.
www.marketingtips.com
11. Join an existing Affiliate Program. You may want to associate with other big names and other authors by joining sales associate and affiliate programs like Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com. Visitors see major booksellers’ logos and search engines on your website and overcome their fear of ordering from you when they notice brands they are familiar with. It appears that the bookstores are endorsing you! You can feature authors and books that are similar to yours. If someone purchases those books and you have an affiliation agreement set up with an Internet bookseller, you will receive a commission.
Even if you do not want to create the links back to Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com, join their programs anyway. There are Internet Marketing techniques that they share with affiliates that will be located on the corresponding affiliate program pages.
This information is very valuable. You will find links to other places you can post your eBooks as well.
Where do I purchase my website?
Ask people you know who are happy with their websites.
I have listed some reputable website hosts in the resource section or later articles and on this website at:
www.eBook-marketing.com
What do I look for when I purchase my own website?
The following are features you want to insure a great eBook selling website:
1. Toll free technical support. You need this because problems will happen. Its best to get 24/hour 7 day per week toll free service.
2. You need your own domain. A domain is a name you pick like freetosell.com or huas.net. Pick one that is simple for your readers to remember. The shorter the better. For example, barnesandnoble.com added the following domain names to their Internet bookseller. They added “bn.com” and “books.com”
3. E-mail boxes. These are unique e-mail addresses that will have your domain name as the home address. For example: f2s@ huas.net or anythingIwanttowrite@huas.net
4. You want a large number of Autoresponders. Autoresponders are one of the oldest and by far the best marketing tools you can have regardless of what Internet product or service you offer.
Autoresponders work like fax-on-demand systems. Visitors go to your website and notice that they can receive a free chapter of your eBook by clicking on a link. When the visitor clicks on the link, a e-mail software client opens with visitor’s address as the recipient and your e-mail address as the sender.
The visitor clicks “send” in the e-mail client and in a minute a free chapter is sent to the visitor’s inbox.
This is much faster then air delivery. The autoresponder document is delivered with lightning speed. You can load a sample chapter of your book along with complete ordering instructions. You can deliver your newsletters, press kit, articles, or just about any other text information very quickly. You do not have to be present when your reader requests the information.
My host, Godaddy.com gives me unlimited autoresponders for one monthly charge.
5. You want to be able to access daily statistics. You need to track how many web page views. You need to know the number of visitors you receive daily, weekly, and monthly. I know hosting services that don’t allow you to receive daily statistics. Make sure you ask for this feature before you contract for a web hosting service.
6. You want to be able to administer your website, such as checking daily statistics and changing individual pages from any computer in the world. While you are at the Writer’s Conference in Maui learning more about your craft or lying on the Maui beaches, celebrating your good fortune, you may want to check your new orders or add some new products. Make sure your web host allows you access to statistics. Offering a “hit counter” is not enough. You should have very detailed web statistics.
7. You want T-3 line connections by your website host to your website. T-3 lines are fast data transmission lines. Most hosts now use T-3’s.
8. Microsoft FrontPage Extensions support. If you author your Website in Microsoft FrontPage, the extensions will allow you to create interactive forms. Now your website visitors can answer questions on line and give you immediate feedback and marketing information.
9. You want 100MB of storage. I have around a thousand pages on my website and don’t come near that 100MB limit. However, when you add sound files, (your author interview or readings on-line) book covers, and video down the road, you may find that you really do need that much storage. Get more than you need now and you will grow into it.
10. You need support for e-commerce. Many websites now will make provisions for adding on your own store. A store is basically an order button or a shopping cart system that provides for a secured access page on your site. You will still have to apply for your own Merchant Account or a Merchant account processor. I have more information about that and direct links to those sites located in Chapter Seven.
How do I design my website?
Look at other sites that sell eBooks. Check out their index pages. Index pages are the default pages you view when you enter the URL into your browser. Find a site that loads quickly and you can read the information clearly. You may want to copy that design.
A good index page or home page should load at 4.6 seconds at 28.8 speed. Additional pages on the site should be smaller than 40k in size.
Most of my pages are 10k or less in size.
Do I have to learn HTML in order to have a website?
Yes, you will need to know some HTML. You can purchase an HTML editor program like Microsoft’s FrontPage. Look for an editor that claims it is a WYSIWYG editor.
WYSIWYG is an acronym for what you see is what you get. FrontPage looks like Microsoft Word. It will have the same menus and page set up.
As you are typing in the content of your page, HTML is created underneath the document. There is a tab you can select and you can view the HTML and make changes. I would recommend a WYSIWYG HTML editor program to begin your website project.
Learn how to create links in HTML and to create “Bold” and “Italics” text. You need to know how to create paragraphs. You will need this skill when you are adding eBook commentary to Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.
I have a nephew who is a website designer. Should I use him?
I would only use him if he will sit you down and teach you what he knows about web design. Web design can make your site look pretty, or web design can be profitable. Most sites opt to look pretty and most of these millions of websites on the Internet make absolutely no money at all.
A web designer is interested in making the site look great. Most designers don’t have a clue as far as how to bring people to your site and purchase your products.
Also, many times I hear Internet marketing consultants say, “if you don’t want to spend money designing a site, have your 15 year old kid do it.”
Well, if your 15-year-old kid is the top salesman for Realty Executives, Nationwide Insurance, or Johnson and Johnson Medical Products, than yes, I would agree.
Internet website design is all about SALES and very little about design. Remember that 99.9% of all business sites are losing money by having their own website. These are websites that are usually professionally designed by an official web designer.
You can do a great deal better by learning sound Internet marketing techniques and applying those techniques with a simple web design.
What do I need to bring lots of visitors to my site?
The following seven elements are necessary for you to bring visitors to your site.
1. A fast loading home page. It should load at 4.6 seconds with a 28.8bps modem. If you design your home pages and view it with a 56K modem or a cable modem, you will be not be looking at what most of your paying customers are looking at.
Speed decreases over distance due to many technical issues but the one thing to remember is, design your speed to the lowest modem speed available.
Keep away from black backgrounds. The color black is a composite of all of the colors of the rainbow. When someone selects a black background every single pixel or picture cell on your monitor has to be painted, with every single color available.
This takes time. Look at search engine websites. They all have white backgrounds. White, being the absence of all color will help your page load quickly.
Don’t put any photographs or banners on your home page or index pages. If you must have them, place them on separate pages and link them with a text link to your index or home page.
Keep all of the text on your index page above the “scroll line.” Only 30 % of your viewers will look below the scroll line on an index page.
2. Create “Meta tags” for your index pages and all of the pages you create on your site. There is a free website listed that will make Meta tags for your site and send them back to you through your e-mail. Meta tags include information about your site that is classified and used by search engines when people conduct keyword Internet searches.
Here is a brief course: Click on the following website.
www.wayneperkins.net
When you are there, look at your tool bar at the top of your browser and look for VIEW. Then click on VIEW, and PAGE SOURCE, or it may say SOURCE or HTML.
You may want to print this out. You are printing the “PAGE SOURCE” or the HTML.
Now lets look at the META tags.
You will find the following html text near the top of the page.
<head>
<title>Hypnotism Education: How To Hypnotize Yourself On The Internet, Wayne F. Perkins, Hypnotherapist</title>
<meta NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”how to hypnotize, hypnosis, hypnosis bookstore, self-hypnosis, autogenics, books, eBooks, instruction, training, hypnotism forum, fear, phobia, hypnotist, autogenics, bookstore, eBooks, hypnotherapist, digital books, virtual books, rocketbook, softbook, Wayne Perkins”>
<meta NAME=”description”CONTENT=”Hypnotism Education is a site created by Wayne Perkins, Hypnotherapist Free self-hypnosis training and hypnosis scripts for students,largest hypnosis bookstore.”>
</head>
Between the <head> and </head> html tags you will see the <title> </title> html tags.
Just below title but still within the <head> element of the home page you will see a Meta tag called <keywords> and one called <description> and one called <classification>
If you are writing a mystery eBook. Your Meta tags will look something like this:
<Head>
<Meta name=”description” content=”this is a mystery story eBook by author John Doe that takes place in the Western United States in 1880 titled The Strange Cowboy Murder”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”mystery book, eBook, western united states, The Strange Cowboy Murder, 1880 Western America, John Doe, author, cowboys, western lore, stories”>
</head>
NOTE: Use the format with all of the quotation marks and < signs exactly how I placed them. You can use either upper case or lower case lettering in your <tags> Use both upper and lower case in your <key words> and
<description> tags.
The end of the <description> tag always ends with “>
Search engines and directories many times look for these tags in classifying their sites. No tags, no classification.
Now you are going to learn the <keywords> tag. At the end of the keywords tag it will always end with “>
You may have up to 1500 characters in your keywords.
Notice in my example I have several words or phrases separated by commas. Your keywords are anything that appears between those commas, A key word can be a single word or a series of words. Do not use the same word more than 3 times in your keyword section. Search engines may dump them out. They call it, “spamming the page.”
After you are finished with the <keywords> and <description> tags, you can end the whole series, with the </head> tag. This means you have finished the <head> section of the home page or index page.
If you have several pages on your site, each one should have its own <description> and <keywords> tags. Search engines will now find more ways for people to find you.
Your name and book title should be included in the <keywords> tag and the <description> tag.
You can find additional Meta tag instruction at:
www.searchenginewatch.com
3. Start A Free Newsletter. You need a free newsletter to give your visitors a reason to come back often to your website. When your readers subscribe to your newsletter you can include national or international updates in your field, advertising about your eBooks and other interesting information about your eBook genre.
Free newsletters are a great way to obtain repeat buyers. There are websites that will “host” your free newsletter. Some are listed in later articles.
If you are too busy to create your own newsletter, make an agreement with another webmaster to place a subscription button on your website, in exchange for a link back to yours or free advertising in his newsletter. You will be giving your readers more content and the other webmaster more people interested in visiting his site.
4. Begin and maintain an ongoing link exchange program. Your site will not be popular right away. Most websites only get 50 or 60 hits a month in the beginning. Every time you go and look at your site, that counts as a hit. So if you look at your own website once or twice a day, you have accounted for your 50 or 60 hits per month. One way to begin with a bang is to start a link exchange program.
Begin by searching for free information that applies to your book’s subject or genre. Search on Yahoo and other major search engines. When the top 10 search returns come up, send e-mail to the webmasters at each of the websites listed and ask if they would like to add sample chapters of your eBook to offer their readers on line.
In return you need to include the URL of your website, or the specific link to your eBook on Mightywords, 1stbooks
Library, the Booklocker, or Barnes & Noble.
The order URL on your website and on Mightywords.com will experience a rapid increase in the amount of hits.
You will benefit by getting orders. It is easier to get your information published on other high visibility websites than it is to lure everyone over to your website.
Every week conduct additional searches on keywords that you feel other people would use that are interested in your subject and send more content offers to other websites.
You may even offer to publish your eBooks in serial form.
Serial form means that the other websites receive sample chapters each month in return for links to ordering information on your website.
Readers get your eBook little by little. If it looks good, readers will purchase right away rather than to have to wait several months to read the entire book for free.
This is one of the most profitable ways of using your time on the Internet. You won’t have to spend any money on marketing if you keep up this program. You will help websites stay up high on the search return list of major search engines, and the people that do arrive on your site are there for one purpose…to purchase your eBooks!
5. Offer credit card processing for your orders. Without credit card processing, you won’t survive. You can either obtain merchant status with a merchant account or you can have a merchant account processor do the work for you. I actually use both. I love the merchant account processor that processes on-line and in real-time. You don’t need to send them any financial information and you are accepted immediately. CCSLIDE is located at:
www.ccslide.com
They are included in later articles.
Also, you will want to sign up with as many eBook resellers to offer your eBooks as you can find. They will reach markets that you may never find. They will also accept credit cards and perform the entire order fulfillment for your customers.
6. Autoresponders are a requirement! You need autoresponders for your site. Each autoresponder can contain an eBook chapter and ordering information. If you want to see how they work send e-mail to:
autoresp@wayneperkins.net
You will now experience the advantage of using autoresponders.
The e-mail will arrive in your e-mail box within a few minutes. My website host, Valueweb provides me with 500 separate autoresponders for free when I pay them my $19.95 per month for my website-hosting fee.
You can also find free autoresponder host sites that will give you autoresponders even if you have no website. Now that your first eBook is finished, you should sign up for free autoresponders and start giving webmasters the autoresponder addresses so you can deliver free chapters of your eBook. I will list some free autoresponders sites in Chapter Seven.
7. Study and implement website changes every week. Search engines know which websites are changing content on a regular basis. Websites are not static telephone book advertising. The more often you change your site, the higher your site will be mentioned in the search returns for that topic and that is what will make your site popular. Most corporate websites change very little or not at all.
Corporate directors usually don’t realize that a website is a function of sales, marketing and customer service. Since websites have something to do with computers, most corporate directors dump the job in the hands of the IS Department rather then the Sales, Marketing and Customer Service departments.
This may explain why corporate websites perform poorly and are a major disappointment.
