Newbies’ Guide to Niche Marketing

You’ve written and compiled an E-Book. Now you have to decide how much to charge for it. Finding the right price is essential to the success of your product. If you charge too little, people will think it’s of little value, and they won’t purchase it, or even it they do buy your book, you will have to sell thousands of copies to get to the point where you can begin to see a profit. If you price it too high when compared with your competition, you will find yourself steadily lowering the price, which will cause you all kinds of new problems in the future. For example, if you sell your E-Book at first for $39.99, and later reduce it to $24.95, don’t you think the people who bought it for $39.99 are going to be PISSED?

Choosing the right price for your E-Book is one of the most critical parts of the marketing process. The first rule of pricing E-Books is to never underprice. Determine the highest price your audience can afford, and then if you find your book isn’t selling, you can always reduce the price. Before you take that step, make sure you are promoting your book like crazy on the Internet and on websites. The price should be aimed at bringing in profits, but you should never forget that price is one of the factors that people use in judging the value of your E-Book ? before they buy it. So always start with the highest price, and then launch a mega-marketing campaign.

Pricing an E-Book is particularly difficult because E-Books are a fairly new commodity. Since they are digital, the value of an E-Book is as confusing as the understanding of what digital actually is to the average layperson. This means that we must look at E-Books in a different light in order to determine their actual worth in this brave, new cyber world.

Let’s look at the difference between a book in print and an E-Book. A printed book is an object you can hold in your hand, store on your bookshelf, even hand down to the next generation. It is priced on factors such as paper stock, design and production costs, and marketing.

But the fact that unites E-Books and print books is that they are composed of ideas. It is the ideas in these books that have the ability to change, or possibly transform, people’s lives.

What do you think an idea is worth when evaluated against the cost of paper and ink?

It is the IDEAS that are valuable! That is how you determine the cost of your E-Book.

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging. Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photos, graphs, advice, and tips will keep the reader turning the pages. Sidebars are useful for quick, accessible information, and they break up the density of the page.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a formal tone such as textbook diction. Reader’s respond to the feeling that you are having a conversation with them. Break up the length and structure of your sentences so you don’t hypnotize your readers into sleep. Sentences that are all the same length and structure tend to be a good aid for insomnia!

Good writing takes practice. It takes lots and lots of practice. Make a schedule to write at least a page a day. Read books and magazines about the process of writing, and jot down tips that jump out at you. The art of writing is a lifetime process; the more you write (and read), the better your writing will become. The better your writing becomes, the bigger your sales figures.

In an E-Book that is read on the screen, be aware that you must give your reader’s eye a break. You can do this by utilizing white space. In art classes, white space is usually referred to as “negative space.” Reader’s eyes need to rest in the cool white oasis you create on your page. If your page is too dense, your reader will quit out of it as soon as their eyes begin to tear.

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Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This makes your information easy to absorb, and gives the reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs one after the other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font that’s easy on the eyes, and stick to that font family. Using dozens of fonts will only tire your readers out before they’ve gotten past your introduction. Use at least one and a half line spacing, and text large enough to be read easily on the screen, but small enough so that the whole page can be seen on a computer screen. You will have to experiment with this to find the right combination.

Of course, don’t forget to run a spell and grammar check. You are judged by something as minor as correct punctuation, so don’t mess up a great book by tossing out semicolons randomly, or stringing sentences together with commas. (By the way, that’s called a “comma splice.”)

Last of all: create an index and a bibliography. That’s it! You’ve written a book! Now all you have to do is compile and publish your E-Book online, and wait for download request from your website visitors!

Getting your E-Book out is going to be your focus once you’ve finished writing it, just as it is with print books. People will hesitate to buy any book from an author they’ve never heard of. Wouldn’t you?

The answer is simple: give it away! You will see profits in the form of promoting your own business and getting your name out. You will find affiliates who will ask you to place their links within your E-Book, and these affiliates will in turn go out and make your name known. Almost every single famous E-Book author has started out this way.

This doesn’t mean you should stop here. Eventually, you will move into where most of the wealth mountains are – selling them, and then maybe their Resell Rights and Private Label licenses!

Another powerful tool to attract people to your E-Book is to make it interactive. Invent something for them to do within the book rather than just producing pages that contain static text. Let your readers fill out questionnaires, forms, even crossword puzzles geared to testing their knowledge on a particular subject. Have your readers hit a link that will allow them to recommend your book to their friends and associates. Or include an actual order form so at the end of their reading journey, they can eagerly buy your product.

When people interact with books, they become a part of the world of that book. The fact is just as true for books in print as it is for E-Books.

That’s why E-Books are so essential. Not only do they provide a forum for people to learn and make sense of their own thoughts, but they can also serve to promote your business at the same time.

If you haven’t yet heard about AGLOCO, you need to listen up! This new company, founded by a bunch of Stanford MBA students, is creating quite a buzz. Their slogan is ‘Own the Internet’… and that’s what it’s about: you’re getting back some of the money you generate for e-businesses just by surfing as you usually do. Skeptical? Well, here’s why I chose to join:

1) $$$ - I will earn ownership in the company (in the form of shares) and will then begin earning substantial money if this thing blows up (and I have nothing to lose if it doesn’t.)

2) Simplicity - I use the Internet just as I always have… I just get paid to do it!

3) Getting my share! - I like the idea of getting my share of all the billions of wealth being created on the Internet – even if I am not going to be a millionaire because of this.

The company has a very solid privacy structure in place, so your information won’t be shared and you won’t start receiving loads of spam. AND, you can earn for not only the time you spend on the net, but for the time your FRIENDS spend on the net. Think about it: you’re driving users to the site, so the company earns more, and you, in turn, earn more. Fair and square, right? I used the AGLOCO member calculator – I can get over 5,000 shares a month if I sign up 10 good people who recruit more new members; and, once the site has grown enough, I will start earning actual checks.

SIGN UP NOW – this is the key! Remember that you can maximize your earnings by getting referrals to the site… and YOU want to be the one referring everyone!

Here is a link to sign up

Another good point to keep in mind is… your book doesn’t have to be hundreds of pages long. I tend to create short powerful reports because they are quick and easy to produce.

That’s a great way to go, especially if you’re a new marketer and want to get your feet wet.

Best of all, short reports allow you to spread your risk.  Listen, all of your projects will not become home runs. That’s just the reality - of any business - that most of us have to accept.
So, if you invest a lot of time and energy into creating a monster ebook that turns out to be a dud, you would have lost all the time and energy you put into that project… with nothing to show for it.

On the other hand, if you had only spent a few weeks on creating a much shorter ebook which also turned out to be a dud, you could quickly pull that one out and replace it with another short one. Your risks are dramatically reduced and your chances of putting out a winner is increased!

See, it’s better to create 10 little ebooks per year and have 2 of them flop (which means 8 of them are bringing in the cash!) than to only create one or two big ebooks in that same year and risk having them both flop. There is also a much better chance that 1 of your products will be a hot seller if you have 10 of them out there, instead of just one or two.

Think about it!

If you get stuck or lost at any point during the product creation / marketing process, don’t panic. There’s an easy solution!

Just watch what the experts in your field are doing and how they’re doing it. Then do the same thing.

Example: If you can’t think of a great title for your ebook, look at what the experts are doing. Or, go to amazon.com and do a search for books on that subject. Read the titles/headlines and you’ll get some great ideas from there.

Don’t know how to create an outline for your product? Look at how the existing books are formatted.

Having a hard time creating a killer sales letter for your product? Just look at the top sellers and see how they’re doing it. And model yours after the best sellers!

Most of the work has already been done for you. You don’t have to steal other’s work, but you can look at their stuff to get ideas… you can model after the successful ones.

[tags]writing ebooks,internet marketing,make money online[/tags ]

If you have an existing mailing list, tell them about your new ebook first! Offer them the best deal possible – a special offer that no one else will be getting. (You’ve gotta treat your own list the best.)

I would also offer an affiliate program to my customers so they can promote the product to others while they earn a commission.

If you don’t have your own list, the first thing you may want to do is, start sending out ‘joint venture’ offers to other businesses in your field. Offer them a nice-sized commission (at least 50%) and explain to them how they (as well as their customers) will benefit from the deal.

I would send out at least one JV letter, per day!

If all you do is work on striking joint ventures with other marketers and business owners, you will not need any other marketing strategy to pull in amazing profits! Joint ventures are the best thing out there for us writers and marketers — especially online!
You can also use highly-targeted ezine ads to get customers. (Here’s a twist to this technique: instead of targeting customers, target affiliates who will help you sell the product! This strategy can grow your business very quickly!)

Another strategy that can work well for you (if you don’t have an existing customer list) is to write short, focused articles and submit them to targeted ezines. Articles can be a great way to get viral advertising working for you.

There are hundreds of other strategies you can use. However, the ones listed above are some of the best and most effective ones around. You should always go for ‘quality’ traffic verses ‘quantity.’

[tags]internet marketing,promote ebook,JV[/tags]

How do you decide what the best selling price is for your ebook. Surprise, surprise. I just look at what’s already out there. Research is your biggest ally in this business. I look at how much the other sellers are charging for their products. I also look at the sales page to find out what they’re offering in exchange for that price. And whenever possible, I take a look at the actual products others are selling, to see how well they’re done and if they are worth the asking price.

Then, there are several ways you can use that information. Here’s an example…

If most people are charging $47 for the standard info on the subject, you should aim on offering:

a better product/package, and

a better deal/offer.

So, you can either offer the same or similar info for say $39.97… or you can keep the price at $47 but add some valuable bonuses to the package to increase the perceived value of the overall package (or provide additional useful info in your main product that other people are not offering. Make yours better, remember?)

[tags]pricing,ebook,writing,selling ebook[/tags]