Posted by Daniel on November 14, 2008 under Ebook Business | 
By Daniel Moro
If you are setting up an online business then sooner or later you will wonder whether you should be writing and selling your own ebook. Here are 8 reasons why you should do it.
1. Brand Awareness
When you write your own ebook and publish it online, not only is there the prestige of being able to call yourself a book author, there is also an increase in brand awareness.
Your audience will grow to recognize and trust your name, they will perceive you as more of an expert in your topic, and they will be more likely to purchase something from you in the future.
2. Good Prices
If you believe that electronic books always sell for less than their paper counterparts, think again! Ebooks are regularly selling for remarkably high prices.
If you don’t believe me, have a browse at the ebook marketplace at ClickBank. In this marketplace alone there are over 10,000 products for sale and many of them are ebooks priced between $20 and $50.
3. Low Production Cost
Ebooks take an investment of time during the development stage, but once they are finished they don’t cost anything to produce. There is no manufacturing process required.
You simply place the file on a web server so that your customers can download it.
4. Low Delivery Cost
Ebooks are almost free to store and deliver. Have you ever worked in retail? Then you may know what is involved in maintaining a storeroom, making deliveries to customers, handling returns, and keeping track of all the stock.
When you sell ebooks you need not worry about all of that. You don’t need any special storage space in your office. You only need a few megabytes on your hardrive. And you don’t have to worry about any product returns!
5. Instant Delivery
Ebook delivery is instant and, like production and storage, delivery of ebooks costs virtually nothing. Most customers download their ebook from the Internet immediately after completing their payment.
6. High Profit Margins
After reading the reasons given above, you should not be at all surprised to learn that ebooks have very high profit margins. Once the ebook is written the only real cost you will have is a small percentage for payment processing fees.
7. Never Run Out of Stock
You will never run out of stock. That is, unless you accidentally delete your final copy of the ebook… in which case you better talk very nicely indeed to one of the customers who already purchased your ebook.
8. Instant Gratification
Customers love to buy products that they can receive immediately and selling ebooks is a way of providing this instant gratification. They allow you to provide instant information, instant advice and instant solutions to your readers.
As you can see, ebooks are truly a wonderful tool for online businesses. Get started on your own ebook right away.
Posted by Daniel on November 6, 2008 under Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, Web Traffic |
by Daniel Moro
Many affiliate marketers become caught up with identifying and testing new affiliate products and sometimes miss out on the opportunity to maximize profits products which they are already successfully advertising.
A few hours spent optimizing pay per click advertising campaigns can sometimes be a wiser investment of time than continually chasing after new products. There is a time and place for doing that, but my advice to affiliates is to make the most of the good products you have already identified and ‘milk them’ for every dollar that you can.
Recently I went through some of my own ‘successful’ campaigns and I was quite surprised to learn how easily I could increase the performance of each campaign. Almost every campaign became more profitable as I employed a combination of the following techniques. I suggest that you check if any of these might lead to improving the profitability of your advertising campaigns.
1. Increase Your Campaign’s Click-Through Ratio by Split Testing Ads
If other affiliates are promoting the same product at the same pay per click network, then you must make every effort to capture as high a percentage of the available traffic as possible. One of the best ways to get your ad showing instead of your competitors’ ads is to increase the CTR or click-through ratio of your ads. The reason for this is that major advertising networks usually prefer to show ads with good click-through rates.
So how can you increase your click-through ratio? The simplest way is to split test your ad. Always be running at least two versions of each ad. After you see the click-through rates for each version, discard the worst performing ad and write a new one. Keep repeating this process over and over again, improving each time.
A good shortcut is to study your competitor’s ads. Why pay for all the research and testing of ads when other affiliates are doing it already? It is a good idea to monitor other affiliates’ ads for a week or two and note any changes that they make. To see their ads either do a search at Google or use Google’s free AdSense Preview Tool. There are also a number of great competitor analysis tools available on the market.
2. Add Additional Keywords to Increase Traffic
Another way to maximize the revenue from your PPC advertising campaign is to increase your keywords. You can quickly generate large keyword lists using software such as Good Keywords, which is free, or even better, Keyword Elite if you can afford it.
One word of caution. If you add too many keyword phrases that are broadly related to your product, then even though your ad impressions and overall clicks may increase, your sales and commission conversion rates could fall. Take care when adding keywords to add only those keyword phrases that will result in targeted visitors who might purchase the product you are advertising.
3. Consider Targeting Your Successful Campaign to Additional Countries
When you created your original campaign, which geographical settings did you specify? For example, you may have targeted USA only, or North America. Now that your product is proven to be successful in the original region, consider whether people might purchase the product in additional countries. How about United Kingdom and Australia? Depending upon the product you might also discover a good response from Europe, Asia, or even the Middle East.
The key to success here is to test the new market independently, so be sure you have a way to track which countries your commissions are coming from.
4. Replicate Your Successful Campaign on Other Advertising Networks
You have already found a product that converts well when promoting it through one pay per click advertising network. Now replicate that success at the other major advertising networks. I try to replicate every successful campaign at Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing. Due to differences in visitor demographics, traffic quality and editorial policies it is not always possible to get every campaign working successfully at all three networks, but that is always my goal.
These four techniques will make a big difference to the profitability of your affiliate pay per click advertising campaigns, and that’s all without going out and finding another product.
