Promoting your ebooks: Does Giving Away Information Hurt Your Sales?

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Promoting your ebooks: Does Giving Away Information Hurt Your Sales?

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 Subscribe To Our Feed

The best way to promote your ebooks is to give information away, on a Web site or blog. Your ebook’s buyers can’t see the ebook, or hold it in their hands as they could in a bookshop. Therefore, you have to give information away, so that your buyers can work out whether the information in your ebooks is worth paying for.

When someone is interested in a topic, they will perform a search on it. Many sites will come up in the results, and the person that performed the search has the option of scanning all of those sites in order to find the information they are looking for. However, not many people have the time to do that. In fact, most people do not even have time to read the websites they are visiting - they simply scan the pages.

Many people are naturally skeptical. If they come across your site, they may be very interested in the information product you are offering, but they may also wonder if the information is worth the money.

Giving them a bit of information for free up front can help ease their fears. They will get a better understanding of the information you are offering and whether or not they want to buy it. Someone who is satisfied with your free information will see you as an expert; they will trust you and will be more likely to become your customer.

When you write an ebook, try taking a bit of that information and creating a special report that is available on your site for free. If you created a course that contains both print and audio materials, you can take a sampling of the information and create an ecourse. You can sign up for an auto responder service that will email a section of your ecourse each day to anyone who subscribes to it.

The point is to give them enough information to whet their appetite; don’t answer every question they have. If you leave them wanting more, they will be more likely to come back.

This also creates a mailing list of people that are interested in your products. Stay in touch with your mailing list and continue to market your product to them. In addition to your own information product, you can also promote other related products to them using affiliate links.

You don’t have to worry about giving away too much information. It does not matter what subject your information product is about; there is always another related subject that you can promote to your market. For instance, if you had created a paid course on organization and created a free e-course on the benefits of being organized, you can create a companion product about time management skills. Even if the person who received the free ecourse on organization felt all their questions on organizing were answered, they may be very curious to buy the time management course.

Promoting your ebooks is vital. Even before you start writing your ebook, you should be thinking about promotional strategies.