A lot of people are joining the ebook bandwagon because quite frankly, it can be a lucrative niche with the right strategy.
You can choose to do it either full-time or part-time depending on how your schedule is and so it does allow you flexibility, among other great benefits.
That being the case, you need to have unique and creative marketing ideas so that you get an extra edge over the others.
Here, I will be walking you through some of the best marketing tips and techniques that you can employ on your ebook marketing plan so that you get your ebook exposed much faster and make even more sales.
So, roll your sleeves, and let’s jump right in.
Table of Contents
How to Market Your Ebook Like a Champ
Before we get started with exact ways on how you can do this, you must recognize that planning on how you will market your ebook is incredibly significant.
We know that failing to plan is pretty much planning to fail and so first you want to think deeply about and plan crucial details and aspects of your marketing approach such as:
– How you will get started with your marketing strategies
– When you will actually get started
– How much time you will spend on it
– Who you will be targeting as your audience and the best way to appeal to them
– How far you are willing to stretch yourself as far as finances are concerned
– Any other important factor or aspect that you feel plays a huge role in your ebook marketing efforts
Considering these factors and planning for them before you start marketing your ebook gives you the perspective of where you are, how you are going to approach the whole marketing process, and which aspects you are going to pay more attention to so that you maximize your efforts and get good results.
After you have done that, you can now comfortably get into the actual process.
Let’s now take a closer look at that and different marketing strategies to use.
1. Share small sections of the contents of the ebook with your audience
Giving a sneak peek of your book helps create curiosity among those who see it, especially if you give a taste of a few lines or paragraphs of the best chapter that you know offers more insight on the topic you have covered than anyone else who has handled the same topic.
The idea of doing this is to make your audience learn something so educative in a few lines that would spark their desire to want to read the whole ebook.
You can always share those snippets on various platforms that you know your audience is on.
You can share them as tweets and leave a link to the ebook in case interested people want to check the whole thing out.
You can also share on Facebook, online forums for ebooks that are based on your topic to people you feel would benefit from your ebook.
This is a simple way yet powerful way to push your ebook and trust me it goes a long way because your audience will also share the same with others.
2. Create a video of a summary of your ebook
Videos are naturally fun to watch and they offer visual appeal to your audience, so creating one for your ebook will cause it to get more attention from them.
Just sharing a bit of information on your ebook will see people reaching out for more of its contents.
The idea here is to give them just enough to help them understand what the ebook is about, the hot topics it tackles, its unique selling points, and why readers should get it.
Also, mentioning the extra information that you have gone deep into more than other similar ebooks makes people get excited and want to have the ebook.
However, as you do your ebook’s video, make sure that the video is relational to your ebook as well as interesting to captivate them.
Try not to make it unnecessarily long in a way that offers too much information that even makes the people who might want to check it out lose interest in it.
Ensure you put some thought into what you are going to cover in the video while being careful not to give away too much of the juicy stuff or go out of topic.
3. Use your email
Emails are a rewarding technique to market your ebook.
By emailing as many people as possible that you know might learn a thing or two from the book, you get to increase your chance of getting your ebook bought.
Other than emailing your friends and family, it can also be a good idea to send emails to the people who may have bought your other ebooks in the past to let them know about this new one you published as well.
Someone may have loved your publishing work and would be more than happy to get the ebook you are trying to market at the moment.
Also, as you promote your ebook online, ensure you leave your email as part of your promotion plan so that anyone who would want to ask you any questions about it can easily do that.
Since the use of emails is a common way to promote your ebook, you may also want to add an extra touch to it.
Make sure that you address those who reach out to you using their names, be quick to answer any questions they might have for you, and accompany your emails with a GIF file that is relational to your ebook to help catch the attention of your readers.
4. Make a blog post on a chapter of your ebook
If you have a website, you can also choose to create a blog post that is dedicated to making the ebook known to your website visitors.
In the post, you can try to give more perspective to the ebook by explaining what inspired you to write the ebook, how long it is, what the ebook is generally all about, and what sets it apart from the other ebooks that already exist on that topic.
Give away some brief but enticing content of your book and leave people yearning for more.
With a summary and a link to the ebook at the end of the post, the people who will read the blog post will want to click on the link to find out more about your ebook
As you publish the post on your website, see that there are no grammatical errors and the article is not too revealing otherwise people may not bother following the lead you have provided to your ebook.
If you need some help with that, you can take influence from other established ebook writers who use this technique to market their work.
5. Start a conversion online about it
To make your ebook relevant and useful for people who are interested in the area you have talked about in the ebook, you can create some buzz around your ebook in various forums or social platforms to direct attention to it.
You don’t have to promote the ebook directly per se, but you can instead address a topic you know you have covered in your ebook, and then at the end, you share a link telling people that there is more they can learn about the same from the ebook as it has gone deep into the topic.
This is another inventive way to spark interest in your ebook.
6. Launch your ebook officially
When you finish and publish your ebook, you can carry out several activities, both online and offline, that will make people aware that the book is now out and ready to be purchased.
You can choose to have a party for that, invite people and ask them to invite their friends as well.
And at the party, you can spare a few minutes to talk more about the ebook and explain to them what it’s all about and how it’s going to benefit the readers.
You can also choose to have a launch as a conference and invite other well-known authors and do the same.
You can even decide to give discounts on it during the launch to entice people to buy it while the price is low before it goes to the normal price.
Making the event to be about celebrating your achievement while aiming to make sales can be a good strategy if you approach it wisely.
In your speech, you will just talk about the effort you put into the book despite the challenges you had and then touch on the discounts as an addition to your speech.
Making it an additional point instead of the main focus of your speech, people will get the impression that the discounts are part of the celebration and not a way to make money from your guests.
Alternatively, you can choose to reach out to popular blogs related to the topic your ebook addresses and pitch your book there.
You can even go as far as writing a simple press release to ensure you are reaching as many people as possible.
7. Have giveaways or promotions
Everyone loves getting good things without having to pay for them. And by giving away your ebook for free or at a really low price for a short period, you will make it possible for many people to get it and boost its readership.
And if it is a good book that improves the lives of your readers in some way, those readers might make your book popular through word of mouth and get their friends and family to buy it as well.
This will make them consider buying the other ebooks you will publish in the future because they have seen how much value your work carries and how life-changing your ebooks can be for them.
8. Polish up essential aspects of your ebook
This might not really be a marketing strategy, but it does affect it one way or the other.
The title of the book and its cover are some of the key aspects that help an ebook sell.
Most ebook writers might feel that these two don’t really matter when it comes to selling your ebook, but trust me they so, a great deal for that matter.
If these are poorly designed, few to none will get their attention captured by the ebook and so chances of buying it will be very low.
Since this is what you don’t want to happen, take your time with these details and make sure you come up with something that will really add to the overall value of the ebook.
You can consult with experts on the two areas or ask for feedback from people you consider well versed with the topic you are handling and get ideas from them before you publish it.
Be sure to settle for the ones you are sure are going to have a huge positive impact on your ebook when it goes out to the public.
9. Get reviewers talking about your ebook
People who do reviews of ebooks usually have the audience you are looking for.
These reviewers are people who have established themselves in the ebooks space and people have gained trust in them to help them understand whether a book is worth taking a look at or not.
And if you reach out to them and ask them to do a review of your ebook, you are sure their reviews will bring in some considerable amount of sales, if the ebook is good.
As you go for these people, try to settle for those who have a huge following to ensure you will get more people to know about your ebook.
And if the quality of your book is great, you will get positive reviews for your book that will bring in sales.
10. Create an affiliate program for your ebook
An affiliate program is a popular method that allows you to get expert marketers online to promote your product and get a cut of the sales they help you make.
What happens is, these online marketers will promote your ebook on as many platforms as possible and in many other different ways that target the right audience for the ebook.
This increases your sales and to appreciate their efforts, you give them a certain percentage cut for every sale they initiate.
You can create an affiliate program easily using many available affiliate program software out there such as AffiliateWP or Omnistar.
As you use this strategy, you must think carefully about the price of your ebook so that you have enough for paying out commissions to affiliate marketers.
11. Connect with other ebook writers
Connecting with other people in your line of work not only helps you increase your level of credibility in your industry but also helps you in other different ways.
If you connect with other ebook writers, for instance, they can help you sell your ebook more.
Some established writers would be happy to share your work with their audience for free and others may want some value exchange to help you push your ebook.
Either way, these people have a network that can surely raise your net worth.
And by reaching out to them and expressing your intentions to them to want to tap into their audience and let the readers know about your ebook, you can work something out that will benefit you in the long term.
12. Turn it into print
There is a good number of people who really prefer working with print books as opposed to ebooks.
Some people just naturally love interacting with the pages of a book and others love keeping off the screens of their devices and improve themselves differently, among other reasons that people may want to use print books.
You can make a few prints of your ebook that will make it easily shareable in different places for example the conferences that you attend.
You can print a few copies first and see how they do in terms of sales and then you will, later on, decide whether to print more or not.
13. If your ebook is a series, incorporate preorders
A series-based ebook is an interesting way to keep your readers hooked to your work and keep them thinking and wanting to get to read more of your work in the future.
And if you have sold a few of your first books in the series, there are people who already want to read the next book that will be coming out.
You can allow your readers to take preorders of the ebook which will help them access it first even before you release it.
This generally makes the book more desirable and creates an urgency for it amongst readers especially if the first book was great.
14. Put some thought into your landing page
A landing page is the sales page that gives more information about a product and provides a link to help the reader of that page to buy the product.
Landing pages, when it comes to ebooks, are mostly used by marketers online.
When they promote your ebook, they lead the interested readers to your landing page so that they can learn more about your ebook and how they can get access to it.
So, you always want to create a well-optimized landing page that will keep and increase the interest of the reader who is thinking about getting the ebook and get them to make a purchase.
You should ensure you mention all the hot points and selling angles of your ebook that make it a great read and people will feel even more convinced to buy.
15. Convert your ebook to other formats
People use smartphones that allow different ebook formats and there are people who prefer a specific format when reading ebooks online.
You always want to make sure that your ebook caters to everyone’s needs and preferences so that you can make them happy which will, in turn, make you more sales.
Don’t just work with the PDF format, make the ebook available in other formats including EPUB and Kindle File format, among others.
Ensure you have provided as many formats as you can to your potential readers so that they have an easy time reading the ebook.
16. Make proper use of ebook promotion sites
Ebook promotion websites are great places to get your ebook more exposure that would end up increasing sales.
These websites are known by ebook enthusiasts and many of them go there to discover new ebooks and authors in different categories.
And if you can get your ebooks on many of these well-known websites, you can surely get discovered by other people who would find your work an awesome read for them.
Some of the ebook promotional websites you should consider include:
√Smash Words
Founded by Mark Coker in 2008, this is a free platform that helps in the publishing and distribution of ebooks.
A great thing with the platform is that you are in control of what happens to your ebook, that is, how it’s sampled, priced, and sold.
Moreover, you earn 60% of the list price for sales through the different retailers on their platform including, Scribd, Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and Gardners.
Other benefits of using the platform include being able to monitor the sales you make daily, access to preorder tools and so much more!
√Barnes and Noble
Formerly known as Nook Press, this is another great free platform where you can put out your ebook fast and easily.
All you need to do is pick whichever format you want your ebook to have and actually in the future you can change that, format your ebook, and from there sell it.
The platform is great because it will help you market your book so that it sells through its various marketing programs and provide you with actionable tips you can utilize to ensure your book is a success.
√Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
This one is popular in selling ebooks and so it will help you get many people reading your ebook on Amazon.
It makes your book accessible worldwide between 24 and 48 hours and you get to earn 70% royalty on sale to customers in countries such as Spain, Canada, Australia, US among others.
You are also in control of what happens to your book and you can publish your book in either print or digital freely.
√DraftToDigital
This is yet another fantastic platform that will help you format, publish, promote, and track sales.
With it, you earn 60% royalties and you get promotion of your ebook across a few major retailers such as Amazon, Kobo among others.
They have an automated formatting system and provide powerful sales tracking tools. The platform is easy to use and is also free.
√Kobo Writing Life
This is another similar platform that helps you get your ebook more eyeballs.
To get started with it, you need to create your account, follow the steps provided to publish your ebook, promote your ebook through the various strategies they have such as offering preorders, and from there make money which, by the way, is sent directly to your bank account.
The platform is great to work with because your ebook becomes accessible to people in over 190 countries, you publish your ebook for free and you get to monitor how many sales you are making through their sales analytics feature.
There is a lot to enjoy with the platform.
√Book Baby
Though it is still green in this field as it was founded in 2011, this website has established itself among the best when it comes to promoting ebooks because it allows you to do so everywhere through well-known book retailers such as Walmart, Amazon Kdp, Walmart and so many others.
Through it, you access services such as ebook formatting, a great cover design, make your book more discoverable through “book metadata optimization” and other features that will boost your ebook’s success.
17. Have paid advertisements for the ebook
Online paid advertising through popular platforms such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, Gmail, and Bing, to name a few, is a useful strategy to reach out to people who would be down to buy your ebook.
These platforms have an advertising provision that brings your advertisement in front of millions of people who are more likely to make a purchase, and if you have a really good ebook and do your advertising well, this can be a lucrative marketing strategy for you.
You can use the interests, location, and online behavior features given by these online companies to target the kind of people you know would be more likely to buy your ebook and hence improve your chances of getting your ebook bought.
You can get started with one or two of these companies and learn how you can make the most of your advertising efforts on them and then see how they work.
If they are successful, you can maximize your efforts on them as you also venture into the other ones.
Wrapping Up
Promoting your ebook isn’t as hard as it sounds.
With solid techniques that have proven to work for other ebook writers and a commitment to making the best use of them, you can surely get your ebook to become more popular in the area it has covered and get it bought a lot.
By applying one marketing technique after the other and ensuring you are completely leveraging each before you get to the next one, you will see your efforts pay off in good time and you will slowly grow to become an authority in your industry as an author and make your ebook popular.
