OK....I can write articles all day long about the following subjects. Tennis, hunting, fishing, hiking, outdoors, cooking, meat processing, coffee shops and many smaller niches within these subjects. Tennis and fishing are probably my two most knowledgable fields. Should I write articles or just write a book.
I'll try giving you my idea in a step by step manner and hope that helps:
1. Write an eBook on either Tennis or Fishing, whichever you prefer. Use Open Office and pay attention to every detail, including using background and header images in your document. Really spice it up so that the presentation and substance are both top-notch. Save it as a PDF.
2. Create a PayPal account if you don't have one.
3. Set up a free account at PayLoadz to automate the delivery after buyers pay through PayPal Once you start making sales you'll need to upgrade to one of their paid plans which I think is completely worth it, but if you don't you can always stop using them and setup some other delivery system if you want. (HINT: one of the major benefits to using PayLoadz is there's a built-in affiliate system there, so you can get others to market and sell your product for you too)
4. Create a nice looking sales page for your eBook. There's lots of info here on landing pages and sales copy so I don't need to go into that. Just be sure you use smart keywords that will attract "buying" traffic (look into keyword research here on the forum) in your page title and sales copy text.
Make sure you have a good stats tracking system on your sales page. I use Google Analytics but any good stats program is fine as long as it tells you how many people are visiting, where they're coming from and what search terms they used to find you.
5. Use social bookmarking to start getting some initial traffic. Again, lots of info about this here on the forum.
6. Submit your site to tons of directories.
7. Start writing articles on whichever subject your book is about. Use the first ones to create a Squidoo Lens, HubPages page and Weebly blog -- and make sure you link to your sales page from each of those. Also be sure to social bookmark each of them too, and from Squidoo and HubPages there will be an RSS feed for your page, submit those to a pinging service.
8. Start submitting additional articles to Article Directories like eZine Articles, GoArticles, SearchWarp, ContentCaboodle and etc. Make sure you create a good "call to action" link to your sales page in the article author's resource box. Don't say "click here" with your link, say something like "Get more tips on BLANK here" to encourage higher click-thru's
It's also not a bad idea to look for a program called Article Post Robot and automate submitting articles to a bunch of article directories with that too.
9. Social bookmark your published articles on the article directories to boost traffic to them which will hopefully boost traffic to your sales page.
10. Keep pumping out the articles and social bookmarking them once published until you're averaging 200+ daily visitors and have received at-least 4000 to 5000 total human visitors to your sales page.
Then review your stats. How many sales have you made? What's the conversion rate?
- If you're making 1 sale per 200 human visitors or better then you're really golden and just need to ramp it up.
- If you're making 1 sale per 500 human visitors or better then you've got a good product and a buying market but may be able to tweak either your sales copy to convert better, or the subjects you're writing articles about to attract more targeted visitors.
For instance, if your book is about improving your tennis swing, you may be writing articles about picking the best tennis shoes; and even though both topics are tennis related the visitors to your sales page from your tennis shoes articles aren't perfectly targeted to your tennis swing eBook, so fine-tune the subjects you write articles about to better target the perfect visitors for your product.
- If you're not converting any sales, or are converting at a rate higher than 1 sale per 500 visitors you'll need to really look at the data and determine if your product or market are just bad. I don't mean a bad product as in you messed it up, but bad as in it may just not be something people are looking for. Or, the market may just not be there, it happens.
11. Once you're up and running and are converting sales at a rate that you feel is good then come back here and look into things like building niche blog networks and link-farms to really scale it up further.
This is the basic blueprint I've used over and over when creating a new product of my own. I hope its helpful and of use.
