I was speaking to a blogging friend recently who had read my last post about how I make money online. She asked me how much of my online income was profit, so I told her the rough percentage.

She looked a little upset at the answer, so I asked her why? This is what she told me.

I’m starting to make a bit of money now, but I’m not sure whether I’m actually making a profit.

I doubt she is the only blogger feeling that way. When those first dollars start coming in it is a very exciting time, but after a little while you might start to feel like something is amiss. You’ve got money coming in, but nothing to show for it.

As we discussed this problem further I asked her to list all of the ways she had spent money on her blog in the last year – web hosting, domain name, premium themes, a few plugins, ebooks, any coaching or training products, even anything she bought just to write a review or promote as an affiliate.

To her shock she had spent almost $1000 on her blog in the past year. That was way more than she had assumed she was spending.

Holy sh*t! I thought it was just a domain name and some hosting to run a blog, I didn’t think about all these other things!

Funny how this stuff can sneak up on you. A $20 ebook here, a $47 training course there… do you really know how much you’re spending on your blog?

Profitable Blogging Step 1: Know Your Income and Expenses

If you aren’t already doing this then I suggest you make it a top priority this week. Fire up a spreadsheet program (use Google Docs if you don’t have Excel or OpenOffice  or similar on your computer) and quickly brainstorm all of your blogging income and expenses into two columns.

I make a lot of my purchases using Paypal and one credit card so it is pretty easy for me to quickly see where most of my money has gone.

Dig out whatever email receipts or transaction reports you can to give as clear a picture as possible. Don’t skip anything just because it’s “only a few dollars”. It all adds up.

Once you’ve got it all entered in the spreadsheet subtract expenses from income to see how far ahead (or behind) you are right now.

Profitable Blogging Step 2: Decreasing Expenses

Most people will find the quickest way to increase profitability is to cut out some expenses. Some expenses can be removed immediately, such as cancelled monthly membership programs, switching to a cheaper hosting plan, or putting a self-imposed ban on buying any new information products, themes or plugins.

Other expenses can take a little longer before the cuts start to help. Domain names are a big one for a lot of bloggers. It is very easy to collect domain names for all kinds of ideas that you have, and before you know it you’re spending hundreds of dollars a year renewing domains for sites you haven’t even started yet.

You may need to make a few tough decisions there, but cancelling domain names can save you a lot of money when they come up for renewal.

Another option is to sell off any sites you started but lost interest in. Even a few hundred dollars for an established site is better than nothing.

Profitable Blogging Step 3: Increasing Revenue

Now comes the harder part – increasing your blogging income. Since you already know your expenses, having done the exercise above, you know how much you need to earn each month to start showing a profit.

If you have no income at all then this is something you may want to fix pretty quickly. Two of the fastest ways to create an income from a blog are services and affiliate marketing, because neither of them requires you to invest a lot of time upfront in creating products.

If you do have some income streams already then you can look at ways to boost those. For example if you have an auto-responder with an affiliate offer at the end of it, then it’s time to crack open those Aweber stats and look at which messages in the sequence are performing badly and try to stop those leaks so more people make it to the offer at the end.

If you sell your own products then you can look at ways to drive more traffic to your sales funnel/page, or work on boosting the conversion rate of the sales page itself. When I spent just one day overhauling my ebook sales page I doubled the monthly income from it.

Making Tough Choices

Depending on how many different blogs or domain names you’ve got at the moment you may need to make a few tough choices to increase the profitability of your business.

Like the tough choice I’m making today.

This is the last blog post I plan to write for Blogging Teacher. As much as I love this blog and am proud of what it is, I have other projects that are simply further along the road towards the goals that I have for my family and my business.

I considered keeping it going and just writing once or twice a month as I’ve been doing this year, but I’m finding it to be just too distracting from my main projects.

Nothing will change for now, I’ll leave the content where it is so that the visitors coming to it can still benefit from it. At some point in the future I’ll work out a permanent solution.

Thanks to everyone who has been a reader, subscriber, and commenter here over the last few years. Of course I’ll still be around on Twitter and the other communities where many of us are connected. Maybe you’ll see me pop up in a guest post elsewhere from time to time.

Other articles:

• Is Guest Posting Traffic Valuable for Your Blog?
• 3 Winning Rules of Business Blogging
• How to Make a Successful Blog Without Any Content
• Create a Better RSS Feed with the Better Feed WordPress Plugin
• 4 Ways Busy Entrepreneurs Can Find Time for Blogging

This article How to Make Your Blog More Profitable is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

I’ve just finished doing my books for the last financial year. I live in Australia where our financial year is July 1 to June 30, so I’ve just finished my 2010/11 financial year book keeping.

This has been the most successful financial year for my business by any measure – eg, revenue, profit, website traffic, and so on. So I thought it might be interesting to some people to see how this success was achieved.

Keep in mind as you read this that I make almost all of my online income from sites other than this one. I am not a blogger who makes money blogging about making money from blogging ;-)

I know that income reports are very popular with readers of some websites, but I’m not going to share exact dollar figures in this post. It just isn’t something I feel comfortable doing, and I think it can sometimes overshadow the real lesson behind these types of reports.

If you do need some context for what I’m about to go through let me just say that although I don’t personally live solely off the income from my business, a person could still live off it.

Okay then, let’s get started.

Business Income Breakdown

For the financial year 2010/11 this is how my various online income streams contributed to my business.

Slightly over half of my income is from products that I sell. Another quarter or so came from services, and the last quarter was divided up between advertising and affiliate sales.

This income split is not much different to a fictional example I gave in a post on this blog over a year ago. The point I was illustrating at the time was the importance of diverse income streams for bloggers. The reason behind that is that it can help to cushion your business from the rise and fall of different income streams over time.

The chart you see above has come about from several years of work. I’ll explain how each of those income streams has started for me, how they contributed to the last financial year, and what I plan to do about them in the future.

Products Income

The majority of my online income is now from product sales. This is mostly in the form of ebooks, and I also have plans to grow this part of my business even further. I have another ebook under way now, and some video training products in the pipeline for later this year.

Although I have launched ebooks from this blog there is more action going on with the products I sell at my main blog.

There is an inherent risk with creating products that you’ll end up trying to sell something nobody wants to buy. I’ve got products that have been very successful and some that have been not so successful. Of course the successful ones are those where I met an audience need.

The reason I want to build my products income stream further is that they are a more passive income stream than others such as services. There is still a lot of work involved in finishing the product, but after that the ongoing marketing and the tweaking of conversion rates is a relatively small effort.

Services Income

Although the first dollar I made online wasn’t from services I can definitely say that it was how I made the the first serious money online. This income came from two main activities.

Website Development – I had a number of direct clients as a well as some big sub-contract jobs through one particular design agency for developing websites using WordPress.

Freelance Blogging – for about two years I worked as a freelance blogger, getting paid to write blog posts for a few different websites.

What is interesting, at least to me anyway, is that I put a halt to both of these activities before Christmas of 2010. Although they were earning me a very nice amount of money they were conflicting too much with having a family. If I was still single or we didn’t have kids yet the story might be different, but too often a client deadline would clash with something like the kids getting sick, and since family always comes first it resulted in some pretty high pressure situations to finish off jobs in time.

Eventually I decided that the stress and the chance that a client might be negatively impacted were too much and I shut down those services.

However, I still look at services as one of the fastest ways to start making money from your blog. The simple reason is that there is almost zero pre-work involves in launching a services offering. All you really need is a page on your site describing your services, a price, a way to take payments (Paypal is fine), and the skills and knowledge that you already possess.

Offering general consulting services is also a great way to discover audience wants and needs. Many bloggers have built products based around the services that they have repeatedly performed for their clients.

So while I have no immediate plans to reopen my services offering, I would encourage you to consider it if you have not already.

Advertising Income

During the previous year I decided to start selling advertising on my blog. I kept getting offers from companies who wanted me to review their products in exchange for a copy of the product for myself, or a copy to give away in a contest. I did that a few times but soon found that the time it took to review products wasn’t really getting me the results I wanted.

I also felt that I was working very hard to attract an audience and was then giving away their attention for free.

So after a few months of testing ad placement and click through rates using a combination of Adsense and affiliate offers I offered a paid advertising spot to one company. Ever since then my ad spots have stayed sold out, sometimes a few months in advance. Some of the companies were not all that happy with the performance of their first campaign, while others have been happy to renew several times.

The advertising income isn’t as much as I’m making from product sales, but it is not a lot of work to maintain so I’m very happy with how it is going so far.

However the only way I can grow it further is by increasing traffic so that I can either charge more for the space or introduce rotating ad spots, or by redesigning the site to accomodate more ad spots.

I’m not rushing into this decision because I want to make sure that both my readers and advertisers stay happy. Too many ads might annoy readers, and a new design that causes ad campaigns to perform worse might kill the relationships I’ve built with advertisers.

Affiliate Income

The smallest of my revenue streams comes from affiliate commissions. Along with services some of the earliest money I made online was through affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing is something you can get into relatively quickly compared to selling products.

Affiliate marketing is the smallest of my income sources mostly because I don’t do enough of it. I’m only making a few affiliate offers at the moment and haven’t worked them into any auto-responder sequences to make them a bit more consistent.

However, much like advertising and product sales, the income I do get from affiliate commissions is fairly passive. It all comes from blog posts that I wrote once and that receive an ongoing stream of traffic. It is nice to see the emails in my inbox letting me know that a few more dollars has been earned by a blog post I wrote over a year ago.

Again, I do want to grow this side of my business some more but I’m not rushing into it as I don’t want to turn my sites into a constant pitch-fest. But there are a lot of great products out there with affiliate programs so I certainly will continue to recommend them when it is suitable.

Summary

There is a lot of talk from blogging experts about treating your blog like a business. One of the ways you can do that is by developing a diversity of revenue streams so that you earn a stable income over time as things are constantly changing.

However just keep in mind that what I’ve described above didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t even happy just in the last year. If you’ve got the time, skill, or luck to make all the right moves then you can probably do it in less time than I did, but for most people it will be gradual process of developing one thing at a time until you get to a point like this.

The purpose of this blog post is certainly not to brag about how well I’m doing, rather it is to show you that good things do come if you keep working and stick with it for the long haul.

I’m going to expand on a few of the points in this post over the coming weeks, but for now if you’ve got any questions about what I’ve just shown you please feel free to ask in the comments below.

Image Credit: Flickr

Related articles:

• The Super-Guide to Making Money from Advertising on Your Blog
• How to Write and Sell a Successful Ebook
• The Optimum Time to Sell Your Blog
• Reader Q&A: How Can I Improve My Blog?
• Blogger Interview: Pat Flynn of The Smart Passive Income Blog

This article A Look at a Successful Year of Blogging is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

Web analytics are one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal. But they can also be a massive time sink if you do not use them effectively.

Here are four ways to use your web analytics that aren’t a waste of time.

Measure Trends

If you told me your blog had 300 visitors today, how will I know whether or not to congratulate you? How can I know whether that is twice the traffic you got last week, or half the traffic you got last week?

Web stats at a single point in time simply do not tell enough of a story to be useful. Here are some trends you can look at that will give you a better idea of how well your site is performing.

• Look at the last 30-90 days of visits to measure your recent performance improvement or decline
• Compare two calendar years of traffic to spot seasonal trends that you can plan for in the future
• Observe time on page for different styles of blog posts to determine which ones are engaging your audience for longer

Identify Root Causes

Sometimes we look at trends and freak out a bit when we spot something that looks bad, and other times we celebrate when we spot something that is going well.

But without understanding the root cause of an improvement or decline in performance you have no chance to do anything about it.

Here are some examples of using web analytics to dig into the root causes of these events:

• Segment traffic by source to determine whether a decrease in average time on site is due to visits from a low quality traffic source
• Compare the top ten referrers over two different months to identify if a traffic increase is coming from a new source that you can give some more attention to
• Make a list of your flagship article and drill down into the keywords that are sending traffic to them. Identify the keywords that have the highest bounce rate and see whether the article can be optimized to cater better to the intent behind those keywords.

Improve Efficiency

Time is one of the scarcest resources that you and I have, so we want to be sure that we’re spending our time where it is doing the most good.

This means making sure that the forums and social networks that we hang out on are actually helping our website in some way.

Here are a few techniques for using web analytics to improve your efficiency:

• Use referral data to identify whether the forums you are a member of are sending you traffic. You can take this a step further by analysing whether the traffic is coming from your own forums interactions or from other people linking to your content in their replies.
• Tag your URLs in different social networks so that traffic from applications isn’t simply counted as “direct” and you’re able to tell which networks your followers are engaging on the most.
• Find out where in the world your traffic comes from, and at which times of day, so that you can schedule posts and social network updates to take advantage of peak audience times.

Track Goals

An often overlooked usage of web analytics is tracking goals. Most of us have goals for our websites, even if we aren’t actively measuring them.

The most obvious examples of goals are things like traffic targets. A goal of achieving 10,000 visitors in a month is fairly easy to track with web analytics.

But goal tracking can be also used to connect the dots between different outcomes that you might currently be tracking with different tools. The benefit is that you can see not only which pages are producing the most goal conversions, but also which traffic sources, how many average visits it takes before a conversion is made, and much more.

Here are some examples of goals that you can track with your web analytics if they are set up correctly:

• Mailing list sign ups – By setting a goal for your mailing list opt-ins you can learn a whole lot more than would otherwise be available by looking at your Aweber stats. Wouldn’t you like to know whether it is blog comments, guest posting, or forums that are producing the highest percentage of opt-ins for your list?
• Product sales – Some third party e-commerce platforms will let you add your analytics tracking code to the pages where your buyers download their purchases from. Then you can set a goal to track each sale and work out which of your traffic sources or blog posts is producing the most sales conversions and look for ways to optimize them.
• Funnel conversions – A funnel is simply a series of steps towards a goal, such as a blog post series or an email auto-responder. Your web analytics can be used to monitor each step of the funnel to work out which ones need to be optimized to get more of the traffic all the way to the final step where the goal conversion is measured.

Summary

As you can see web analytics can be used in very powerful ways to achieve some very important goals for your website, and prevent you from simply wasting time staring at your stats.

Image Credit: Flickr

Related articles:

• Use this Fast and Easy Way to Get New Blog Post Ideas
• How My Blog Traffic Doubled in Just 3 Months
• Hockey Stick Traffic Moments in Blogging
• How to Find the Busiest Time of Day for your Blog
• Are Your Traffic Techniques Out of Date?

This article 4 Ways to Use Your Web Analytics that aren’t a Waste of Time is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

You’re scared to ask for the sale.

Congratulations, you’re perfectly normal.

Being too shy to ask for the sale is one of the biggest mistakes a blogger can make, and the biggest one they actually do when trying to convert their readers into buyers.

I understand completely. Failing to ask for the sale was also the number one mistake I made for more than two years.

Though I knew the right way to do it, read it over and over again, and heard it from the countless friends and advisors who told me on repeat that I’d eventually need to get over myself and ask for the sale – I wasn’t willing.

The shy part of me always stood in the way, his heels in the dirt and a sneer on his lips.

But you don’t have to be as ridiculously stubborn as I was. Asking for the “sale” could mean all the difference between circling obscurity and writing the life of your dreams. And “sales” aren’t just about the dollar signs.

A “sale” could be a comment on your blog post, a subscription to your feed, a re-tweet on Twitter, an opt-in to your list, or a like on Facebook.

A sale is simply “mission accomplished” for whatever it is that you want your reader to do.

Unfortunately, as much as we’d like our readers to anticipate our needs as we try to anticipate theirs, most will never guess what we want them to do. Yet if we routinely deliver value, then tell them what we want them to do when we want them to do it, they are often all too happy to comply.

Sometimes I’d love nothing more than for my children to anticipate my needs; knowing I’m trying to write, then staying quiet as I tip-tip-tap on the keyboard downstairs. But they are nine and six and sometimes it’s unreasonable for me to expect them to be anything children.

I have good children, and when I charge upstairs and only takes him a second before they fall into a hush, knowing just what I’m going to say.

You have good readers. Your call to action is at the bottom of your copy, meaning they didn’t get there by accident. As long as you gave them a compelling headline, delivered on the promise of your headline with great copy, then moved your reader all the way to the bottom of the page, they are in the perfect frame of mind to do whatever it is you must ask them to do.

Don’t be shy. Step out of yourself and ask for what you need your reader to do.

Sometimes in life, you have to ask for what you want. It isn’t always easy and it isn’t always fun. But the difference between getting what you want and wanting what you shall never get is sometimes as simple as stepping outside of yourself and doing the slightly uncomfortable.

Sean Platt helps good writers make a great living. Download his free report, “24 Easy Ways to Turn Readers into Buyers”.

Image Credit: Flickr

Related articles:

• Do You Have a Blogging Mentor?
• What Keeps You Going?
• Hockey Stick Traffic Moments in Blogging
• When You Feel Like You’re Getting Nowhere
• The Optimum Time to Sell Your Blog

This article How to Get What You Really Want From Your Blogging Career is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

Since I make a healthy portion of my blogging income from ebooks I certainly don’t agree that they are dead. So I’ve asked an expert on ebooks, Kelly Kingman from Sticky Ebooks, to say more on that subject as well as other questions that people have been asking.

Q: It seems like last year every big name was releasing membership sites and coaching programs. Are ebooks yesterday’s news?

That’s like saying reading is yesterday’s news, because an eBook is simply a way to structure and package longer textual information. I can guarantee you, those big names are creating informational PDFs to share with their members, and in our blogging and Internet marketing niche, an eBook is basically a well-formatted PDF file.

When it comes to creating a product — eBook, video, audio, print — the most important consideration is: is this a medium my audience is comfortable with?

If you’re a blogger, chances are your subscribers will be fine reading a PDF eBook. Then the question becomes: how do you make your eBook stand out in a noisy marketplace?

That’s why Pamela Wilson of BigBrandSystem.com and I created eBook Evolution, to help people match powerful content with great design and grassroots launch strategy.

Also, if you’re not already a big name, launching a membership site right out of the gate is really tough.  It’s good to get the hang of launching, especially if you’ve never sold anything before.

Why not test the market with an eBook — which has relatively low overhead and learning curve — and then use it as a blueprint for a program or membership site?

Q: Are people really reading ebooks outside of the blogging and internet marketing niches?

First, we need to distinguish between two types of ebooks real quick. For our discussion here, we’re talking about PDF eBooks sold from your blog or website, not digital books formatted for devices like the Kindle and sold via online retailers like Amazon.com.

For now let’s call the PDFs “PDF eBooks” and the rest “retail eBooks.”

Either way, though, the answer is yes. Retail eBook sales have already outstripped hardcover sales on the major sites and the growth boom continues.

In PDF eBook sales, the biggest example I can think of is Digital Photography School, Darren Rowse’s other blog. Selling PDF ebooks is a large slice of his revenue pie.

I see a huge potential for bloggers to follow in Darren’s footsteps with Digital Photography School and in fact many minimalist lifestyle bloggers — Leo Babatua of Zen Habits, Tammy Strobel of RowdyKittens come to mind — write and sell eBooks. I’ve seen health gurus selling collections of recipes and exercise tips.

Also check out eBookling.com, a great site that launched earlier this year which offers a collection of great eBooks on a variety of topics.

Q: If you could name the one thing that prevents most ebooks from being successful, what would that be?

I’d have to say two things tie for first place here. One is not understanding the basic structure and psychology of a launch — recruiting affiliates, building your list and then asking for the sale.

I created the eBook Success Checklist as a guide to the basic principles that, even if you’re simply aware of them, will help set you up for a successful launch.

Assuming you grasp the basics of how a launch functions, then the next mistake I see (and I’ve made) is failing to make it ridiculously easy for your affiliates to promote you. I mean sending them everything: sample emails to send their list, sample tweets, custom bit.ly links — whatever you need to do so that promoting your product only takes a copy and paste action from them.

Do 95% of the work for them, don’t expect people to know what’s going on or have time. Some people plan their marketing two or three months out, the rest are in the moment.

Q: Does a blog need to have a lot of traffic or a big mailing list to be able to sell an ebook?

You certainly can sell an eBook with a small list, and I encourage people to do so. In the eBook Evolution Launch Guide I explain how I launched with 75 people on my list. I made $1,800 during my 3-day launch and tripled my list but — I go into this in detail in the guide — over time there has been a lot more return from a marketing stand point. I used my eBook launch as a way to test my market, build my list and be seen as an expert.

It’s opened a lot of doors for me, sent me clients, prompted requests for interviews, and became the blueprint for two eCourses I launched.

Of course, $1,800 won’t make everyone’s heart skip a beat. If you want to retire to the Carribbean while your eBooks sell themselves, you’ll need a different approach, the one based on SEO and hard-sell copywriting. That type of marketing just isn’t my style, I only want to write eBooks that interest me. I’m happy that my eBook has sold steadily over the past year, up to 370 copies now, as a complement to my service-based business.

Bottom line: you don’t need a lot of traffic or a big list to be successful, but if you want a business based solely on products like eBooks then volume matters.

Q: What sort of strategies can a blogger use to make their ebook stand out in a crowded market?

Get creative. Creativity is the only way to compete unless you’ve got so many pageviews that you can wait for 0.05% of them to convert.

To break it down, there are three points where you can be creative: the writing, the look and feel, and the launch itself.

Writing. I’m a huge believer in embracing your personal voice in your writing, don’t have an eBook that reads like Wikipedia. People want valuable content, but it’s just important that your eBook is a pleasure to engage with and consume.

Look and feel. My eBook Evolution co-creator, Pamela Wilson, and I believe great design is a huge differentiator. Pamela’s templates make it easy for those of us who aren’t designers to make eBook pages and covers that stand out from the noise and help readers really engage with the content.

Launch. I had a lot of fun creating a Launch Personality Quiz for the eBook Evolution launch content. It had people tweeting about what their “launch personality type” was. Our days are filled with work, put some play into your launch.

That’s it! Have some fun with it and really challenge yourself to create something that will get people engaged in conversation. If your eBook is interesting, looks awesome and you get creative with your launch you’ll be way ahead of the game.

**************

Big thanks to Kelly for taking the time to answer those questions in such detail!

I’ve been reading through the Ebook Evolution kit, and Kelly and Pamela have definitely put together a strong package here. It is just the right mix of education, motivation, and technical assistance to get an ebook written, designed and launched successfully.

• If you’ve got an idea for an ebook and aren’t sure where to start, then this is for you.
• If you’ve got an ebook written and you’re not happy with how it looks, you’ll love the design templates (I’m actually going to use them to redo all of my free workbooks that I give away here).
• If you’ve tried to launch an ebook and think it could have done better, then you’ll love the launch advice.

I kind of wish this kit was around when I started writing my first ebook. It basically took me three ebook launches to learn what Kelly and Pamela teach you in Ebook Evolution. Go and check it out today.

Related articles:

• Ebook Case Study: How Important is Sales Page Conversion Rate?
• Marketing a Successful Ebook
• Writing and Editing for a High Quality Ebook
• Creating an Ebook with Authority
• How to Write and Sell a Successful Ebook

This article Are Ebooks Yesterday’s News? is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

Lately I’ve been publishing a series of posts on how to write and sell a successful ebook. If you’re reading this now and haven’t already read the other parts of the series you can go back and start here if you like.

As I mentioned once or twice in that series I’ve released three separate ebooks for sale, each on different topics and with different levels of success. In this post I’m going to talk specifically about my two most recent ebooks.

Comparison of the Ebooks

To start things off here are the common elements of both ebooks:

• Both meet an audience need that was identified through performance of blog posts, keyword research, and surveys
• Both are well written and well packaged as good quality PDFs (this may seem subjective, but this is actually based more on customer feedback than my own ego)
• Both are sold through e-junkie and are available for affiliates to promote

The ebook launch followed a similar pattern:

• Internal launch to mailing list at a steep 40% discount for a limited time
• Public launch on the blog with a 25-30% discount for a limited time
• Further promotion at the regular price point

The launch and ongoing promotion differed at this stage in the following ways:

• Ebook #1 has affiliates and a guest posting campaign to promote it, as well as some reviews (by affiliates), and banner placement on the site
• Ebook #2 has no affiliates (which is normal for the niche), no guest posts, some reviews (by non-affiliates), and banner placement on the site

Sales Performance of the Ebooks

The sales performance of the two ebooks has very clearly been different. We’ll start with ebook #1.

The sales graph for ebook #1 shows:

• The internal launch as the initial high point, dropping off as the launch period ended
• The external launch as the second spike, that included a discount and a guest post campaign, which generated strong sales (though they were diluted by affiliate shares)
• Very low ongoing sales in the months afterwards

Now let’s take a look at ebook #2.

The sales graph for ebook #2 shows:

• The internal launch as the initial high point, dropping off as the launch period ended
• The external launch that included a discount but no affiliate promotion or guest posts
• A small spike in sales followed by a slump
• A recovery and stronger ongoing sales (the two biggest dips were for holiday weeks such as Easter)

Ebook #2 has clearly been more successful in the long term than ebook #1, so now let’s look at why that is the case.

The Important Element of the Successful Ebook

First of all I will say that after both ebooks got through their initial launch they each bottomed out at around a 1% conversion rate for their sales pages.

The traffic to the ebook #1 sales page means that this is very few sales each month. For some people it would be enough to keep their blogging habit funded though, which is definitely nothing to dismiss.

The traffic to the ebook #2 sales page is much, much higher. So even at the same conversion rate of 1% the actual sales numbers were much higher. This ebook is also priced higher and has no affiliates to pay, so if it was left alone to continue selling at that rate it would still generate a very nice amount of income. But I wanted to see if I could get more out of it.

When you’re trying to improve sales of your ebook there are two things you can do:

• Increase the amount of traffic to the sales page
• Increase the conversion rate of the sales page

Since this sales page was already getting strong traffic, I decided to turn my attention to improving the conversion rate.

Conversion Rate Improvement – 1% to 2%

The first thing I did was make some minor design changes to the sales page to polish it up a little. I changed little if any of the copy on the page, and in a week saw conversion rates increase from 1% to around 2%.

Increasing conversion rates by a percentage point like that is no small achievement. You are literally doubling your income by going from 1% to 2% conversion rate, if traffic stays the same.

Conversion Rate Improvement – 2% to 5%

At around this time something happened that was just plain good timing for me. Copyblogger Media released their WordPress landing page plugin called Premise.

I could say a lot about Premise right now, but the short version is that Premise is a plugin for WordPress that lets you create seven different types of landing pages for your website, such as opt-in pages, pricing table pages, and of course sales pages. Because it is a plugin instead of a theme it works without impacting your existing blog design, so it doesn’t take over your entire site like some other sales page themes do.

I bought it immediately and spent about 5 hours through that weekend consuming the Premise content and rebuilding my sales page. The following week my new sales page converted at 5%.

Here you can see the first arrow pointing at where sales had dropped to 1% conversion rate. After that is a small increase from my own sales page tweaks, and then the second arrow shows the sales boost that Premise gave me.

After that boost the actual sales numbers have gone up and down each week depending on traffic to the page, but the conversion rate has held steady at 5% for several months now.

How Premise Increased Sales Page Conversion Rates

The value of Premise comes in two parts. First there is the plugin itself, which gives you enough design controls to quickly build classy sales pages. I struggled with them to start with, until I realized the problem was I was trying to over-design the page instead of just keeping things simple.

The second valuable part of Premise is the training content that you get access to. That is what made the big difference for me. I can create basic pages and handle any custom code required to build them, but my copy writing skills for sales pages aren’t great. It just isn’t my area of specialty.

But all I did was watch, listen and read the Premise training lessons, load up the sales page template, and slowly work my way through replacing the sample content with my own words.

For example where the sample content says “This is a good place for a testimonial” I would dig one out of my inbox and put it there. Where it said “Here is where you restate the benefits of your product” I would do exactly that.

The result is a sales page converting at five times the rate it was before.

How this Case Study Can Help You

As you’ve seen above two different ebooks that can perform very differently in sales, even with both are based on good fundamental product development process, and both had a strong launch.

The real make or break moment for any ebook comes after that initial launch with affiliates and guest posts fades away. To generate consistent ongoing sales you need to send traffic to a sales page that converts.

You might think that all you need is a great ebook and the sales just take care of themselves. But it takes a lot of trust for a person to buy your ebook if your sales page is bad. You’ll still get sales to your long-term readers and subscribers, but newer visitors and those sent by affiliates will convert poorly. And if your sales page isn’t converting, those affiliates will stop sending traffic too.

And my experience shows that it was a lot less work to increase the conversion rate of the page than it would have been to have to write another ebook to generate the next bit of income.

So if you’ve got an ebook that just isn’t selling well after it was launched, take a good look at your sales page and start working on improving it. And if you need some help with that, give Premise a try.

Related articles:

• Marketing a Successful Ebook
• Are Ebooks Yesterday’s News?
• Writing and Editing for a High Quality Ebook
• Creating an Ebook with Authority
• How to Write and Sell a Successful Ebook

This article Ebook Case Study: How Important is Sales Page Conversion Rate? is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

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So you’ve written an ebook that fills an important audience need. Will it sell itself like some kind of magical, passive income unicorn?

No, it won’t. You still have to actually market your ebook to make sales.

I’ve sold three different ebooks in the past, with different marketing efforts for each.

• Ebook #1 – I barely did any marketing to launch it, and none on an ongoing basis
• Ebook #2 – I did some launch marketing, but nothing ongoing
• Ebook #3 – I did a moderate amount of launch marketing, and have continued to market and drive traffic to it every month since launch

As you’ll see here, the ebook that had the most marketing effort put in has been my most successful one.

How to Sell Your Ebook

When your ebook is finished and ready to sell you need to set up your sales system.

Now there are lots of ways to do this. It could be as simple as a Paypal button that redirects buyers to a hidden web page with the link to download the ebook. Thats a bit of a hassle though for several reasons, such as the risk of other people sneaking copies for free and the lack of any kind of affiliate program you can use.

Using E-Junkie to Sell Ebooks

Personally I use e-junkie. $5/mth gets you started and it is a good platform for selling digital products such as ebooks. The affiliate program works fine and is easy for affiliates to use.

It also can be used to sell one-time payment access to membership sites if you chose to put your ebook inside one of those (a good idea if your ebook comes with bonus videos or coaching forums). For ebooks they also handle secure download via expiring links so that theft is not going to be a problem for you.

If its your first time using e-junkie then set aside a good amount of time to get familiar with how it works. They have good help pages and even though its technically as simple as uploading your product and adding some “buy now” button code to your sales page there is also a lot of extra stuff to understand such as:

• How discount codes work
• How to customize the thank-you/download page
• How to automate adding e-junkie buyers to your Aweber mailing list

The important thing is to take your time and test, test, test.

• Use a second Paypal account to test the complete purchase and download process
• Test your launch discount codes
• Test the refund process
• Test the affiliate signup process

The last thing I’ll mention about e-junkie is paying affiliates. E-junkie lets you download a Paypal “mass pay” file each month so you can upload that to Paypal and mass pay your affiliates in one go without them incurring fees for receiving the money. Thats how it is supposed to work, don’t go paying them individually via manual transactions or your affiliates will get upset about the fees it costs them.

The Sales Page

You’ve got two choices with sales pages.

• Host the sales page on your blog/website
• Set up a mini-site for the product and host the sales page there

Either is fine depending on your particular situation. Some people prefer to have dedicated mini-sites with their own designs or special opt-in/funnel pages. Its also a “neutral” place that affiliates can send traffic to instead of to your main website. This is important for some people who want the products to be slightly separate from their main brand.

Another consideration is whether you might expand the ebook into more of a full membership site later, or even sell it off one day as a product+website package. A mini-site makes a lot of sense in those cases.

I’ve used both methods in the past, and both work fine.

Launching Your Ebook

I’m no big time launch expert. But I’ve managed to create a successful launch for my latest ebook. Here is how I did it.

1) I started mentioning it

I dropped a couple of mentions of it in my LinkedIn group and on Twitter.

2) I emailed my list to let them know it was coming

I emailed my list offering the chance to win a free copy of it for sharing a question or concern of their own about the topic. That feedback collected via SurveyMonkey served two purposes

• It helped me identify (albeit at the last minute) whether I had adequately covered the topic in my ebook
• It gave me ideas for a series of FAQ-style blog posts to write in the weeks after launch to draw attention to the ebook

3) I offered a launch discount

I wrote a blog post announcing the impending release and saying if you want the launch discount to signup to my mailing list. This generated a good number of new signups, but more importantly those were people who were very interested in the ebook.

4) I launched to my list

I launched on a Thursday as I already email that particular list every Monday. I had a 7 day deadline on the launch discount.

5) I reminded my list once

With 48 hours to go I emailed them again to remind them of the discount.

6) I launched on the blog

Now at full price I launched on the blog. I did this late in the week so it would be the first blog post listed in the following Monday’s digest email, but also because in some markets Thursdays are the best day to send sales emails. Aside from the obvious days to avoid such as big holidays there is no right or wrong day to launch, this is something that you can only find out through testing in your niche.

And that was the simple launch process I used for my most successful ebook.

In the next part of this series I’ll show you how I turned it from one-time launch event into a consistent, ongoing revenue stream.

Image Credit: Flickr

Related articles:

• Ebook Case Study: How Important is Sales Page Conversion Rate?
• Are Ebooks Yesterday’s News?
• Writing and Editing for a High Quality Ebook
• Creating an Ebook with Authority
• How to Write and Sell a Successful Ebook

This article Marketing a Successful Ebook is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

Writing and selling a successful ebook requires a lot of commitment. The biggest thing you need to be committed to is actually getting it done.  And there is no way to get an ebook finished other than time and effort. You need both of them together or you just won’t reach the finish line.

Making Time to Write Your Ebook

I want to drive home a very important element of product creation…making time to get it done.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s the execution that is gold.

So where did I, a busy guy with a full time job and a family just like many of you, find the time to write a 200+ page ebook with over 23000 words in it?

1. A time audit. I wanted to know not only if I was wasting time, but also if there were things I could drop to free up more time. My time audit didn’t reveal much in the way of wasted time (I barely watch TV for example) but it did drive home to me how little free time I actually had each week. That realisation motivated me to become more focussed and work even harder in those precious few hours.

2. Freeze all other projects. If you’re anything like me you’ve got a dozen things going at once. I knew I would be distracted by other stuff so I shut it all down to focus on the ebook, even going so far as to stop writing BloggingTeacher.com for a couple of months.

3. Aim for the MVP. The MVP means Minimum Viable Product and it’s a concept I learned from Chris Garrett originally. What it means is cutting your ebook down to the minimum amount necessary to be able to sell it. Not only does this reduce your workload but it also tightly focuses the ebook on a particular niche market, which can actually make it sell better.

Getting Your Ebook from “Written” to “Done”

There is a critical stage in ebook writing where I think a lot of people just give up and either shelve the project or give it away for free out of lack of self-confidence.

When the ebook is actually “written”, but not quite “done” is where I suspect a lot of people stop.

The reason? That last 5-10% of the job is actually really hard. For one thing, you’re over it. You’re sick of your own ebook. You’ve read and re-read it so many times the words are just a blur. The topic bores you to death right now.

An easy way out of that is to just fling it out there for free. Guess what? You make no money out of that.

How to Go From 95% Complete to 100% Complete

Here’s a few things I feel really helped me go all the way with my latest ebook.

1. Design – a basic Word template looks okay, but when you put a nicely designed (yet simple) cover on it, some basic styles and coloring, and a few images, suddenly it goes from “Pages I wrote” to “A proper book”. Give yourself time to do this, it is both enjoyable and re-energizing.

2. Editing – if you’re that sick of reading your own words get a friend to review it or hire an editor. They’ll spot things you didn’t and as you make the suggested edits you’ll feel the boost in confidence of having someone else tell you “It’s good, and with these few minor changes it’ll be great“.

3. Testing – After you’ve designed and edited it, take the time to check the resulting PDF on multiple computers and devices. Again ask friends if you need to (I once released an ebook that had fonts that didn’t render properly on iPad, doh!).

These stages are important whether you’re sick to death of your ebook, or even if you’re gang-busters to get it launched. Taking a few extra days to get it from 95% to 100% is well worth it.

In the next part of this series I’m going to dive into the sales and marketing side of successful ebooks.

Image Credit: Flickr

Related articles:

• 4 Ways Busy Entrepreneurs Can Find Time for Blogging
• Regaining Your Balance
• You Won’t Make Money by Just Blogging
• The Blogger’s Guide to Eating Elephants
• The Perils of Synchronous Blogging

This article How to Get Your Half-Finished Ebook Done is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

When I first started writing ebooks, mostly as free giveaways for my blogs, I didn’t go into it with a clear structure in mind. Because most of my writing was of the technical “how to” variety I really had no choice but to write the content in a logical step by step sequence.

I think that lulled me into bad habits for when I came to write my first ebook that was more general instead of being a step by step guide. The writing came across as very flat and lacked any real punch. And poor writing can definitely undermine the authority of your ebook content.

When a friend proof read it for me he suggested some structural changes that made a lot of sense, and I was able to improve the ebook a great deal by changing the order of a few sections and rewriting others.

Creating a Structure for Your Ebook

In hindsight I planned that ebook poorly. So now I don’t write any ebook without first doing a mind map to create a solid structure before I get into the actual writing. I use a program called XMind which has a free version as well as a paid version with a few extra features.

Here is the mind map for the latest ebook I wrote, fully expanded to show all of its branches. You can see the core subject in the middle, and the main sections branching off that. It then branches out even further into more detail. The green ticks were how I kept track of which sections were complete and which were still being written.

I’m a visual person and I love making these mind maps. They really help me build a basic structure for a product or flesh out an idea. When you’re doing a mind map like this you quickly find out whether your idea has legs or not. I’ve got folders full of “great ideas” that died after I made a mind map and realised they lacked substance.

Writing and Editing Your Ebook

When you’re writing, write. When you’re editing, edit. Don’t do both at once.

The one important thing you need to do when you are writing is create momentum (which takes about 5-10 minutes) and then keep that momentum moving. Every time you stop to edit something you break your flow. Just write and leave the corrections for later.

Editing works the best with fresh eyes.  Don’t try to write several pages and then immediately edit those pages. Leave it for the next day or even a few days later.

For me some of the most productive time on my ebook was when I spent evenings writing and then my lunch breaks at work editing. You might be surprised how effective your editing can be when you just spend 30 minutes on it (especially with a looming deadline like the end of your lunch break).

A lot of you will be able to easily fit in highly effective editing time with a little bit of planning. A friend of mine would print out pages of her latest draft and edit them on the bus ride to and from work. Another friend got creative and took the printouts into the bathroom with them because it was one of the only times they could get 5 minutes of peace and quiet to read their work.

Tips to Keep Momentum Up and Avoid Getting Stuck

Over time I’ve developed a few personal techniques for keeping my writing momentum going. For example:

• If I can’t instantly come up with an opening sentence for a section I’ll just put 2-3 bullet points or a short note saying “Cover this, this and this here” and move on to the next bit.
• If I’m not sure about a fact or figure, or need a diagram, I’ll stick a quick note in to say “Check this” or “Draw a diagram of this” and move on to the next bit.
• I find that the Comments feature of Microsoft Word is a great way to leave little reminders for myself. It’s like having digital sticky notes all through your document.
• Autocorrect and Autoformat were driving me nuts because a lot of their default rules were contrary to how a technical document like mine is written. Taking the time to fix those up to suit the style of the ebook avoids a lot of stop/start situations.
• The same goes for any pre-configured tables that you need for breakout boxes or tips/notes. Create those in advance so you can quickly insert them without having to muck around with the same settings every time.
• I resist the urge to tweak heading styles or pagination issues until the entire ebook is written and edited. There is no point stopping to fix a hanging sentence if the next day you add a section that moves it anyway.

The bottom line is that getting your ebook written is the hardest part, and it is where most people falter. But the effort is worth it. The feeling of watching sales ticking over weeks and months after you’ve released the ebook makes you grateful that you pushed yourself to get it done.

Speaking of getting it done, in the next part of this series we’ll look at how to actually get your ebook finished and on the market.

Image Credit: Flickr

Related articles:

• Creating an Ebook with Authority
• Are Ebooks Yesterday’s News?
• Ebook Case Study: How Important is Sales Page Conversion Rate?
• Marketing a Successful Ebook
• How to Write and Sell a Successful Ebook

This article Writing and Editing for a High Quality Ebook is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com

When you set out to write and sell an ebook you want to be sure that you will create a quality product that delivers value to the buyer. Part of that involves creating an ebook that is authoritative.

But authority is a relative term. To some people I am an authority in my IT niche, but there are plenty of people in that niche who I consider authorities too. In fact just about anybody that you consider to be at the top of the authority pile will have their own authorities that they look up to in different ways.

So being an “authority” really just means understanding where it is that you sit relative to others in your niche, and aiming your ebook for a spot that is somewhere just above your target audience. This ties back into understanding audience needs.

Authority and Accuracy

I’m an authority on the topic I wrote my last ebook about (relative to most), but that doesn’t excuse me from making the extra commitment to accuracy. So after I’d finished planning my ebook I looked for the topics where I was weakest and then I went and researched the “right way”.

Now in my field there are published best practices for a lot of this stuff. They have some wiggle room depending on the real world situation, but the core best practices are still there. So in my case the ebook was able to be written both from real world experience and published best practices.

Filling Gaps in Experience and Expertise

Just because you aren’t “the expert” or there is no “right way” for your topic that doesn’t mean you can’t write with authority. You can bring authority to your product in several ways.

Case Studies – these are great for topics where there is no single correct way to do things. By presenting a series of case studies explaining what was done, why it was done, how it was measured, and what the results were, you can give your audience suggestions and (more importantly) a framework for testing and identifying the “right way” for their specific situation.

Expert Interviews – Kelly and Pace did this with Engaging Ecourses. Instead of just writing a product on ecourse creation, they interviewed successful ecourse creators on the what, how and why of their course, then broke the information down into actionable items for their customers.

Research and Synthesis – some of the most successful products are the ones that take other people’s teachings (often multiple sources) combine them and translate them into something targeted to a particular niche.  The more niche-focussed your product is the more attractive it will be to those customers.

For example Neuro Web Design is basically just Cialdini’s Influence trimmed down to the core principles and reframed specifically for web design. The author made a connection between web design and the psychology of influence for the reader instead of them having to make that connection themselves.

Remember the biggest audience in any market is beginners. You don’t need to create an authority product that will knock the socks off the A-list in your niche, you only need to position yourself as an authority to those who need the most help getting started.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at the process of writing and editing an ebook.

Image Credit: Flickr

Related articles:

• Writing and Editing for a High Quality Ebook
• Are Ebooks Yesterday’s News?
• Ebook Case Study: How Important is Sales Page Conversion Rate?
• Marketing a Successful Ebook
• How to Write and Sell a Successful Ebook

This article Creating an Ebook with Authority is © 2011 BloggingTeacher.com

Get more blogging tips at BloggingTeacher.com