E-books can be a great source of income, as we mentioned in a previous article, but no matter whether you write it yourself or hire a custom writing service to do it for you, you need to promote it.
The good news is that there are a number of effective ways to market your e-book and make the right people aware that it’s out there. The first couple ideas I’m going to throw out there involve paid traffic.
OK, before you balk at the idea, please understand a few things:
For starters, if your e-book is designed as a marketing tool, you need to have all your promotional ducks in a row ahead of time anyway. You don’t make money without spending money. It’ll cost you in time and resources to write the e-book (or to have it written), and it will cost money to advertise it.
What you need to determine ahead of time is whether your e-book has the potential to at least cover those investments. In most cases, if you’ve done your homework and you’ve produced something that people will want to read, that shouldn’t be an issue. With that in mind, here are a few suggestions for how to effectively promote your e-book.
1. Facebook Ads
There is no more powerful platform for raising awareness of your brand right now than Facebook. It is the ideal place to not only market your e-book, but also target it to a specific audience.
Facebook ads are also quite versatile, giving you the option to advertise in either the newsfeed or the sidebar, decide how many people will see your ad, and set a budget that is low enough to test different demographics to see what custom audience responds the best. Best of all, Facebook marketing is very affordable and allows you the freedom to spread out your spend over multiple ad units for split testing purposes.
Bear in mind as you develop your ad campaign that although this is the best place to market virtually any product, the competition on Facebook is fierce. The responsibility to create engaging content doesn’t end with the e-book.
Your ads have to grab the attention of your target audience and get them to stop and read. Make sure you are using high-quality visuals and creating headlines to accompany them that are interesting, thought provoking, humorous, or even a bit controversial. Your headlines and visuals should also fit together, telling a complete story.
2. Google AdWords
Imagine being able to reach 2.6 billion searchers each and every month with a potential reach of 90% of all Internet users. While Facebook is the best online marketplace for raising awareness, Google is the place to go for instant, rapid conversions. When you fuel your e-book marketing campaign through AdWords, that is precisely what you get, and it, too, is surprisingly affordable.
AdWords also offers effective targeting tools that allow you to market by age, gender, city, country, parental status, etc. You can also narrow your search by language if, for example, you are offering your book in both English and Spanish (or just Spanish).
3. Click Popups
Your knee-jerk reaction here might be, “That can’t work. People hate popups.” The simple truth of the matter is that there is tons of research that says they actually are effective when used properly. Click popups are among the most effective, right up there with exit popups and scroll popups.
What sets click popups apart is that they actually make it easier for the user to navigate to your product. A clear and concise call to action in an isolated space can amp up conversions dramatically. Why? Because the information appears instantly, there’s no waiting for another page to load, and – when used correctly – they can function as a full-service point of sale.
4. Retargeting
Retargeting campaigns allow you to show specific ads to people who have visited your website in the past but didn’t make a purchase. It is a valuable tool for being able to market to people even if you haven’t captured any personal information.
Through retargeting, you can show specific, targeted ads to these users via any website that displays banner ads. You can create segments based on any number of criteria from the articles they’ve read or the products they’ve browsed and show only ads that relate to those things. Simply add a retargeting pixel to your website, and you can track everything from cart abandons to content consumption and start marketing based on specific interests.
5. Guest Blogging
Finally, something that doesn’t have to cost anything out of pocket! For an effective and inexpensive way to reach a wider audience, you can reach out to other blogs within your target audience and ask if you can write an occasional guest post for them. It’s a very common practice that bloggers use to ensure their blog content stays fresh.
The only expense here is if you opt to have a custom writing service write the blog posts, and, in most cases, that costs far less than a full-on ad campaign.
More Exposure, Better Conversions
If you want to spread awareness about your e-book and guarantee it gets seen, consider the five methods above. They are powerful and effective means of reaching a broader audience and improving conversions.