eBook Sales: a Cornerstone of Success

E-Book sales remain a booming area in internet marketing and it's one of the main ways by which many internet marketers gain a significant portion of their incomes. Indeed, estimated eBook sales in 2006 being $220 million. This is still small potatoes compared with taditional book sales, but current growth in the eBook sales market leads to an estimated sales value for eBooks of between $3 billion and $5 billion in five years' time.

So, how do you get yourself a slice of this lucrative (and growing) market?

Information products are a massive growth area on the internet. But the truth is just about anyone with a little nouse can create an information product. It's simply a matter of finding a topic you know something about an writing an eBook about that topic that someone else might be able to benefit from. You can even use your favourite text editor (MS Word, for example) to create the document and then export or save it as PDF. PDF stands for 'Portable Document Format' and is a standard originated by Adobe corporation for the free exchange of documents over the internet. As long as you have Adobe's free 'Adobe Reader' software on your system you can read PDF documents. PDFs also allow you to lock your documents so that they are still readable but the content cannot be copied or altered in any way without a password or permission. Very important if you want to protect your intellectual property rights.

If you're more serious about creating internet products then it might be worth your while investing in a more professional PDF document generator. But it's certainly not necessary.

Once you have your PDF document then you have a product that you can sell or give away... Give away? I hear you ask in horror. Yes, give away... Remember you're in the area of internet marketing now and you've probably heard of something called 'Viral Marketing'. Here you embed links to your products and sites within the eBook you've just generated. You then give away the eBook to subscribers to your newsletter, for example or you give it away to site that allow cheap or free eBook downloads. This way the information about your site and products is disseminated through your eBook. A very cheap form of advertising that can be very effective.

If you have a more serious eBook or an eBook on a topic that you think may make you serious money you will want to sell that eBook. You can do this by creating a landing page on your own site and selling the eBook there (usually with PayPal and/or ClcikBank as your payment processing partners). But this still means that you need to advertise your eBook and market it so that people can find it to buy it.

If this heavy marketing does not appeal to you then you might want to consider signing-up to an eBook site or repository. Here you can allow the site to sell and market the eBook for you. These sites either work on a profit-sharing basis where the site takes a certain percentage of the sales or they work on a flat fee where you pay-up front to include your eBook or information product on their site and then you get the proceeds of any sales made (some sites work on a combination of both). If the site is good then you can make reasonable money this way.

But what if these sales methods aren't for you? Well, a number of eBook sites allow you to list your eBooks in their systems for free. Effectively they're giving you free advertising and host a link back to your eBook so they do the marketing but you handle the sales. This can be a cheap and effective option. It's well worth doing as it gives you more exposure and an additional back-link to your site.

What, though, if none of these options appeal to you? Well, there is, as always, another option. You could set-up your own fully-fledged eBook sales site. There are many scripts available (some very cheap) that allow you to quickly set-up your own eBook sales site. These are database-driven sites that allow you to add hundreds of eBooks, information products and software products to your site. As well as adding your own products you can add free eBooks available from the web. You can also buy eBooks and products with full resale rights from various other eBook repositories and eBay very cheaply to fill your store. This way you keep 100% of your profits and you have a residual income from all the other products that you're selling.

Even if you're not into eBooks and eBook marketing in a big way this still remains a good way of gaining a residual income for yourself.

If you are interested in the topics in this article, would like your own eBook sales site or have an eBook to advertise, then why not visit:

Celtnet eBooks Sales site

Find everything you need to set-up your own eBook sales site or to advertise your eBooks successfully.