I’ve been studying Internet Marketing for several years now and feel like I’ve learned a lot, but when it comes to putting all the pieces together, I seem to hit a wall. For example, I wrote my first e-book for a client about 5 years ago, and a few years ago I decided to finally write one for myself. I partnered with an SEO expert who knew html, and between the two of us we launched a website with sales page and the e-book.
We had done surveys to come up with the topic, so we felt we had a winner. We took a webinar with some experts to find out what all the steps were. We did Google adwords and Google adsense. We built a mailing list and sent out newsletters. We signed up a bunch of affiliates and sent out emails. We tweaked and tested the sales letter ad nauseum! I’m not sure what we didn’t do, it seemed we were always working on it.
Long story not so short, we sold very few e-books and I was sorely disappointed. I had done a lot of work, mostly the writing, but I couldn’t figure out where we went wrong.
Any so-called “failure” is really a lesson in my mind, so I really learned a lot. The biggest mistake I think we learned is that for a product to sell well, it has to fill a need, solve a problem, or provide some significant benefit. Our e-book did not. It was primarily informational—well it was an information product, wasn’t it?
So we had all the pieces and we put all the pieces together—we just didn’t have a strong motivation to buy. As you venture into this crazy, complex, yet exciting work of Internet marketing, always remember this: why would someone buy your product? If you can’t answer that, you can’t sell it.
More to come…
Happy info-products,
Andrea
Andrea Susan Glass, founder of WritersWay
