Experimenting with a Sales Page

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1) What's New at the Shared Self Publishing Experience

Keep up with traffic figures. See what kind of audience a big, do-it-yourself site can draw.


2) Your Book Answers What Question?

Shoppers discover new sites by entering search engine queries. One secret to getting found is deciding which queries your site - and your book - could offer the answer to!


3) FEATURE ARTICLE:
My Self Publishing Adventure: Part 2

I've begun selling electronic versions of my children's books on my kids' books site. Read how it's going!


4) Married to Your Marketing Approach?

Marketing means testing and improving until you find the approach that makes sales. Is your website adjusting to marketing realities? (Or does it still look like it did when you first put it up?)


5) New Pages on the Site

When you signed up for the newsletter, you were promised an update on new pages to the site. Here they are!

==============
Functionality Alerts!
==============
If any links in this newsletter don't work, it's probably because your email software cuts off the link text at a line break, then prints the rest of the link as plain text. To use one of these links, try copying the WHOLE link then pasting it into your browser.

This email was designed to be read in an email reader that reads html. If you don't have one or yours is turned off, this letter might not look great but I'm guessing you're still smart enough to make sense of what I'm saying!
==============

1) What's New at the Shared Self Publishing Experience

As I mentioned last month, I've been focused on my children's books site, where I've begun selling electronic versions of my own books.

I'll say more about that exciting news later in the letter, but I thought it might be informative this month to look at the traffic figures on that site, rather than The Shared Self Publishing Experience.

Select October traffic figures for Best Children's Books - Find, Read or Write:

• 21,325 unique visitors
• 28,618 total visits
• 55,751 page views
• 18,039 visitors referred by Google

The site made just over $500.00...over and above sales of my books. These were the income sources:

• Google AdSense - $342
• Amazon - $31
• BookCloseouts.com - $85
• Magazine sales - $36
• Personalized children's books - $10

Talk about WIN-WIN situations! If a site offers more than your books...

1. It'll sell more THAN your books, and
2. It'll sell more OF your books.

Let's face it: there are a lot of books out there. Yours on the ups and downs of online dating is going to have a hard time competing with Harry Potter.

So stop marketing your book as just a book. Your book has a specific market. Market specifically.

Online, people look for answers. We query a search engine and up pop thousands of links to possible answers.

What query does your book answer? What query could your site answer? Once you've figured that out, you can market accordingly.

I'll give you an example. I wrote a children's book entitled, "How Smoolie Became a SHY-entist."

I could write a website all about the book and tell everyone how wonderful it is. (Because it is!)

But that site would rarely, if ever, get found. Why? Because no one knows to look for it.

Instead I wrote a site about children's books. Smoolie gets her own page on the site. But even that webpage isn't so much about Smoolie.

It's about the need the book meets, the query the book answers. My book offers a solution: helping your shy child feel less alone by introducing her to a shy character in a book.

The page works on two levels:

1. the search engines rank it highly because their "reading" of my text tells them that the page speaks to the SHY CHILD BOOK query, and


2. visitors arrive at the page and don't have to simply settle for me saying how wonderful the book is. They find out how it fills a need - the need that led them to my site in the first place!

Google SHY CHILD BOOK to see how well my method works. Then figure out what queries your book answers and add to your website accordingly.

Not sure how to find what keywords searchers use? Click to this page:

Keyword Searching

Page to the bottom and click on Search It!

A tiny little window should open. Click on the Step 1 dropdown menu. Click "Brainstorming" under KEYWORDS. The Step 2 dropdown will now offer about 10 different keyword brainstorming choices.

Now, click "Click here for information." Read.

If your book really is about dating, enter dating in the third dropdown to get keyword suggestions. Click Search It!

Play around. Read up. Find the keywords that the people most apt to buy your book would use. Add a page to your site for the best keyword you come up with!

Or, better yet: start a NEW site all about the needs your book fills. Write pages for ALL the keywords you come up with!

Sales occur when needs are met. The same goes for book sales.


3) FEATURE ARTICLE
My Self Publishing Adventure: Part 2

Last month I told you I was beginning to market my children's stories as ebooks on my kids' books site. That's Part 1.

It was definitely time to start marketing my work. After all, my site was receiving tens of thousands of visitors per month. Surely some of them would buy my books.

The first month (August), I gave the stories away. I wanted to gather feedback and testimonials. In September, I began trying to sell books.

I priced them at $3/download. I wrote a sales page (take a moment to take a look at it) that described all seven of the books I was now trying to sell.

I placed links to it on my home page and a number of my other well-trafficked pages.

I didn't make very many sales - only about 10 during the entire month of September. Was I frustrated?

Not at all!

Getting traffic to your site is the hard part. I already had that! Now I just had to do a better job of figuring out how to persuade more of my visitors to buy my book.

I tried adding video to some of the pages for the individual books.

Apparently I'm not a very persuasive salesman.

So I consulted. I contacted a few people who had posted their successful ebooks to The Shared Self Publishing Experience. I read and re-read this book on ebook marketing:

I learned that most successful internet sellers have a rather patterned approach. It involves a very specialized sales page. That sales page usually reads like the text version of an infomercial. Lots of hype.

So I gave it a try.

VERY different, don't you think?

I'd also been told that you have to offer freebies and bonuses and such. You'll see that advice reflected in this second sales page. (With the Ebooks, adding freebies was easy. Throwing in an extra book increases my costs not at all.)

The results?

Unspectacular still. But I remained undaunted.

There was, by the way, one piece of advice I wasn't following: to raise the price significantly.

I didn't want to do it. I wanted the books to reach parents and children who couldn't afford more than three dollars. And I wanted every buyer to feel like they got a good deal.

After pondering my traffic and my results, I decided a third approach was in order. I felt the hype was a little much for a three dollar purchase, and I decided that the traditional ebook sales approach was designed more for grown-ups trying to grow businesses or get rich quick.

And a generous Norwegian fellow in the SiteBuildIt forums had made a brilliant observation that I wanted to act on.

By the way, jot me a note if you ever want to visit the forums. I can get you in!

My books, you see, are intended as bibliotherapy - stories intended to help parents help children correct their problem behaviors.

Kjell suggested that my sales page promote storytelling as the age-old "cure" for problem behaviors. (Which, of course, it is. Think "The Boy Who Cried Wolf.")

So I took Kjell's advice and tried pitching my books that way. Take a look!

And you know what? It's WORKING.

I'm now averaging a little under a sale per day. I continue to make refinements on my sales approach, and I continue to build the site in order to attract more traffic. After all...

Book Sales = Traffic x Conversion

Focus on that equation for a moment. If you have five visitors a day, you would need a 10% conversion rate to make 15 sales in a month. But if you had a 10% conversion rate, you'd be a sales guru!

1% conversion is more realistic (and might still be high). Now we're talking 1.5 sales per month.

Traffic is the part of the equation most under your control. Increase your traffic to 500 visitors a day (very doable with effort and the right tools!) and now your 1% conversion rate means 150 sales per month.

Now, my story has a little postscript.

My home page - like yours - is my site's most valuable real estate. Over 4000 people visited it last month. The "above the fold" portion (the part you see before you scroll down) is the most valuable part of this most valuable page.

I'd been driving traffic to my sales page by putting colorful graphic links above the fold on the home page.

http://www.best-childrens-books.com/images/child-tantrum-cartoon.gif

http://www.best-childrens-books.com/images/angel-and-devil-children-vertical.gif

(Copy and paste the URLs into your browser bar if you want to see.)

Well, the holidays are coming. And I had a realization:

I have ways to make much more money during gift giving season than by selling my ebooks. I need that valuable real estate for a link to a gifts page.

So if you visit my site during the holidays, you'll see a different graphic, one that links to my Christmas Reading Gifts page.

You'll notice that I do mention my ebooks on this page. But because the circumstances are different, I promote them differently. Here I pitch them as reading/activity books that can keep the kids occupied while the grown-ups visit with each other.

So here's the message in all this: you might be most interested in selling your own books, but a well-trafficked website is one that offers information on a LOT of different, RELATED topics.

Want still more information on this subject? Read my article, Building A Generous Website.

Such a website will have multiple income opportunities, and your book(s) will be only one of them. Such a website can support your writing habit!


4) Are You Unhappily Married to Your Marketing Approach?

If you read the previous article, you know I'm continually experimenting with how I market my books on my children's books site. My FIRST approach didn't result in very many book sales!

So I tinkered with it and came up with something drastically different and significantly more effective.

How about you? Are you still stuck with your original marketing notion?

Why?

I know a lot of people remain married to their original approach because of how they engaged the internet in the first place.

Maybe you built a site with limited skills.

Maybe you had terrific tech skills, but didn't know the first thing about attracting traffic.

Maybe a friend or relative built you a site as a favor and now you're kind of stuck with it.

Maybe you spent all your money on a talented web designer...who didn't know the first thing about attracting traffic (or converting it once it arrived).

Any marketer will tell you that a successful campaign is one in which research is done and methods adjusted.

Fact: the first "light" beer was marketed as diet beer. It bombed! Beer drinkers either weren't interested in losing weight...or being PERCEIVED as interested in losing weight.

So when did light beer catch on? When the folks at Miller ditched the word "Diet" and decided to market Lite as a way to drink MORE beer.

"Tastes great. Less Filling." Scary, but true!

If your site is in its original state, chances are it's disappointing you. It hasn't adjusted to changing circumstances, nor the realities you've discovered about bookselling on the net.

If you haven't made those changes, chances are it's either expense or hassle (or hopelessness) holding you back.

Here's the thing...

You're a writer. A website is composed, mostly, of words. (Or at least it should be.)

Words are what attract search engine traffic.

If you're not ADDING words to your website, you're wasting your advantage as a writer.

If you're not ADJUSTING the words on your website (to sell your books more effectively), again, you're wasting your advantage as a writer.

DON'T surrender the web to the non-writers. Assert your advantage.

If you don't know how to add content to your website, it's time to learn. If you think it's going to be too hard...

You could use the service I use. Build a NEW website. One that could attract real traffic because it's about something more than you and your books.

It's a service that allows you to focus on text and get your words on the web without having to know html or javascript or any of that crazy stuff.

If you can type words and click buttons, you're good to go. It's a method that I've used to post nearly a thousand pages to the internet, and it works.

Stop beating yourself and your site up just because you didn't get it right the first time. You don't publish a first draft, do you?

The good thing about the web: you CAN post your first drafts to it, in order to learn from the results. But for goodness sake: don't leave those first drafts up forever!


5) NEW PAGES ON THE SITE

When you signed up for this newsletter you were promised updates on new stories posted to The Shared Self Publishing Experience. There have been a few new pages added to the site since the last newsletter.

Each url below reflects the title given by the author to their self publishing experience (minus the punctuation). To visit a page, paste into your browser's address bar the characters

then paste in the characters for the particular page that catches your eye.

I'm noting some terrific posts below in each category by bolding them. Read the comments (because when writers write back in response to my questions, sometimes that's where the best information is). And please post your own comments as well!

discovering-spiritchili.html

a-mothers-day-gift.html

selfpublishing-just-do-it.html

crossing-the-road-a-guide-for-the-college-bound-chicken.html

1106-design.html

ernn.html

wicklowphotographs.html

livermore-the-online-novel.html

publishingmadeeasyorg.html

http://www.best-childrens-books.com/fu-fus-for-president-obama-and-diversity-publishing.html

http://www.best-childrens-books.com/life-is-short-make-your-dreams-come-true-and-inspire-people-of-all-ages.html


WRAPPING UP

Please remember that this newsletter is perfectly suitable for forwarding to your self published friends and acquaintances! You can also recommend to them that they sign up for the newsletter on The Shared Self Publishing Experience home page. Also remember to tell those folks they can post to the site in return for a link to their site!

This newsletter comes from

Add it to your address book so it doesn't end up in the Spam pile!


THANK YOU