“We are here to kickstart your ecommerce ambitions by providing you with a range of ecommerce stores in the most popular niches whilst providing you with a fully functioning business complete with products to sell saving you time, money and effort in the process."
“We are here to kickstart your ecommerce ambitions by providing you with a range of ecommerce stores in the most popular niches whilst providing you with a fully functioning business complete with products to sell saving you time, money and effort in the process."
How to make money online by selling ebooks
As you can imagine, the question I most get asked is “do ebooks actually sell”? The short answer is “yes, definitely”. In this episode of the Startup Streams Serial Entrepreneur Podcast, I will share my own store of how I made $550 with the very first Startup Streams pre-made business for sale…
So, do ebooks sell?
This is important for all Startup Streams customers to understand as all of our pre-made businesses for sale, currently come with ebooks for you to sell on our stores.
The very first Startup Streams business for sale was our original mental strength hacks ebook store. And, before I had even conceived the idea of Startup Streams - fully intending to keep the mental strength hacks store for myself as a passive form of income - I was able to make over $500. I will share with you how I did that today.
Now, being able to make over $500 is important, as this amount should put you into profit, if you were to buy the same exact mental strength hacks store I used, as seen and available to buy right now at StartupStreams.com.
Ok, so the very first thing you need to do is to make sure that you know your audience. Who are you actually going to sell to? Unfortunately, this is one of the most overlooked first steps, and one which will pay dividends down the line if you get right.
For the mental strength hacks store, targeting military personal was my “Who?”. As the ebook and website are in English, targeting Army, Marines, Air Force and Navy personnel in the UK, US, Canada and Australia was my “where?”. And my website, which delivered the ebook to my customers automatically, was the “how”.
You can find the Startup Streams Support Pack at StartupStreams.com right now, to help you better find out your target audience.
How to price your ebook?
Next, you need to know how to price your ebook. One of the many great things about selling ebooks is that you don’t have any cost per unit. Meaning, once you have it to sell, it costs you nothing to sell each and every unit - like it would do if you were to sell physical books, as it costs money for the raw materials, to print and ship. Check out our other podcast “9 Advantages Of Selling Ebooks Online” to find out more about why ebooks are so favourable to sell.
So with pricing; do you go low-ball or high ball? As there is no unit cost, you could potentially sell each ebook for $0.01. But why would you want to do that? Where is the room for profit, and surely this would dissuade people from buying as they may believe the low cost reflects poor content inside? Not a good look.
Equally, don’t go too high. That said, I did run some pricing experiments and managed to sell over 20x of the ebooks for $100 each! Yes, you heard me correctly - $100 each for an ebook! This experiment was at a later stage, I will make a podcast about this in the future, so stay tuned.
So, how is best to proceed? Well, I suggest somewhere in-between. In fact another of our customers got in touch with us to say that they made 800x sales within 2 weeks of launching their ebook store from us, selling their ebooks for $29 each. This was also with the mental strength hacks store.
Just make sure you conduct some market research - what is the average price for selling or buying ebooks in your niche to give you some ideas of where to base your pricing. Of course, you can always refer to our demo stores for an indication of how much to charge per ebook and changing the price is super easy to do, right inside your Shopify store.
And I would certainly also suggest conducting similar pricing experiments as I did, to find the optimal price people would pay.
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How to market your ebook?
So now you have your store, ebook to sell, you know who to sell to and have your pricing strategy in check; let’s now look at marketing.
If you have already subscribed to us on your favourite podcast platform; such as Spotify, Amazon or YouTube, you may have come across the “How to make your first sale on a Startup Streams store within 24 hours?” podcast. Here, I explain in more detail, what is the easiest way to make your first sale? In short, it is to sell to people in your inner circles and your network. Sell to friends, family, colleagues, fans… the post man - whoever you know. This is what I did with my store, gained my first bit of traction, and could then reinvest what I had earned into paid ads. Ok, I didn’t actually sell to my postman.
Moving on, and after checking out all of the main social media channels; Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc… I decided to go with Instagram as I could find dozens of military based fan pages, in english, based in the the countries I wanted to target. This was 2019 and I don’t think TikTok was much of a thing then, but if I started again from scratch today, TikTok is where I would start - so you may wish to consider using TikTok instead of Instagram to keep up with current trends.
Once I decided to use Instagram, It was very easy to DM military fan pages and ask how much it would be to advertise with them. I quickly made a basic ad to test, and was reassured when I was quoted between $15-$50 per 24 hour post, depending on the size of the audience. This was in budget, as I had already made enough profit by selling to people I know to reinvest. Side note, you can easily make an ad on Canva, if you don’t have access to Photoshop, or you can find a cost effective freelancer on platforms like Fiverr or Upwork which can help.
So, I then made sure that I had my own Instagram account optimised, with a link to the website, a strong bio, and at least 12 images already on the account page.
I then chose three accounts to pay for a 24 hour post with, each on a different day, each page with a unique discount code so that I can monitor where exactly the sales were coming from, and sat back to watch.
And that was it. Within a week or so, I had made over $500.
Throughout this period and beyond, I made sure I kept the Instagram account activate as the shout outs were also gaining me Instagram followers, making sure I stuck to a 4 to 1 ratio; of posting 4 posts which provide value to every one post encouraging sales.
I have since sold this very first store, which was Startup Streams sale no.1 and the new owner got back to me to say that they regularly make $700 a month, and has since started up a second Startup Streams business. You can find out more in our very first podcast “How To Make Money Online With Startup Streams?”.
On a final note, Instagram isn’t what it used to be, as it was prior to 2020 when Instagram actually said they are no longer just an image sharing app, turning themselves into the world’s greatest social media copy-cats by copying all SnapChat and TikTok features, and in turn reducing everyone’s engagement - and therefore enjoyment.
So make sure you are paying attention to which marketing methods work, and which - like Instagram - don’t work as well as the once did. As I stated before, TikTok may be the way to go now; again this is likely to change in the future.
Make sure you collect reviews and ask for referrals
Lastly, I must say that it is super important to make sure that you collect reviews and ask for referrals. This is super helpful for increasing your conversion rate as it increases trust. And I even asked buyers to provide a picture of them reading the ebook for my Instagram page and to use on the website - many customers I asked who loved the ebook did for free, and the pictures are even included in the Startup Streams store named “Navy Seal” mental strength hacks store. You can use the same social proof I collected back in 2019, today, by buying this business for sale. We’ll even have it completed and ready for you to sell from within 24 hours of your order.
Or, head to StartupStreams.com right now and explore all of niches we make ebook stores for, to find a store which is right for you, today.
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