Ebook Project Summary
Back in November I decided to write a free ebook monetized with affiliate links and I created a project on this blog to track the progress of its creation and marketing. I have now completed all of the tasks that I set out to do and have marked the project as complete. This is a summary of what I did and the results that ensued.
The Aim of the Ebook
Throughout the project I had two questions fired at me over and over again in emails, comments left on the blog, remarks in Twitter and so on. They were:
- Why aren’t you charging for this ebook?
- Why aren’t you capturing an email address?
I decided to make the ebook free for two reasons: firstly, it was monetized via affiliate links in the book. The main affiliate program that it promotes is for my webhost, BlueHost. There are a few other affiliate links but this is the main one and it pays out $65 per referral which is a decent chunk of change.
The second reason is that when you give something away for free it is easier to promote, and in particular, easier to get other people to promote for you. A secondary goal of the project was to establish myself as somebody who could write something more substantial than a blog post so I wanted to get exposure for myself and my writing. By giving the ebook away free, many other bloggers in the IM niche were happy to promote the ebook for me.
The reason for not capturing an email address was to make it easier to distribute the ebook far and wide. I wanted to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible in order to create as much exposure for myself as possible and to make more sales via the affiliate links. The moment you ask for something in return, such as an email address, you create a barrier that a percentage of people will resist and I did not want any barriers.
For those of you with concerns about my lack of opt-in list and chargeable products, check out my new project - the Email Course Project :)
Summary of Work Done
In my original project plan I had quite a few ideas for promoting the ebook but in the end I only really used four of them:
- I submitted the ebook to many web directories
- I conducted a large email campaign
- I created and distributed a Torrent file
- I promoted the ebook in the Warrior Forum
Oh and of course, I blogged about it here rather a lot!
Traffic Received
Once the first release of the ebook was ready for download I created a landing page for it on the blog and whenever I mentioned the ebook, either in an email or somewhere else, I always linked to that landing page. My aim was to get people to that page so that I could track the traffic with Google Analytics.
However, I also made the direct link to the PDF itself public and I encouraged people to share the file and of course once I had distributed the ebook on the Torrent network, that opened up another channel of distribution which didn’t touch my blog at all.
What this means is that I can never know how many copies of the book have been downloaded. All I can do is track the traffic that arrived at my landing page and then guess at the downloads. There were a total of 24,399 pageviews and 17,061 unique visitors since January.
Excluding search and StumbleUpon traffic, here are the top 10 referrers to this page. The number in brackets is the number of visitors sent:
- shoemoney.com (3,495)
- courtneytuttle.com (753)
- heroturko.com (503)
- szab.net (500)
- mubinahmed.com (453)
- carlocab.com (450)
- ez-onlinemoney.com (435)
- emonetized.com (421)
- warriorforum.com (389)
- canimakebigmoneyonline.com (357)
The Viral Effect At Work
People often talk about something ‘going viral’ on the Internet and that means that you start distributing something and then it begins to take on a life of its own. People see it on a site and link to it themselves and so it grows and expands much further than could have been achieved with the initial promotions.
I can see some evidence of a certain degree of the viral effect at work here in my stats. Some of the top referrers in that list, must have picked up the ebook from a third party because they were not part of my email campaign. One of them (szab.net) is not even in English and yet that site sent me 500 visitors!
Search Traffic & Links In
One of the benefits to a promotional campaign such as this is that it tends to create a lot of inbound links. The top 10 referrers I listed above are just a handful of the literally hundreds of inbound links that I received to this page.
What this also does is boost the authority of the domain and this in turn helps the blog as a whole. At some point during this campaign my blog moved from a PR4 to a PR5 and I started to see a lot more traffic coming in from search engines.
What also happened is that all those people that linked to me used anchor text that related to the topic of the book so I have now started to rank very highly for several keywords around WordPress, “niche sites” and so on. Over 4000 visitors came from Google alone and there was additional traffic from other search engines such as Yahoo.
The Benefits of a Cover Graphic
I decided to make one of those nice 3D cover graphics to make the download look more enticing. What I also found is that nearly all of the top referrers used this graphic in their own post when linking to me. This tells me that a pleasing graphic has a much higher chance of producing a click through from a link.
At first I made my own graphic which was not very good (but did the job) but have since had a new one designed by Linda of http://www.ecoversource.com/. She was kind enough to make this cover without charge but I’ll be contacting her again soon to order some graphics for my new StumbleUpon course :-)
Income Earned
It is difficult to know exactly how much income has been generated from the ebook. The main affiliate program promoted, BlueHost has generated a total of 43 sales to date, however they have not all come directly from the ebook. 7 of those came from the banner that I have at the top of the blog, and a couple of others came from the odd link I insert into blog posts. There are at least 34 signups from the ebook which is $2,210.
In UK money that is about £1000 which really is not all that much. If I wanted to make my living in this way I would need to be banging out an ebook like this just about every month but that wouldn’t work because I couldn’t email the same bunch of people month after month to ask them to promote it for me.
I’ve shown that at least 17k visitors arrived at this page and I imagine at least 75% of those people downloaded the ebook. I know this because I have seen my own stats promoting somebody else’s ebook and that had a download rate of 50% even though an email address was requested. If I take into account distribution methods not from this blog then I would guess that the book has been downloaded around 15,000 times.
34 sales out of 15,000 downloads is a 0.2% conversion rate! That is pretty abysmal really!
However, having said that, the income doesn’t stop here. Sales of BlueHost packages are still coming in - I had a few over the weekend. Now that the ebook is on people’s hard drives it has the potential to earn revenue for me for many months or possibly even years to come. There is no telling when somebody may pick it up and read it and decide to sign up. As long as the material stays current, there is potential for future sales to trickle in.
What Did I Learn From This Project?
The biggest thing I learned is that any ’success’ I may have seen as a result of this ebook project in the form of income, traffic, links, new subscribers and so on are about 90% because of other people. My contribution was rather small and without all those other people taking time and space out on their blogs to promote it, my ebook would have been dead in the water.
I also noticed that the most effective form of promotion by far was the email campaign but of course this is something that cannot be abused.
Income wise, I don’t think that the income earned was a good return on investment for the time invested in the project. However, I got a lot more about of the project than just some income. I started to feel my way around the Warrior forum, I learned a bit about Torrent files, I discovered some good places to submit ebooks and all of these things would allow me to promote another one more quickly.
There is also the benefit for the blog. All those links and traffic not only promoted the ebook itself but gave me new subscribers. I know I had several people come from ShoeMoney and subscribed so that is a great benefit. Plus I had a lot of people tell me that they enjoyed the ebook and so that means that anything I write in the future is more likey to be read.
Would I Do It Again?
At this current moment in time I do not have any easily monetizable topics screaming at me to be written into an ebook so no, I have no plans to write another ebook in the near future.
If I did want to do it again I would need to find a better fit for tying in the affiliate program to the content as a conversion rate of 0.2% is terrible. If I could have achieved just 1% conversion rate then I would have seen around $10,000 income and that is far more appealing! I can certainly see the potential for making a small business out of writing free ebooks that are monetized with relevant affiliate links though it’s not something I want to actively pursue right now.
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Nick - road2blogging
March 10, 2008
Caroline,
Great writeup and explaination of how you marketed the ebook. I’ve been watching from when you released the first version and quickly saw posts springing up all over many blogs that I read, and of course the ones above.
I was just thinking as I was reading that it would have been a bit better if you had promoted it to a list, or had someone distribute it to theirs?
Also, pretty bad conversion rate there, but so many people do use hostgator (and other hosts) and don’t want to pay an amount up front for 2 years (or even 12 months) of hosting. I think if you went down the route of having two affiliate links so people could make their mind up then that might have been better.
You never know, people might just open up the book a couple of months down the line and you’ll get a steady trickle coming in.
Nick - road2blogging’s last blog post..The Wonderer returns