MavenBlog: Marketing Strategies

Many people have told me that they want to make money by selling ebooks, but they don’t want to write an e-book. If this describes you, I have great news for you! You can still make money by selling e-books written by other people by using affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing? Affiliate Marketing is an agreement between a merchant (the person who wrote and owns the ebook) and you (an affiliate). You agree to use your web sites and blogs to promote the merchant’s e-books and to link to the merchant’s web site. In exchange for this, the merchant pays you a commission on all sales that were generated by the affiliate web site. A referral occurs when a customer clicks on your product link and makes a purchase.

So now that you know what affiliate marketing is, start looking for a few affiliate products that you would like to sell. You might already know someone whose ebooks you would like to sell, and who has an affiliate program. In this case, just register for this person’s affiliate program, get your affiliate links and start promoting the e-books.

If you don’t know of anyone who has e-books and an affiliate program that you can use to sell them, just use your favorite search engine to find them. For example, if you are looking for e-books on gardening that have an affiliate program, just type in gardening e-books affiliate program into search engines. Chances are, you will find what you are looking for.

Once you find e-books that you would like to promote, start promoting them. Here is information to help you promote them:

Create good web marketing copy for the e-books on your web site. It is not enough to list the e-books on your web site and then link to the seller’s web site. The people who come to your web site are not looking for links to other sites; rather, they are looking for useful information for themselves. Having useful information on your web site increases the changes of your web site visitors buying the e-book, and will generate affiliate commissions for you.

Once you have good web site copy, start promoting your web site online and drive traffic to it. One way to do that is by optimizing the site for search engines. Search engine optimization is the process of modifying web page content and meta-information to improve the search engine ranking of the page. Successful search engine optimization will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your web site. The more visitors to the web site you have, the more affiliate products you will be able to sell, and the more money you will make. Make sure you optimize every page of your web site for search engines, especially the ones that provide the information about the e-books and sell the e-books; that way you will get more web site visitors.

Another way to drive more traffic to your web site is by creating a blog to promote it. A blog is your business diary, in which you share the information about your web site, as well as the e-books you are promoting. Your blog is an excellent tool to let the world know about the affiliate products and to connect with potential customers who would want to purchase them.

In order to bring the most online traffic and make money with your blog, make sure that your blog consistently and create blog posts that are of interest to your past as well as potential customers. Regular posts that are interesting to read is what will keep your readers coming back and buying from you.

Use the tips discussed above to make money selling e-books written by others. That is an excellent way to make money online.

Start making money with affiliate marketing today! Biana Babinsky pays you 50% commissions for selling her Complete Online Marketing Course at http://www.completemarketingcourse.com/affiliates/

You just finished writing a new article that your target customers will love. Your introduction is strong, and keeps the readers wanting to read more, you provide a lot of useful tips in the article, and you end with an encouragement for the readers to use your tips in their life or business. All in all, a great article.

Is your work done? Not at all. You still haven’t written a very important part for your article - the resource box. A resource box is what comes right after the article, the 2-4 sentences that include your bio and a link back to your business web site.

The article’s resource box is your only chance to convert the article reader into a lead for your business. This is why it is extremely important to make your resource box as effective as possible. Here is what you should include in your resource box:

- Information about you, the author. The first sentence in your resource box should introduce you to the reader. After all, your readers can’t do business with someone they don’t know. You don’t need to share your whole biography, but sharing a few tidbits about what you do will help your article readers get to know you just a bit better.

- A free resource that the reader can subscribe for or request from you. Your article resource box is a great place to offer your readers a free e-course, newsletter or special report, to get them further exposed to your expertise. You want to be able to keep in touch with your article readers long after they have read your article. Make sure you make them a great offer in order to be able to keep in touch.

- Call to action. Tell your reader how to get your free resource, bonus or free gift. Use phrases such as subscribe to the newsletter, register for e-course, get a free gift, to get the readers to look at more of your resources.

Over to you - let’s take action! Take a look at your own article resource box, and see how you can make it more appealing to your article readers. Remember, the more compelling the resource box is, the more leads you will gain for your business.

Listen to Biana Babinsky, the online business expert, consultant and author, as she discusses how to turn your knowledge into articles and your articles into profits. Writing articles has helped her become known online, get more newsletter subscribers and sell more products online. She is sharing all the secrets she has discovered in her Article Marketing Audio Guide available at http://www.marketingsalad.com/article_marketing.html