Digital Product Marketing: Five More Ways to Promote Web Sales

April 4, 2012 By Karl Walinskas 2 Comments

In a previous article, I provided some of the essentials to promoting a digital product online. If you didn’t take those steps, revisit  Marketing Your Virtual Goods: 5 Essential Practices for Online Content Creators to benefit from low or no-cost methods of getting your product visible. Now that the basics are out of the way, here are 5 more techniques to not only get noticed, but convert prospects to sales.
1.  Samples & Reviews
Find outlets for articles you can write to provide help and advice while stealthily marketing the eBook. You can use article farms like Ezine Articles or Articles Base, but you can also search Technorati for comparable blogs online to your topic that have tons of traffic and accept submitted material from writers. Your submissions may contain text links or an author’s box that links to your eBook landing page(s). You have a couple of strategies here:

• Submit articles that are no-cost chapters from the eBook. Never give away the whole book, but a great chapter that provides value and tantalizes the reader for more.
• Write a book review about your book using an author alias, so it isn’t you reviewing your own work in the eyes of the online world. You can find 3rd party evaluators for your book by Google searching or visiting gig-oriented web sites like Fiverr.com.

2.  Purchase Visitors Directly
Using Google Adwords or any other internet ad forum, market your eBook within your permitted daily budget to drive people to your landing page. Facebook Ads, for example, can be very targeted based upon characteristics of the members in their database, segmented by age, region, language and activities. Now your ad is only served up to those who match the requirements, strengthening the odds that any visitors are really potential customer for your eBook and not simply money-wasting curiosity seekers.
3.  Joint Venture Alliances
If you don’t presently have a large email list, it will take a while before you have any reach to make headway with email marketing. That’s OK. Take advantage of business publications (start with the ones you read) that complement your subject to use their large distribution. How?
Contact the publisher or author and provide a commission for the good will of that individual or organization to promote and furnish an ad about your eBook. Learn how big the email list is. You can lease the list too, but may be able to get free access to it using the commission strategy. Don’t be pennywise; give the list operator 50-75 %. It’s a digital book! Your cost of delivery, once written and online, is null.
4.  The Amazon Jungle
Capitalize on the ridiculous amount of traffic that Amazon.com has of folks interested in reading books and sign up as an author. Amazon has a detailed policy for getting your eBooks online and priced on their website, and for this approach you don’t even have to manage the ecommerce. They do. As an Amazon.com affiliate, you can list your eBook alongside any others you are interested in on your website and earn commissions when your eBook is clicked through and purchased.
5.  Affiliate Promotion
Just like the JV example above, offer your book with similar commissions to affiliates who can sell it on their own web pages. Google search “affiliate marketplaces” or simply visit Clickbank, the largest affiliate marketplace for electronically downloadable products, and follow their set-up process to get your eBook listed and accessible for internet marketers, most of whom you will never see. Make the commissions attractive to get affiliates that will get results. To use this strategy like a pro, you’ll wish to produce several static and/or dynamic banner ads in standard sizes that your affiliate partners can retrieve and use on their websites to market your eBook.