The Blogger Ebook Problem
If your blog is small, should you write an ebook?
I call this the blogger/ebook problem. It’s sort of like the old paradox of needing a job to afford a car, but needing a car to get to work.
Here is the one side of the blogger/ebook problem most bloggers focus on: they believe they can’t sell an ebook unless they have a large audience. Let’s look at this belief in more detail and start asking some questions about it.
How Small is Small?
If you have a large audience, it’s reasonable to believe that you’ll sell a lot of ebooks, yes? Sure. If you have a small audience, it’s reasonable to believe… what? That you’ll sell no ebooks? That’s not reasonable at all. In fact, it’s plain ridiculous. Really? None? Let’s not be silly.
But how large is large, and how small is small? At what point is it worth it or not? Now that is a useful question, one that requires a little math.
You will sell ebooks in proportion to the size of your audience.
Every member of your audience isn’t actively reading every post you write every time, so you’d really be selling to only a portion of your audience. Let’s say your blog has 300 such people and only 1% of them buy your ebook. If you were selling that ebook for $47, you made $141. That’s not much, but it’s $141 you didn’t have before. And you have gained valuable experience by simply going through the entire process of researching, creating, and selling an ebook.
It would still be worth it. Your first step is always worth it.
If you did a great job at matching up your ebook to the needs of your audience, maybe 2% will buy, giving you around $275 (after PayPal takes its cut–let’s be real).
OK, what if you had an invested audience of 500? At 1% you’re looking at $235. Again, it’s a start. The usual route of monetizing a blog with AdSense would maybe earn you $2 for the same traffic.
Back to the Problem
So we see that small can be pretty small, not some number a blogger “like me” (whatever that means) only thinks is small. You still want the biggest possible audience, there’s no question about that. This is why bloggers and anyone else trying to do business online are so concerned about getting traffic. Now, this really belongs in an post about blog traffic, but let me tell you a secret about trafic: you don’t get blog traffic, you earn it. You have to do something to deserve it. Blog traffic is a reward, not a right.
Here’s the thing, and it revolves around the crux of this traffic issue: selling an ebook will earn you more traffic.
Really.
Here are a few reasons why selling an ebook will get you traffic:
- Selling an ebook is a curiosity attractor: people will link to it and visit just because it’s there, and it’s new.
- You can recruit your social media friends. If you have any friends at all online, and you ask them to help drive traffic to your blog because of the ebook, they will help you and you’ll get traffic.
- You can create an affiliate program if you decide to sell your ebook through E-junkie. With a few affiliates on your side, you have a wider audience.
- Search traffic: Offering the solution that solves a painful problem for your audience can earn you search traffic to your sales page (or post) that you otherwise wouldn’t have.
That’s four solid reasons why offering an ebook for sale will earn you more traffic, which means you’ve also increased the number of buyers the book will have.
I’ve Never Sold an Ebook and My Audience is Less than 500 Subscribers – What Do I Do?
Give your ebook away instead.
Seriously. While selling an ebook will earn you more traffic, giving an ebook away will earn you much more traffic (the kind of traffic you can build a list from and sell to later).
If you’re a long-time reader of Remarkablogger, you may recall that for a while I gave away my How to Start a Business Blog ebook for free if you subscribed to the blog. I went from less than 500 subscribers to over a thousand in just a few days. Once you have over a thousand subscribers, you’ve generally (but not always) crossed that threshold where the numbers just seem to magically grow on their own. And before you know it, you’ll have an audience that’s large enough to sell ebooks to.
Another point in favor of the give-away is this: it lets your audience build trust in you so that when you offer something for sale, they’ll know you’ve got the goods.
Remember this, though: if it’s not worth selling, it’s not worth giving away, either. People don’t want cheap crap for free, they want something valuable for free. Make your ebook as valuable as you can so that it’s worth giving away (and worth some buzz about it, too).
The Free Sample Rules
Of course you can combine both of these strategies, but if your primary goal is building an audience, then a totally free product is the way to go. If your primary goal is selling to an existing audience, then a free sample is one of the oldest and most effective strategies in all of business. In other words, free samples rule!
A free sample has the audience-building power of a free ebook, but with the added monetary bonus of making sales from people who liked the free sample enough to buy the whole thing.
A typical strategy is to use the free sample to entice email list sign-ups. When the ebook itself goes on sale, the list is emailed the link to the sales page.
Small Targets Require Laser Accuracy
The smaller your audience is, the more important it is to target their needs like a laser with perfect aim. This is important for anyone, but for a small audience, a mismatch between product and audience needs could mean the difference between a few sales and no sales at all. Even if you’re giving your book away, remember that it still has to be something people really want and that they would find worth paying for.
If you’re in constant communication with your audience, then you can find out their needs through several different ways:
- Polls/Surveys
- Probing posts that ask for questions in the comments
You can even test out your ideas on a small section of your audience just to see if you’re on target.
Size Matters Not
Remember how in the Star Wars films tiny Yoda was a badass with the Force? “Size matters not,” he said in The Empire Strikes Back, “Judge me by my size do you? Hmm? And well you should not. For the Force is my ally.” And then through the magical powers of the Force he pulls Luke’s sunken spaceship from the clutches of a swamp.
A small blog can have a big impact on the lives of its readers if it’s the right message at the right time for the right people. Don’t let “small” stop you from doing anything, because it’s in the doing that you grow from small to big.