It’s okay to admit that you don’t like the idea of selling. Not many people do.
But there is one big problem. If you don’t sell then it can be really hard to make any money and money is needed for your business to grow. But you already knew that.
So your best bet is to master the art of selling ebooks online. But let’s do it the Odd Noodle way. What does that mean?
It means learning how to sell without selling. It sounds impossible, but it’s a lot easier than you think.
To start, first, we need to understand why people buy things.
Why Do People Buy Anything?
You might think this is a pretty broad question but surprisingly it’s not. The answer is quite simple.
In fact, the answer applies to absolutely anything you buy.
People buy things when they can see those things improving their lives or to say it succinctly, people buy improvement.
That’s it. If it’s not going to improve their lives in some way then people won’t bother with them. So to sell something you need to show someone that it is going to improve their lives and if you truly think it will improve their lives then guess what?
It would be selfish of you not to make sure that they know about it!
How We Sell Thousands of Ebooks Every Year
You probably never heard of us because we aren’t New York Times Bestsellers or Amazon Bestsellers. And yet we still end up selling thousands of ebooks every single year.
How?
By helping people. It’s the truth.
All we do is show up and help people with a problem, and then some of them are grateful and end up buying a book of ours. This blog post is an excellent example.
If you find it helpful (you still have to keep reading) then you might explore the site more and find something you like. Maybe it’s one of our books or another digital product. Or maybe you’ll sign up for our mailing list to learn how to do something else.
From there, after we help you a bit more maybe you’ll decide to buy a book because you want even more help.
This is what we mean when we talk about selling without selling. When you help people then when you do finally pitch them on your offer it won’t feel like selling to them because you’ve already helped them so much.
In fact, they’ll look at it as advice that you’re giving them. Like a tip to check out a hot new restaurant in town.
But that still doesn’t explain HOW we sell thousands of ebooks and how our students do the same thing. So let’s break it down to a process.
The 5-Step Guide to Selling Ebooks Online
Before we show you the steps there is something very important to keep in mind and that is the difference between strategy and tactics.
Strategy never changes. It is always constant.
Tactics are the things that you do to implement the strategy.
Why is this important to know? Because when we show you how we do it you might think that this is the only way to do it until you come across someone else that has a different set of tactics.
It doesn’t mean our way is better or worse. It’s just what we like to do.
The strategy that we follow is something called The Pocket Business Framework.
- Get them to notice you
- Get them to pay attention to you
- Get them to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
If we follow that strategy then we will make money. So then all we have to do i find the tactics that we want to use to implement that strategy.
And here they are.
Step 1: Understand Who Benefits the Most From Your Book
This sounds like it would be an obvious thing but you’d be surprised at how many people go around trying to convince everyone that their book is meant for them. The best thing you can do is choose one person who would be the ideal reader for your book and then talk to them.
If you focus everything else you do around this one person then it’s much easier to find success.
But how do you define this person? Base it on the outcome that the person will get from your book (if it’s non-fiction).
For example, we have an ebook on how to create an ebook in 12 hours or less (we know, very meta). Do we think everyone in the world should read this book? Most definitely.
But does it make sense for everyone to read this book? Most definitely not.
So who would benefit the most from this? We believe Creators that feel creating an offer can be too overwhelming and time-consuming.
Now that we have the person in mind what do we do?
Step 2: Create Content Talking to the Person
Now we focus all of our efforts on creating content that speaks to this person. We mainly do this in two ways:
- Social media content
- Blogging
Both serve a specific purpose.
Social Media
Social media content is a necessity because it’s the best way to build a brand where people get to know you. It’s also the best way to get people to notice you in the short-term.
You can go on TikTok and post a video, and suddenly 50,000 people have come across you. Because of this reason, it makes sense to use social media.
Most of our social media content focuses on two types of content:
- Outcome
- Problem/Solution
Outcome shows people what is possible. In the case of The 12-hour eBook Method, we can show people how many ebooks we’ve created and how it doesn’t have to take too long.
Problem/Solution content is exactly what you think it is. Talk about a problem and offer a solution.
There really is no reason to create any other type of content. Next time you’re on social media take a look at the non-entertainment-based content to see what type it is.
Most of it will be outcome-based because that works really well on social media.
Blogging
This is honestly our favorite content to create because it allows us to fully explore a topic. This is hard to do on social media when people want everything in 5-second spurts.
But more importantly, people who come to read a blog post usually do so with intent. They find your content because they are looking for something and for this reason, spend more time reading.
Blogging also has another benefit which is passive traffic. If you spend time working on your SEO you can get your blog content to rank well in the search engines.
This means that people will visit your blog 24/7 and consume your content.
With people consuming our content this takes us to step 3.
Step 3. Get Them On the Mailing List
Before you roll your eyes it’s important to understand the value of a mailing list. It’s the only place where you own your audience.
You can build an amazing following on social media, but your account can get taken away at any point. Nobody can take your mailing list.
Another problem with social media content is the algorithm. If you have 10,000 followers the algorithm might show your content to 200 of them to test it out. You don’t have that problem with email.
If you send your email to 10,000 people then it will land in 10,000 inboxes. This gives you a direct line of communication to your audience.
It also means that you can continue to sell them after they buy one of your books. Think about when you buy a book from a bookstore. The author has no way of letting you know about their next book so they have to hope by some miracle you keep track of what they’re doing.
But if someone buys your ebook from your site then they’ll be added to your mailing list and can know about every new book that you release in the future. This is how you continue to compound the growth of your business.
Step 4. Make the Book More Than a Book
Okay, what exactly does this mean? How do you make a book more than a book? Well, take a look at one of our offers, The 12-Hour eBook Method.
You can see there is a book there, but there are also other things. You can buy just the book if you want or you can buy the book and a package of other things.
Why does this work in helping you sell your book? Because rarely does a book alone offer everything that a person needs. Usually, they need supplemental resources to help them move along. These might be videos, worksheets, planners, or other things.
If you can show your audience that your book is more than a book, you’ll get more people to step up to buy it.
Step 5. Sell the Book
The part that many people dread, but here’s the thing. If you’ve done everything up to this point then selling usually consists of just letting people know the book exists. You can do some fancy things like expiring offers or deals, but you don’t have to do those things.
You can very easily tell people that there is a book available that will help them or take them further along their journey and they’ll buy it.
You can do this through Feel Good Funnels or social selling.
You can use a tripwire funnel to do the selling for you. This video explains how that works:
What do we do? We put links to our offers in our content as you’ve seen in this post and we also mention our offers in some of the emails that we send.
For the larger offers (think courses or workshops) we have email sequences specifically set up to sell them and the beauty of all of this is that it can be automated. You can leave your computer and your business will continue to make money.
If you’re interested in seeing the playbook that we implement for our own brands and the one that we teach all of our students then check out The Odd Noodle Playbook.
What About Amazon and Etsy?
Our focus isn’t on those platforms because we like to keep most of the money and we can offer a more unique experience selling from our own site. But you can very much find success on those platforms if you don’t mind competing with 1000s of other books.
And the great thing is that everything that you’ve learned in this post can apply to selling on those platforms. Instead of linking to a sales page on your own site, you’ll simply link to your books on those platforms.
Just don’t make the mistake of believing that by putting a book on those platforms you’ll get a huge influx of traffic to your book’s page. It’s the job of those platforms to recommend books that they believe their audience will want.
If they don’t know anything about your book or there are no signals showing how people love it, then your book won’t get recommended.
Your goal should still be to build your mailing list. If you aren’t sure how to do that if people are buying your books on Amazon or Etsy then check out how to build a book funnel.
Make Selling Ebooks Online Easy
We believe the purpose of any business is to serve its audience. The better you get at doing that then the more money you’ll make. It’s very easy to get too caught up in trying to figure out the sales tricks that you can use to sell more ebooks, but you don’t have to go down that route.
Your best bet is to figure out how you can help people every single day and then do that. Get the right systems in place and you’ll find that you’re selling your ebooks without much effort.
If it sounds like a dream then know that it’s not. We’ve helped thousands of people do it and why should you be any different?
