Why Are So Few eBooks Ever Turned Into A Big Profitable Business?
This is an excerpt from my interview with Adam Urbanski from The Virtual eBook Expo 2.
Adam:Very good question and I’m glad we’re opening with this, because there are a lot of eBooks out there and obviously the people who are listening to this (Virtual eBook Expo 2) program already know that eBooks are definitely not dead and they won’t be dead ever or at least not for a very long time.
They can still be turned into a successful and highly profitable business, but you’ve got to add a few more components to your eBook business to explode your profitability and we’ll get deeper into this in a moment.
Why are so few succeeding? It’s because most people make very basic mistakes with creating their eBooks. Let’s just talk about a few basic ones.
1. One of them is following kind of a, me too strategy.
Meaning they see something that seemingly works online and they think “Oh, I can do that and they start doing the same thing.” Sometimes it does work, but you have to know the complete strategy to make it work. Typically what people replicate is just what they see on the surface.
If you think about building a car what makes the car function and drive is all the technology inside that’s hidden; the engine and electronics that you can’t see. When you look at the car and you say this is gorgeous, I want a car just like this, I want to build one, you build what you see on the outside.
A lot of people get side tracked with cutesy titles, clever domain names, designing the graphics, headers and writing perfect copy, but what they don’t know is what actually drives the success of that one particular eBook business they tried to replicate inside. What’s the engine? For me, it’s the business model. They forget to look at this and that’s one of the big mistakes.
2. Another huge problem for people is that they forget that the eBook is not a business.
They focus on the eBook as if it were a business instead of focusing on the target market or their audience. Their audience and their problem, the audience’s problem, in other words in short, their market is where the business is. A lot of people spend time focusing on creating the perfect eBook.
It’s edited perfectly, designed perfectly, perfect graphics there’s not a single dot missing over any I’s, all the T’s are crossed it’s an ideal product, but it’s not the one that the audience wants, so that’s a big problem.
3. They forget to identify what sort of lead generation strategy they will use to actually make that eBook sell.
It goes back to just knowing the market.
-Where you can find this market?
-What sort of problems do they have?
-How big is that market?
-How much do they spend on solving specific issues?
When you create an eBook you have to realize that you are basically starting a business and it’s just as if you started a retail store, but it would have cost you a lot more money to start the retail store. It’s a lot more prohibitive, the barrier to entry is higher.
With eBooks, virtually anybody can get started tomorrow, overnight. They can have a business. They can have an eBook, because there’s no high cost barrier to entry, but the principles are exactly the same.
If you open your store in the location where there is no traffic or no customers you’re going to fail. With the same principle, if you create an eBook in a market where there are no customers and no traffic, nobody sees it, there are no sales and there is no success.
People just don’t do the basic legwork, the homework.
###
Copyright 2010
All Rights Reserved
Adam Urbanski & Ellen Violette
If you would like to hear the free Virtual eBook Expo 2 preview call with Adam Urbanski go to: www.virtualebookexpo.com/ and register now!
You’ll get all 7 preview calls with no obligation!
September 4th, 2010 at 8:42 am
This is my first time i visit here. I found so many interesting stuff in your blog especially its discussion. From the tons of comments on your articles, I guess I am not the only one having all the enjoyment here keep up the good work.