5 Worst E-book Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

So your eBook is almost ready and you expect to generate massive sales and increase your dollarflow, sounds good. Sales won’t come without marketing. This is where most authors go wrong.

They expect too much from their eBooks but do very little to achieve it.

Selling eBooks isn’t possible if you don’t promote your eBook well before its launch. Most authors don’t focus too much on marketing. Others make some serious eBook marketing mistakes that can be easily avoided if you know what to do.

Below I’ll talk about the 5 worst eBook marketing mistakes that authors make and how you can avoid them.

No eBook marketing strategy

You cannot sell your eBooks if you don’t have a marketing strategy in place.

What’s your marketing objective?

How many copies do you wish to sell?

What’s your marketing budget?

Which marketing channels you’ll use?

Authors don’t consider them marketers and that’s one of the biggest mistakes they make. You’re a marketer if you intend to promote and sell your eBook.

An eBook marketing strategy will help you identify goals, track performance, monitor campaigns, assign a budget, and generate sales.

Here is a simple process to create a marketing strategy.

1. Define objectives (like selling 1000 copies of your eBook in a month)
2. Define your target audience (CEOs, males between 35 -45, unemployed college graduates, etc.)
3. Identify and choose marketing channels (PPC, content marketing, SEO, influencer marketing, etc.)
4. Create marketing campaign (Facebook ads setup, acquiring backlinks for SEO, etc.)
5. Track and tweak

No prelaunch campaign

Ever seen a movie launch?

It presells. Generate buzz. Persuade audience to buy tickets for the movie.

This is what exactly you’re supposed to do with your eBook. Run a rigorous prelaunch campaign.

Unfortunately, authors don’t do it or if they do it, they don’t do it the right way.

Prelaunch campaign should be well-thought and the campaign should initiate as soon as possible. You should start bragging about your eBook as soon as you get its idea.

Prelaunch campaign can help you initiate buzz and connect with your audience. It helps you generate sales on the launch day. Create a presell page and start building an email list so that you can send an email to interested buyers on the launch day.

This is the technique that Sujan Patel used to generate 1000 eBook sales in less than a week.

This article by John Lincoln has 23 ways to create your prelaunch campaign successfully.

Inappropriate audience selection

Every eBook has its own audience. Authors make a mistake of marketing their eBook to everyone. This ruins your marketing budget and leads to a poor conversion rate.

Selling an eBook onParenting Tipsto singles, it just won’t work no matter how hard you try.

Guess what, it happens a lot.

Don’t do it.

Identify a unique audience for your eBook and stick to it. You can create buyer personas to improve targeting. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your buyer. Use this free template to get started.

Use of irrelevant marketing channels

A Facebook post won’t deliver the same results as a Tweet. Similarly, a video on YouTube might do a lot better than the same video on Facebook.

Being on a wrong marketing channel is a serious marketing mistake that you need to avoid.

If you have created buyer personas, you’ll know where your target audience hangs out on the internet, what sites they visit, which social networks they use, and so on.

This makes it easier to choose right marketing channels to reach your target audience at the right time.

Ask your audience. Conduct survey. Do market research.

This is what will help you run your marketing on the right marketing channel to reach your target audience.

Jack of all trades

You’re an author, you cannot do everything.

So don’t try.

If you don’t know a lot about marketing, don’t do it yourself. Hire a professional.

If you don’t know how to design a landing page, outsource it.

If you don’t know how to track PPC performance, seek help from an expert.

If you don’t have the time or knowledge to run a marketing campaign for your eBook, its best to outsource it.

Selling eBooks is a $1.1 billion industry in the US. Some 221 million eBooks were sold in the US in 2015. If you’re a part of this industry, you should get serious about marketing – now

Author Bio: Sabih Javed is a T-shaped digital marketer who assists startups, ecommerce stores, and businesses in generating sales and improving ROI. He is the founder of Digital Marketer PK – a Pakistan-based digital marketing blog. Follow him on Twitter @sabihjavedd.