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Why Ebooks?
I first became
aware of ebooks in 1993 when I discovered a growing subculture of
online marketing gurus who claimed to know how to make money on
the Internet. They all offered their courses in ebook format that
could be purchased and downloaded from their web sites. I bought
them all: Corey Rudl, Marlon Sanders, Michael Campbell, Rick
Beneteau, Yanik Silver, Mark Joyner and many others. I examined
all of them and looked for patterns.
Some of these marketers have built huge, multi-million dollar
businesses revolving around the promotion of their knowledge. For
the most part, the content is excellent, even when the writing is
technically not perfect. The presentation is usually very thin –
just the facts. There’s nothing wrong with this approach. It’s
hard to be critical when you realize that most of these writers
have consistently made a lot of money over the years, and will no
doubt make millions more in the years to come.
How Do They Do It?
How do the experts make their ebooks sell? It is actually very
formulaic. Regardless of actual content, the ebooks are pretty
much written and marketed and sold the same way each and every
time -- a cookie-cutter approach that seems to work and gets
easier and easier after their first successful release.
They write an ebook that contains information that people are
hungry for – in the majority of cases; this information is about
making money. Consider the real estate mavens like Ed Beckley or
Robert Allen who sold videotape courses on television throughout
the 1980s. As the Internet began to grow increasingly more
commercial in 1993, it presented such industry experts with
fertile ground on which to raise new crops of readers.
These experts created powerfully worded sales pitches on their web
sites -- long sales letters with lots of examples of people using
their methods to make money – tons of testimonials. Their sales
message grew more and more compelling. The more you read about
their product, the more you wanted to have it. You didn’t just
want it – you needed it.
They priced their ebooks above market expectations, often over
$200.00, to separate themselves from the pack. Such prices seemed
to say, “My book is of great value, and it can only be purchased
by those people who will use my knowledge effectively.” And they
sold ebooks -- virtual mountains of ebooks.
And these experts make millions more, year after year, by building
ever-growing cults of affiliates who help to market their ebooks
on their own web sites in exchange for large sales commissions –
some paying over $100.00 per sale.
Affiliate Webmasters place banner ads and endorsements on their
sites – visitors click on these ads to learn more about the
ebooks – and when they purchase the ebooks, the Webmaster
receives a big check. There are Webmasters who make over
$10,000.00/month from the sales of such products, so naturally
they are very loyal to these information ebook gurus.
These initial ebooks typically are followed by more ebooks, and
with an established audience, future sales become easier and
easier. In a very real sense, the first ebook lays the groundwork
for building an unlimited money machine.
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