Are you looking for setting up your own e-book selling site?

By Arun Tibrewal.

Warning: If you are looking for starting a e-book selling site, please read the entire article below. This article may help you choosing the right business model for your new venture.

E-books are today one of the most profitable and demanding business. Every 2nd marketer wants to share a pie of this growing business. Newbie’s often falls into trap by selecting the wrong product to sell and land up at no man’s land, due to inexperience.

This is the common business plan if followed step by step can help you in starting your own successful venture. The entire thought expressed in this article are based on practical experience and testing and evaluating many other e-book selling proposals.

There many types of sites are sprawling in net and all are different in nature. Few things you will find is common in all the sites are follows:

• Over publicizing of earnings.
• Duplicate sites with same contents.
• Confusing customers.
• Using mind diverting techniques i.e. redirect to other sites or show numbers of bonus offers.
• Self promotion.

In realistic terms you need to project your site would away from all the junk and selling ethical books only, which too come from a person who read the book first, check its euthenics and then resale books to his customers.

This concept of getting a customer and he will return to the site again. You are not going to build a reseller channel, but build a customer base, which are hungry for quality books. Once he buys, he should learn that he had true value of money.

Building a reseller chain or affiliates may end your plan and in future it may be a disaster for you, if you worked on a site hard to promote it and same will become just another site in Internet. Here are the 2 options suggested for you:

Option A: Start a site which list few quality e-books with brief details of what is there inside the book. This site will be selling individual books and focus on few categories. You can have a CMS and shopping cart integrated site, where you can manage the contents of the site your self easily without having any programming knowledge. The sale will include a monthly special section, which you can update every month. An extremely easy going site, which generate sales only. Later on you can upgrade to more features, once you start earning from the site.

Option B: Start a membership site, where register members can download numbers of books every month. Every month you need to fill the sites with fresh books and members will love that. This can be done using an advance CMS and a download manager. Here you are not selling individual books, but selling a membership where user is having his own account paying some monthly or yearly subscription.

Your USP: “I am different than others” is your USP. Fresh books or theme oriented books targeting a particular reader segment will improve your credibility.

Your Goal: To establish a site which will have natural growth? Site starts with basics can improve its presence in due course of time. The start is slow, but it builds a strong customer base and creates an established brand.

Business Value: The value of your site will win trust from the customers only. Once the customers trust you, he will pay you more than others, as it saves his time spent on reverse engineering. Create a returning customer, instead of creating mass of one time customer.

Return on Investment (ROI): Money invested in site + resale rights are treated as investment. Cheap products can not be a good investment always. Very few cheaper products have success rates. If you have a present investment strategy, along with future projections ready with you, can gives you advantage on others. Normally it has been seen that people spend penny amount initially to buy a cheaper solution, but end up paying more than expectation to get a workable solution.

Targeted Audience: You must pre define your prime targets. A site catering mass should have massive product range too. Take an example of Amazon or EBay. If you focus on particular segment and specialized in same, you will have a winning advantage over established giants too. Take an example of Google, it started initially as a core search engine compare to Yahoo which started as a portal. Google become more popular in search technology and now diversifying into many more areas.

Usability: This is one area where you need to stress more and more. Repeated time invested in Usability of site will give your site a better presentation. Consumer requires decision making solution instead getting more confused. If you have a clear idea on what all you selling, you will able to convince your customer the same too. Remember, the toughest task is creating a simple solution. The more simple means more time invested towards usability.

Marketing Strategies: Marketing is the key of success for a site. Step by step marketing strategies if implemented in right time gives you opportunity to gain maximum benefits out of your investment. There are several low cost solutions available, which if implemented professionally in right time can place you on road of success.

Your offerings or Selling Strategies: It is important what all you are offering to mass. Do they feel like worth buying it, or they are following your claims that you have earned this much of $$$$ and they will also earn if the buy the book with resale rights. It’s a difference between the reader and investor. Readers like to get useful information’s where as investor like to earn money. Here you need to define your offerings that to whom you like to sell and what need to be sold.

Selection of books to resale: Stay away with self proclaimed slogans i.e. “I earned thousands of $$$$ simply revealing my strategies, if you are a part of it and you will be earning too.” There will be tons of testimonials from his or her joint venture partner, supporting the claims. Do you think a person will reveal his real earnings and winning formula? In reality companies spend heavy amount on creating a winning strategy. Once they decide to go along with it, never disclose to others since this is a competitive market. So think twice before buying any thing junk. If you have junk you will be distributing the junk too.

Business model: You need to choose a collective business model instead of going to Pyramid scheme. Why follow others? Why not we present our own plan and let others follow that. A collective business model is more sustainable in long run as it invites others to join you and share there information to World Wide Web. Here you will be meeting people who have common interest and willingness to grow together. Most pyramid schemes are attempts to confuse potential consumers into complicated but convincingly fool-proof money making scams.

Subscription Based Business model: You can also choose this business model as it allows you to get a constant source of income. It has low customer acquisition cost but it require a systematic approach and manpower to manage and track customers. Another drawback is from customer’s point of view is, he is also receiving the unwanted books or books which are not his area of interest. This may makes him feel wastage of money too.

Follow-up system: A customer needs to be followed up ethically. There are systems where you get tons of pre-written news letters placed into an auto responder and shooting mails every week, month or even a day. Imagine 100’s of people using same prewritten letters and customer join all of them, he is receiving the same from all. Instead, if you setup your own system and manually follow-up your customers will allow you to present your own business values.

Site security: You need to adopt full security to the system. For example your download link should not be used by others or a member can not post or redistribute unwanted materials. The programmer needs to work on this and create a system where your interest is safe.

Site Design: The site should be designed keeping two factors in mind. 1st is Usability of the site and another one is Search engines. As you know SE’s comes heavily on duplicate contents, using pre-made sales letters will not be a helpful solution. A site designed keeping search engines and usability in mind will gives you advantage over your core competitors.

Note: This article may not be syndicated or used as commercial advice as a whole or any of its part without permission. Republishing is strictly prohibited. The motive behind publishing this article is to provide aspiring publishers a fair idea about starting there own business and choosing there Unique Selling Prepositions.

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