ONLINE SUCCESS

3 Steps to Selling anything Online (case study) ~

Case Study : Step by Step guide on how to publish your very first eBook and get your first sale.

We live in an amazing time where everything has already been built for us. It’s so simple now. Like putting lego blocks together. Easy. But you have to do it. This is from the story of Dan Martell who published and sold his first written content.

1. Create the content (or package something you already have)

Many of us have something we’ve created but have never shared publicly. Lets say an eBook that you wrote during a 4 hour flight on the phone, covering  thoughts on how to host a Founders Lunch. You think its great and that this can sell, so what do you do ? Here’s what :-
Quickly review that you didn’t forget any major typos and click Export to PDF. Simple enough.
That’s it. That’s content. For other people, their might be video’s, jokes, white papers, short films, fiction book….. anything. If you look closely, you do pay for some of these ‘content’ everyday in the form of newspapers, ringtones, online books, cable TV, magazines, 3G data ….. there are quite a few things we pay for.
Great content is great content. Don’t over think it. You can always improve it once you get some feedback from the market… and it’s better to get something done and out that might be low quality, and find out that no one wants it, then spend 100’s of hours producing something super high quality and getting no sales.
Just grab the content, save and distribute. Don’t over think it.

2. Set it up online to be bought

We live in such a special time that there are MANY options for selling a service or product online. For this purpose, it’s a downloadable file, so you decided to use platform, say ~ Gumroad. It honestly takes 3 minutes to create an account, upload the PDF of the eBook, create a cover image (using Keynote) and set my payout settings (using PayPal).
For different content and products there are an amazing number of platforms.The options are endless… but don’t spend too much time with complicated setups. Just create a link that accepts payment info and share it with the world. Keep things simple.

3. Promote it to your ideal customer

The key to selling anything is to put it in front of your ideal customer. If those people exist in your network, then email them a link to the product. If you’re a member of an association that has an online forum for members, post it there. Do something to promote it. Use your social platforms, everybody has a Facebook, twitter, linkedIn or some other social platform account. Again, the tendency is to wait till it’s perfect, but don’t. Just get it out.
For me, it starts with Twitter … once you have the link, tweet it out. (do connect @enfantterriblei ).
Then take a little time to pray. Just Kidding.Smile. You did good. Its out there in the ‘market’, your content is out for sale. Feels good.
Hopefully, in a few minutes, you should get your first sale (from the wife), then your second (mostly a good friend), but eventually you will start getting sales from people you don’t know.
Anyone who understands marketing can tell that I did not optimize anything regarding the product page or the tweet. That just means there’s a need for it. And you got it right.
Life is too short to get everything perfect and miss the opportunity to get REAL feedback. Get a shitty first version done, ship and iterate.
Happy Selling.

http://indiefilmsindia.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/3-steps-to-selling-anything-online-case-study/