When it comes to how to market an ebook, there is a lot of
bad advice out there. However, the advice can sound completely rational and
logical. So how do you best separate out the good information from the bad?
There are three main ways to do this:
Method 1: Ignore success, look for failures
There is an old saying that failures teach more than
success. This is exceedingly true when you are looking for marketing advice.
Many people will take a look at the success of a project and try to duplicate
it. However, they may not see that the success of the project was an iterative approach,
achieved just a bit at a time. That means that when you try to duplicate
success, you could be missing steps or may not have the full picture. Instead, if
you can see the road they took to get to success, you will be setup better.
Things to look for include:
- How many failures did they have
- How much did each or all the failures cost
- What was the method that they experimented
That final thing can be more important than any other piece
of information. However, this is often ignored in marketing advice. Giving an
example of an A/B test is simply not enough. What led a particular marketer
towards certain words? What websites did they visit for ideas? How did they
generate each round of test keywords? This complete method of experimentation
is the map towards success, or at very least, the same location.
Method 2: Are they talking about the 80% or the 20%?
Knowing the impact of each change can determine how much
effort should be put in. When you put your time into an effort, you don’t want
to waste that precious commodity. In addition, advice can also focus on a “shot
gun” approach where the marketer tried a bunch of stuff and something stuck.
However, when you dissect their advice, it is easy to tell that they don’t know
what exactly stuck. Knowing the exact lever to pull is important to determine
the validity of the advice.
Method 3: Does the advice fit the box you are trying to put
it in?
Another common approach to any marketing advice is to keep
it really broad. The idea behind this is that many more people can use the
advice. The only problem is that many more people can use the advice in the
wrong way. Instead of determining what fits their goals, they may focus on a
broad aspect and hope it fits. One example could be the “just write” approach.
However, if the writer is trying to determine the value of time to writing,
this advice isn’t going to be helpful. If the writer is trying to build better
books and needs to learn through trial and error, this advice will work. When
it comes to marketing, the same is true. Pouring more money into keyword research
isn’t going to matter if the problem is that the author doesn’t know their
genre. That would just put the wrong product in the wrong hands. The result of
that will be either negative reviews or no sales.
