My "Book Sales" Experiment

I thought I would share with you a little experiment I am doing and let you know the results. I've been fortunate enough to attend the workshop of Derek Gehl of Internet Marketing Center, in fact, their large 2-binder training course called The Insider Secrets to Marketing Your Business on the Internet was one of my main sources of internet marketing training in the late 1990s when I first got on the internet. Sadly, the founder of the company passed away a few years ago in a car accident and his best friend Derek took over. Okay, I'm rambling...

So the Internet Marketing Center has helped make many millionaires online (I'm not one of them.) When I attended their seminars they really emphasized the benefit of a sales letter. I hate sales letters. But... I actually read them often and sometimes I do buy the product. Some of the best internet marketing tips and ebooks of info have all come from those yucky sales letters. So, last year I designed this 20-page Adoption Scrapbook Album.

It's a 20-page 8x8 album with 20 transparency overlays (15 come with it, 5, one gets to choose to make it even more personal). You basically slip your writings and photos behind the transparencies and they look great -- fast (a benefit for busy moms.) I've sold a handful for a decent price on ebay.

I advertised in Adoptive Families Magazine and sold a decent amount, but didn't quite break even. And then I just started using a software that distributes articles one has written and I've had really good results hitting 35 of the top 50 slots for my keywords on Google. (I know... amazing, huh? People searching those words couldn't get away from me.)

So I am putting out 3 articles this week on scrapbooking your adoptive child's book and I'm sending them all to my ...(ugh)... sales page. Here is my regular page for the Adoption Scrapbook Album -- and here is the sales page for the Adoption Scrapbook Album that my footer in these articles will send them too. It's got all the bells and whistles: highlighting, underlining, bold, red font, photos, a video, and even the "peel back" ad corner... tempting them to give me their email address for a freebie.

I feel a little bit ... well... slimy. But on the other hand, I want people to see the need for this book and buy it if they think it will help them, which is what we all want as authors, right? We're not trying to trick anyone into buying our book, but rather, help them recognize the need and then act on it. I even apologize on my sales letter for the look and feel of it and ask people to keep reading it anyway.

It's all one big experiment and I won't know for about 3-6 weeks what the real results are like, because I'm not sure how long those articles will stay at the top of Google or how many will be reprinted on blogs about adoption or scrapbooking. But either way I am excited to see what happens. I'll keep you posted! Feedback? Ideas? Have you done this and what was your outcome?

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Joel and Lisa Copen have a variety of experience in founding a nonprofit that receieves over 80,000 visitors per month, music and sound editing, web design, and book marketing and publishing. They look forward to your ideas to make the series of ebooks on book promotion a practical tool to help you sell more books!