A lot of people publish all sorts of products on a self-publishing basis: They come up with a sales page. They come up with a landing page. They pay money for Facebook marketing campaigns. They do the whole routine. Still, after all this time, effort and money, nothing happens. Their self-published product does not sell.
Here are four reasons why they fail. I share this information so that you can spot these patterns and work around them. If you recognize them in how you’re doing things, you might want to mix things up. You might want to take a more active role and choose to do things differently
Bad niche targeting
A lot of self-published products fail because they are barking up the wrong tree. They offer things that are big deal solution to problems. The challenge is getting other people to agree with you. It may well turn out that people may not agree that this a problem big enough for them to shell out dollars for. You see how this works?
You may also be targeting a problem that a lot of people have. But these people are not really interested in paying a lot of money for the solution. Whatever the case may be, you targeted the wrong niche. The money may not be there. Or, there may be money, but it has a low return on investment. Also, there may be too much competition.
No reverse engineering
A lot of self-published products fall by the wayside because they were produced on a whim. The author got all excited about a particular concept and has put in the time and effort to write a book. He or she is convinced that the book is the best thing since sliced bread. Well, the book is published and nobody is buying. One reason for this is the fact that the author did not bother to look at other books or digital products that address the same problem.
How did they address the problem? How did they approach the problem? By copying and pasting the approach, the book can position itself in such a way that its prospective buyers would at least view it as familiar enough to consider.
If you don’t reverse engineer your competitors, your book may seem too weird, too unusual, or too innovative for them to bother with. They might think that you’re a genius. But that does not necessarily translate to them whipping out their wallets and buying stuff from you.
Untested sales page
It’s not uncommon for many self-published authors to copy and paste a sales page from a pamphlet. They just plug in their words, use a template, then call it a day. If this is how you do things, don’t be surprised that you are not making any sales.
Sales pages are starting points. You can use a template to put them up, but you are going to have to run traffic through it, make changes, run traffic again and keep on optimizing it until it produces the conversions that you are looking for. Otherwise, if you put it up and forget about it, you’re not going to move that many products.
No relationship marketing through a mailing list
Make no mistake. A lot of affiliate marketers are only able to convert their traffic into buyers because they set up a mailing list. Do yourself a big favor. Set up a mailing list. Create a relationship between your content and your audience. The more credible your content is, the more likely the audience will trust you regarding the stuff that you are trying to promote. This is very hard to do with ads. This is very hard to do with blog posts. With mailing list, however, you can send updates after update to build credibility and authority to reach a point where your readers would click a link and buy stuff from you.
If you fail to wrap your mind to the reasons above, don’t be surprised if your affiliate marketing business and self-publishing efforts are running into challenges. You have to learn from the hard lessons described above.