How To Write an Ebook PLR Package – My Results

On 5/30 I released a new PLR package on How To write an ebook and if you're curious about it and how much I've made in the first 20 days, this post is for you.

First off, I am a PLR writer but I usually write PLR articles because they're faster and easier for me to do. BUT, I like to change it up occasionally and do some ebook packages because, while they're a LOT more work, the potential income is greater.

Here is the website where I sell only these bigger items: www.plr-packages.com
And here is the sales page for From Idea to Ebook.

 

I like to make these as helpful as possible for people to have success with so I include:

• the ebook
• sales page to go with it
• download page
• report they can use for optins
• squeeze page for the report
• 5 autoresponder emails to help pre-sell the main product
• all the graphics including blanks and PSDs
• instruction guide
• guide on how to make this as successful as possible for the customer.

A lot of time goes into this for me. I love starting in on the writing process and get a lot accomplished in the beginning. I get bogged down in the middle with whiny thoughts of "Will this EVER be done?" [as mentioned on Paul Wolfe's excellent site]. Plus I get pulled away to work on other aspects of my businesses. Then I gain momentum towards the end and finish up the book with a happy and relieved flourish.

But I'm not done.

I puzzle through topics for the accompanying report. I don't like reports that are merely giving parts of the ebook. I think reports should compliment, not give the same info but less of it. So I bounce ideas off my favorite smart marketer friend, Alan Petersen, and come up with a great one.

I outsource the graphics to Buddy at Coverscorp and the sales page (the one that goes with the product) to Elisabeth Kuhn. Both do a wonderful job. Packaging everything up and making sure the images are in the right folder for the customers makes me very cranky! I'm working with 2 packages of images (one for the ebook and one for the report) so I have to rename all of them because I can't have two header.jpg, footer.jpg, etc.

Last, but very important, I write some emails and load up some graphics for my affiliates to use.

 

Once it's all done and bundled up all pretty-like, the real work begins.

Decisions, decisions, decisions… again bouncing thoughts off Alan.

WSO or not?  (Offering it at a discount on the Warrior Forum) 
WSO pricing? What are others currently doing?  Regular pricing?
Limit sales of WSO? To what? Limit all sales to what?

So I decide to offer the product as a PLR WSO for half price and limit the sales there to 100. I have it on my site for regular price and will (potentially) sell a total of 100 more there.

I post my WSO with a lot of cursing and hair-pulling angst on my part because the formatting always adds mysterious spaces and extra lines. Grrrrr.

Well here we are 20 days into it!

There have been almost 90 sales so far, with about 1/3 coming through my affiliates.

I've also made several sales of my other packages as I have them featured on the download page (not on sale or anything, just mentioned with links). Even my holiday and families ebook is making sales which makes me very happy as this was a labor of love.

MY PLR list has grown because I give customers the opportunity to sign up for notifications. This is exciting because it means they're happy with the quality of my product and are interested in buying future products! Note – I don't make people optin to get their product, I just let them know they can hop on the list if they want to be notified in the future.

WSOs gain steam when they have lots of views and it turns the little icon on fire. This makes them catch the eyes of browsing parties. Positive comments also give the post some buzz.

My first comments were download issues. Apparently I shouldn't have bundled everything together because the zip file was too huge for some people to download. So I corrected that as quick as possible (while sweating profusely). I'd always separated it out before so I don't know why I did it differently this time.

Note – Always stick around when you start a WSO to handle any unforseen issues! Sometimes it's your fault and sometimes it's not, but you need to have prompt customer service and make it right, or better than right, for them.

Here's a couple unsolicited comments that made me smile big:

hi Peggy
1st time buyer of your PLR products and so far I've read through 10 pages and I'm pretty impressed. You've got a rock solid product.

sunnygc

 

Hi Peggy,

I skimmed the ebook quickly, it's definitely a solid PLR product, better than most of what you get elsewhere.

The marketing material looks good to, I just checked the emails and I wouldn't hesitate to send them to my subscribers.

Ralf

Also worth mentioning is that sales of my regular PLR articles also increased. These were from new people whether they bought my WSO or not. Gotta love that!

I also love that people like these complete deals. I really want to do more of them but they are very time-consuming to do. I'm working out possible scenarios in my head as to how to further streamline this process to make it faster. I outsource the sales page for the ebook and the graphics and I have templates for my own sales page. I won't outsource the ebook writing because that's the part I like to do, plus my reputation is built on my quality. Plus, I admit it… I'm a control freak.

My favorite part of posting is getting to read what YOU have to say!  

• What ideas do you have to speed it all up? Without me spending more than I would make?
• What questions do you have about writing and selling PLR?
• Or do you have questions about any of the selling/marketing process I've talked about in this whole post?

Google Analytics – Discover and Do

This post is long, I admit it. If you'd rather read it as a PDF, click here.

 

There are so many areas you can look at in Google Analytics - custom and automatic alerts, visitors, traffic sources, campaigns, content, in-page analytics and more. You can even create goals and custom reports.

It's a little overwhelming, isn't it?

I mean, you look at it and think "wow, that's nice" or "wish I had more traffic", but then you don't really DO anything with all the wonderful information handed to you – for free. So what I'd like to propose you do is analyze what you've got AND do something with it. Hence the Discover and Do part of the title here.

Right now I'd just like to talk about only two areas of Google Analytics – Traffic Sources from referring sites and Keywords, and see what kind of action can be taken from what is discovered.

 

Traffic Sources From Referring Sites

Discover:

Start by clicking on "Traffic Sources", then on "Referring Sites".

Look at the top 10 or so referring sites. Or if you prefer, you can identify the ones that bring you in at least xxx number of clicks.

Now it's time to look at why you are getting these clickthroughs, these numbers. You can click on each URL in your top 10 and see the referring path (their pages that presented the link that goes to you).

Is it because of your comments on their blog?

This can be a little misleading because you're looking at a month's worth of stats, so it's a good idea to actually pull up the referring site and look at it in more detail. You may have commented there once or many times, and the resulting hits back to your site may have been spread out over the month or show a huge peak because of one specific comment you made (was it deep, long, controversial, hot topic?)

Here is a screenshot of the month of January where BloggingBookshelf sent me 47 referrals to this here blog. When I click on bloggingbookshelf in my Google Analytics I can see how the clickthroughs were spread out over the month. I can also see which pages people landed on when they came a-visiting. This info also includes the number of pages they looked at, the average time on the site, percentage of new visits, and bounce rate.  

 

 

Is the traffic because of a promotion?

These stats are also very revealing if the referrer was promoting a product of yours. Halfway through the month of March, Tiffany Dow started a review of my Become a PLR Writer and it got me 213 clicks just for the 2nd half of the month. The spikes you see below are when she wrote 4 parts of her 6-part review.

Is the traffic from commenting on a forum?

When I check the results for my hits from the Warrior Forum, it tells me what forum post they clicked through to get to my site. That's very telling – I can see if comments I make on certain subjects are appealing enough for people to click on my sig line links.

More questions…

Do the bloggers use CommentLuv and perhaps the titles of your posts bring people in?

Are they mentioning you in a post? Woo hoo! That feels great… assuming they're saying nice things! This gives you clout as well as hits.

Are they promoting one of your products? Which one? How's it going and what are people saying?

Did they post one or more of your articles? If they're a high traffic site and they've posted an article of yours, maybe via EzineArticles, you will definitely see a spike in traffic and wonder about it!

 

Now For The Do's:

• Comment on those blogs that get you the most hits as often as possible. To constantly be one of the first commenters (and thus receive more luv/clics) consider using TrafficSponge.

• Definitely leave comments on blogs that mention you by name. Set up your Google Alerts with "your name" and your "site name" in quotes so you're notified when someone's talking about you.

• Make your titles as interesting and compelling as possible so ComLuv brings you even more traffic.

• Send the top bloggers that send you traffic an email to let them know you've noticed the traffic coming from their sites and to thank them. Get the dialog going and build up a relationship with these influential marketers.

• Ask to do a guest post for these bloggers as a way of saying thank you, and of course to bring you even more traffic. Make the piece your best work!

• On the blogs that bring you good traffic, consider changing your URL backlink in your next comments to a different page on your site. Also, you might have a different blog you want traffic to go to. This not only gets your other pages some link juice, these pages might be really applicable to the topic at hand.

• If someone is promoting one of your products, keep an eye on it so you can answer any questions the blogger cannot. Also, tweet the promo several times over the course of the next few days.

• When they've posted your article from EzineArticles, contact them to thank them and see if they'd like to be notfiied when you've written more articles on the same general subjects. Then they'll post more of your stuff!

~~~~~~~

Analyzing your keywords

Discover:

Look at your keywords and pick out your top 10-20, weeding out the really weird ones. And there will be weird ones, just ask Marcus the Sales Lion. An interesting phrase I see right now on this blog is "one month mentor john thornhill blackhat". I'm not sure exactly why, but I imagine I have all those words on my site in some fashion. But I did get 18 hits on this so it might be worth investigating…

Consider these keywords as topics; topics that people are searching for. There will be all sorts of stuff here… kw's you've gone after on purpose, accidental phrases that are still relevant to your site but you didn't intentionally target (woo hoo! these are freebies!), and those that are not relevant to the particular site but to another site you own.

Is the traffic coming in via these phrases new or returning?

 

You can easily check this by clicking on your "Advanced Segment" box on the upper right, and ticking the "New Visitors" and Returning Visitors" boxes. Then hit the "Apply" button.

 

 

 

So then your info looks like this with the orange line being the new visitors and the green line being return visitors:

 

So what do you make of this? What does it mean to you to have new visitors for a specific keyword phrase? And how about return traffic for a phrase?

An additional thing to look at when people are finding you organically with these keywords via a search is where they are landing. Is it a current, hip, epic post? Or is it a 3 year old post that maybe isn't even quite correct information anymore?

So what about the keywords that don't match the blog at hand?

For example, I get hits here on this Internet marketing blog for "peggy baron plr". What they are really looking for are my PLR sites – AllstarPLR, PLR-Packages and MyNichePLR.

Are you getting hits for misspellings?

You'd think Baron wouldn't be that hard, but I often get Barron and Barren and also Pegge Barron.

What would you do if someone finds your site via misspellings? Personally, I'm happy they found me. You can call me anything… just don't call me late for dinner. Bah-dump-bump!

 

Now Do:

• Write blog posts surrounding these keywords if you haven't already. And if you have, consider writing more. Give them what they're searching for! If they come back again and again for the same kw's, then they're either not finding what they want, or they like what you've already said and are wanting more.

• See what you can do, if at all possibe, with kw's that are from left field. Even the intersting phrase from above might make a good post. Something along the lines of "John Thornhill's One Month Mentor Review… Is it Blackhat?"  (It's not!)

• For those search words that pertain to a different site that you own, you can write something that I call an umbrella post to showcase several of your sites and capitalize on the search words. I did this recently by writing a post here about my PLR businesses and my experiences running them.. with links to my PLR sites, so the vistors looking for them can find them.

  [That article filled many purposes - it told people who visit this blog about how I make some of my income, gave my PLR sites some link love, gently promoted my ebook on becoming a PLR writer, helped inspire some readers who needed a boost, gave me some cred and some reasons for PLR users to trust me, and it helped me to take a look at where I've been and where I want to go next.]

• As far as misspellings, you could write a piece with those words purposefully misspelled. I can't bring myself to do that though. But maybe on a niche site that doesn't have my name on it? What do you think?

• If the kw search lands the visitor on an old post, or one that is not your best work, consider writing a new and better post with those keywords.

• Consider writing short reports around your most searched for words and give/sell them as PDFs.

• Put up a YouTube video on the topic.

• Do a podcast on the subject making sure you have the phrase in your written description and title.

• Consider interviewing an expert on your primary searched terms, and similar to the podcast, use those terms in the title and written description.

 

Tip - If the keyword are "buying" words and you don't have a good review of the product on your site, then think seriously about writing one. I mean, people are already searching for those keywords and landing on your site, so that means you've got a leg up in the search engines.

Buying words can be:

buy
review
product comparisons
get rid of
best price
bonus
sale
cost
get

If these buying words are bringing the people in, whether on purpose or accidentally, capitalize on it if you can.

So here you have it, 2 sections of Google Analytics you can explore, evaluate, and do something with. Two caveats about the "DO" part…

1) I encourage you to do something with the top referrals and keywords, not every single one. 

2) They're not all going to work for ya. Keep to the overall purpose and direction of your blog, and don't shoot in too many different directions.

 

• Chime in! Is there anything else you would "DO" with this particular information?