How to Sell Your Expertise Online – Part 3: Search Engine Marketing
Author: Jamie | Filed under: E-commerce, General
Whether you’ve decided to give your product its own website or not, you’ve got to get the word out about it.
You should already have a head-start by having gone through this process with your core business, but you will have to sell your product as if it were an entirely separate venture.
Organic SEO
Long tail keywords will be integral to successfully marketing your online training/e-book. Let’s say you’re a social media consultant. The sorts of phrases you want to rank for are ‘how to use Facebook for marketing’, ‘DIY social media’ and ‘social media for business’.
Blogging will likely be at the heart of your organic SEO campaign, as posts with titles like these are your best chance of ranking for these sorts of terms. They also offer a taster of what people can expect from your product.
Pay-per-Click (PPC)
The same sorts of keywords will apply here, but naturally you can afford to cast your net much wider with PPC.
In particular, it may be worth looking at the same keywords you would target for your services, to try and hijack users looking to hire someone, offering them the chance to learn to do it themselves instead.
Again, long tail keywords will be the lifeblood of your PPC campaign, so don’t restrict yourself by using ‘exact match’ only. Start with ‘broad match’ and use negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches.
Forums
Forums are a great way of finding people who may be interested in your product. Find the main forums for your niche and become a regular contributor. If you can establish yourself as an expert here people will quickly become interested in your product.
Don’t push it though. Put a link to your e-book/online training programme in your signature and let people find it themselves. It’s not only the forum users that will follow the link, lots of people use forums as sources of information without contributing themselves. Not only will you get links from your forum posts, but as threads get indexed you will become more visible in the SERPs.
Social media
As social becomes steadily more important to both Google and Bing, it’s essential to utilise it to promote your product.
Hopefully you’ve already built up a following from your existing business, and this can be used to generate traffic to your blog posts, as well as get the word out about special offers and promotions.
Promoting your product will take just the same work as for your core business. But once established they can be used to cross-promote one another.
Do you have any questions or experiences to share about trying to sell your expertise online?
I haven’t tried selling expertise online since I haven’t tried professional SEO strategies. But I have tried facebook marketing and some do-it-yourself kind of marketing. I am taking precaution on what kind of software I am using because some strategies online are considered to be black hat or white hat strategies. I agree how effective forums, organic SEO and social media in promoting except for PPC, which I wouldn’t know how to use since I haven’t tried it yet.
Stephan Hilson recently posted..Comparatif de forfait mobile
One best way is stock photography (e.g. Istockphoto). Google stock photo andyou willbe lead to different good sites. Normally, membership to the site is free. They will pre-qualify you byosting one of your best shot. If this gets approve, you can then upload as many picture as you want. They will manage the marketing, ypur task is to upload good pictures. Once your photo is chosen by a client you get a paid as royalty. Price differs according to the size of the photo. So if you get tons of photos uploaded on different stock photography sites, you earn a lot too!
Been wanting to do this also, but i still have few inventory yet. Good luck!
abegail recently posted..door awnings
Yes, absolutely. I’m doing it right now. About a decade ago I co-wrote a novel with a friend. We tried the traditional publishing route for years before finally giving up and moving on to other projects. Recently we put an ebook PDF version up for sale on my website and used Paypal as the payment method. This was the absolute low-budget, do-it-yourself, fast and easy way to get it out for sale.
There are websites out there that handle the website and sales back-end portion for you, for a cut of the ebook sales. Check out http://fiction-ebooks.com/ as an example, but I know for a fact that there are several better ones (or at least there were a couple of years ago). HOWEVER…
Things aren’t as rosy as they seem. Typically you can expect to make a LOT less money than you would with a traditional publisher, especially if you don’t already have a following online and choose to do everything yourself rather than partner with some sort of distribution site. There’s more to selling your fiction ebook than just converting your text to a PDF and slapping up a page with a Paypal link on it. This is what I did, and I sold almost nothing until I put some money behind it.
Beverly recently posted..How to Get Rid of Cellulite on Legs Naturally
Thanks Stephan, I agree that many types of software can be considered ‘black hat’ techniques. It definitely pays to research any software you plan to use thoroughly,
Thanks Abegail, yes, photography is another good way to sell your expertise online.
Hi Beverly, thanks for your comments. Yes, it’s one thing making a great e-book, but spreading the word about it does take time and some degree of financial investment.