Payhip Review – How I Sold my First eBook Online

Are you thinking of self publishing an eBook ? If yes, Payhip could be an ideal choice for you.

I love experimenting new things and seek for opportunities to make money online. My last post was about self publishing Tshirt and selling them to public. I already compared two top Tshirt selling platform, Teespring vs Spreadshirt review in my blog post.

In this post, I will provide an insight on Payhip and its review. It is one of the platform that I use to self publish my eBook.

I published a book in Payhip, Organic Traffic in a month, and I would like to share my experience on how I made my first sale with the website. Actually, the eBook is now provided free to my subscribers.

Payhip is relatively a new eBook self publishing platform, however it has established as one of the leading one in recent times. The domain registered only in late 2012, its almost three years now that the website has been providing its service, and to my honest opinion, this has already impressed me as well as some other customers.

I have also found that Payhip has been upgrading itself with new features which could be highly important.

Payhip Fees

Payhip is free to join, which means you do not need to pay anything to get started with it. You could always self publish your eBook for free, however it takes a small amount(5%) per sales. The payments are made automatically to your associated paypal address.

I made my first sales of 3$ and paid 15 cents back to payhip as processing fees which is paid on every transaction. So this means you do not need anything to get started.

How I sold my first eBook ?

As I said, I created my first eBook with dipincome.com and made it available for sale at 9$. Later I realized the price was too high for new visitors to try. Since dipincome was new and I did not have any loyal visitors already, I came to know that people would barely spend for an author whom they have barely know.

However people are always ready to risk small amount of money. Although they do not tend to spend big amount on new products or authors they have barely known, they would certainly try out small amount of money.

So I dropped the amount to 3$ and luckily I was able to sell my first eBook without any marketing effort. All I did was I added a small image banner in my website that directed to my Payhip webpage. So my first buyer must have navigated to my payhip landing page through my blog and was pretty impressed to make the purchase.

Marketing Efforts

After my first sales, I decided to run a Facebook marketing campaign to boost my sales. Since the banner thing did not make high conversion, my first sale was the only one for the first week after I changed the price to 3$, so I decided to run Facebook ads.

I targeted the ads to my website visitors through re marketing campaigns. The process is already explained in this blog post, targeting Facebook to website visitors.

My landing page was the payhip page, which means when people clicked on the ads, they directly landed to my eBook page in Payhip.

Since advertisement was shown only to the people who visited my blog atleast once before, they already knew about me.

Since people found my blog through Google searches about the topics on Digital marketing, blogging, SEO, etc, my eBook was kind of their interest. Re marketing advertisement made sure that the Facebook ads were only shown the people who were interested. Since I only displayed advertisements to my visitors, and since my eBook could be something of a value to them, may be this was the reason I could get better conversion from the advertisement.

I was able to make 30 sales by only spending 35$ on Facebook advertisement, which means I was able to make 45.5$ worth profit with the campaign, withing the first week in my first try which was not that worse.

Later I focused on increasing my email subscribers, so I decided to provide the eBook for free to the visitors who subscribed to my blog.

Some Attractive Payhip Features

Actually Payhip has been amazingly wonderful since I decided to make my first eBook available through it and it has improved a lot since then.

Payhip offers great marketing features that makes it stand out from its competitor. Some marketing features like coupon codes and affiliate opportunity helps you market your eBooks even more efficiently.

You can carry out promotional campaigns and create coupon codes and then track your progress. Additionally you could also offer affiliates sales.

Additionally a new marketing feature has been introduced where you could ask users to like and share your eBook in social media to offer them some discount as a reward. This way you could spread word about your eBook.

Payhip also collects the information of your buyer including email address which you could always use later to promote your new products. You could directly send promotional email to your buyers from payhip.

Besides marketing features, Payhip has also come up with some new features including graphical editor where you can edit your sales page graphically.

Additionally, some more features like Google eCommerce tracking, Zapier integration, etc has also been included.

Although its you who has to put efforts on promotions and marketing to sell your eBook, not the platform, payhip gives you everything that you need to self publish your eBook and sell it to your customers. This could be an ideal option for you to try.