Aside from aggressive promotion on social media, have you ever thought of other ways you could make money from your ebook or other digital products?

Of course, constantly shoving your book in the face of your audience seems to work pretty well. But what if that’s not your only strategy?

In this article, we share 4 unconventional ways you can make money off your ebook asides from social media promotion and ads.

But first, you need an audience and a community of people interested in what you have to offer.

With that, you can use these methods to make money from your ebook.

1. Sponsored content

Sponsored content, as you know, doesn’t only apply to social media and other media channels. You can also include sponsored content in your ebooks to make money.

Here’s a real-life situation you’ve probably never thought of.

Think about your days in primary school or even secondary school (high school). During graduation ceremonies, when you receive a copy of the magazine for the school year.

In the magazine, you’ll see pictures of the graduating class, the teachers, the school board, and speeches of various high-class individuals and valedictory students.

Now towards the last few pages of the magazine, you’ll begin to see ads from different businesses and services. It makes you wonder their affiliation with your school.

You receive the magazine for free and go home happy to see your face in your school’s magazine.

Here’s the backstory.

These businesses pay to have their ads in your school’s magazine because you and your parents are their likely target audience.

Since the school can’t charge you for the magazine, they must make money elsewhere. Hence, the ads.

Ebook-sponsored content is a way for brands to connect with their audience. You can leverage this to make money from your ebooks even before you start selling.

Amba Eyang-Ajakaiye, a digital creator, and coach, shared how she made money from the first free ebook she wrote. In her words, “Although I was going to make the ebook free, I was thinking of how to make money from it.

So I had the idea to let businesses run ads in the ebook. I told my audience that the ebook is going to be downloaded by 1000 people, and it’s an opportunity to increase visibility for your business. I partitioned the spaces into different sizes and gave them different prices.”

Now, who says you can’t apply this strategy to your ebook, whether its free or not?

2. Pre-launch the book

Another strategy to make more money from your ebook is to pre-launch it. That is, selling your ebook when it’s still in the preparation stage while building anticipation for it.

It’s also another strategy to carry your audience along in your digital product creation process and aid your community-building efforts.

During pre-launch, you tell your audience that you’re releasing an ebook on a certain date, and offer an early bird discount price to make more people jump on your offer.

The idea is to implement the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) strategy to make your audience feel like they are missing out on an interesting offer.

With this strategy, you make money before your book is released and even more after it’s released. “When I put the book up for pre-order sales, I had almost 700 people on the waitlist. In the first month of its release, I made 1 million Naira, and the book was 3000 Naira. You can imagine how many people had already bought it,” says Mitchelle Chibundu (designer babe) on how she made 1 million Naira in the first month of her book release.

3. Repurpose the ebook

Repurposing your content simply means turning it into various formats to serve various functions. For example, that masterclass session can be repurposed into an online class. Your articles can be repurposed into videos too.

Generally, repurposing helps you maximize one form of content without writing so much of it.

For an ebook, you can repurpose the content of your ebook into a masterclass or online course and put it on sale on Selar. With this strategy, you can cater to all kinds of your audience. That is, people who prefer to read over watching videos, and those who prefer to watch videos, more than read. So you are not leaving money on the table.

Alternatively, you may host a webinar session for your audience around a topic they are interested in which also ties to your ebook. Then after the webinar, you can pitch your ebook as a follow-up to the webinar session.

The goal is to leverage all kinds of content and digital product format to drive traffic to your product and increase your revenue.

LEARN: How to Repurpose Your Webinar For More Content

4. Affiliate marketing

Over the years, affiliate marketing has become relatively popular amongst creators and marketers.

Well, the good thing is that it works, and is a good way to boost sales of your ebook.

It typically involves offering a commission on sales to people as a way of incentivizing them to market your product. A typical scenario is this “Sell this XYZ ebook and get 20% on each sale. So if the ebook is $500, essentially that affiliate makes $100 on each sale.

While the affiliate is motivated to sell more of your products, you effortlessly make more money even without marketing the product.

The best part is? You can easily automate this process on Selar, so you never have to worry about sorting affiliates or receiving your money.

LEARN: How to Use Affiliate Marketing to Boost Your Digital Products Sales

Ready to make money off your ebook?

Social media and paid ads are not the only way of making money from your ebook. We’ve explored a few unconventional strategies that can help you generate that extra cash flow that you need.

While hitting your sales target depends on the quality of your content and marketing strategy, you can also devise other means to make money.

With these strategies, you can diversify your income and ultimately turn your ebook into a very profitable venture.

But to do that, you need a platform that makes it easy to sell ebooks. You don’t want to be manually sending your ebooks to your customers. Selar is that platform for you. With Selar, you can sell all kinds of digital products and services, and access all the features you need to start and grow an online business as a creator.