Hi there,

I’ve now posted quite a lot of videos on MindBites.  But while they seem to be attracting a good many views, nobody’s buying them!!  Which as you can imagine is a bit demoralising!

Am I doing something wrong, please?  Are they overpriced - or is it just that people don’t want that content?

I’d be grateful for your advice.

M

Rest assured that this certainly isn’t uncommon. No need to feel demoralized just yet.  :)  The first thing you should know is that time is on your side.  The longer a lesson is up on the site, the more time it has to garner favorable ratings/reviews and build a network of external links that help out by driving traffic and conferring SEO bonus points.  Thus, especially with newer lessons, things frequently take some time to get going.

With that said, there are definitely a few things you can do. What everything really comes down to is a numbers game - the two most important numbers for you will be your traffic numbers (how many visitors land on your page regardless of whether they come via search or through a referral link or whatever) and your conversion rate (what percentage of visitors to your page opt to purchase your lesson).  Presuming you don’t make any changes that impact your conversion rates, you’ll find a pretty consistent percentage of people will opt to purchase your lesson.  Thus, the more people you can drive to the lesson, the more sales you can make.  From an expectation standpoint, most successful lessons on MindBites, like most internet retailers, see conversion rates of 0.5% to 2%.  Highly successful lessons can convert at rates up to 8%, but these are usually either from very well-known authors with devoted followings or they are lessons focused on very niche areas of content that are difficult to find information on.

We’ve started a blog series on getting your lessons set up optimally to maximize your revenue - the first entry in the series is focused on what you can do on the MindBites site and can be found on our blog here: http://blog.mindbites.com/marketing-your-video-lesson-on-mindbites/

It talks about getting your lesson page optimized such that people can find it.  Then, once they find it, there are a couple tips and tricks in there to help you boost your conversion rates. 

As to what to do, I’d side with the blog post on focusing first on getting your lesson and author profile pages in tip-top shape.  We’ll be coming out with a few more blog posts on more advanced techniques for getting the most out of your MindBites (leveraging your own site, getting value out of different social networks and online communities, using PPC campaigns like Adwords, etc).

Other thoughts/suggestions/recommendations?

Good News!  The second entry in our Marketing your MindBite series is up on our blog!  So if you’ve mastered the techniques in our first post, check this out: bit.ly/rTzQY.