Your own Website vs selling on someone else’s?

[Frznrth]

Hi
I’m a speech therapist. I’ve made a few downloadable e-booklets that parents can use to work on sounds at home.  I made a site speech-therapyathome.com a few years ago to try to sell them and also put them on a site that teachers use to sell materials to each other. 

Ive never been able to get enough visitors to my site to get many sales.  I don’t know much about search engines or site promotion.  I even gave away the programs for awhile but still visits were relatively low. 

I have about 6 months before my hosting contact runs out.  I can’t really decide if the site is worth keeping - it just barely breaks even - or if it’s worth putting some time into.  I don’t spend anytime on it right now. 

The teacher’s site makes a few more sales but their commission is high.  I’ve read that some sellers do fairly well - almost a part time job income. Focus on this?

From what I can tell making money selling speech therapy materials online isn’t easy. But some extra income - if I don’t have to work too hard at it - would be appreciated so I’m not quite ready to call it quits. 

Any and all thoughts are much appreciated

Thanks

[yachi]

I Googled speech therapy at home materials and found your site on the 4th page.  It's unlikely most people would go that far from the first page.  Google lets you set a budget when you buy adds for keyword searches, so you could experiment with very little money at stake.  Maybe set a $500 or $1000 budget and see how traffic to your site increases when you do that.  They have more information here: https://ads.google.com/home/#!/ I think you should at least try that before throwing in the towel on the website.

I did notice your site has some free content under "helpful ideas".  It wouldn't be a bad idea to have advertising link to that page from a keyword search for "free speech therapy"

Also I think you should set the links on this page: https://speech-therapyathome.com/links-to-sites-i-rely-on/  to open in new windows.

[travel2020]

Are you just trying to sell eBooks or use these eBooks as a way to sell your services?

If you are just interested in selling eBooks, you can self-publish on Amazon quite easily and it will give you much broader reach. You will still need to market but you can do that by discounting your price, giving away free eBooks as promo, etc.

[Frznrth]

Thanks for the replies.  I spent a couple of hundred on google ads when I first started.  I couldn’t make it pay off and the visitors I did get didn’t seem to ever come back. 

I’m trying to sell the e-books not really wanting to sell services.  I was looking more for passive income. I did upload most of the books to Amazon.  They get a couple of sales a month.

Glad you found my site on google - I think page four is about as good as I’ve ever ranked.  Maybe n a few more years…. 

I’ll keep playing with it. 

[travel2020]

Do you have a Facebook page? (I can’t tell from the website as the Facebook and other links came up not found).

I’ve tried both google ads and Facebook ads and at least fin my case, Facebook has always been more effective. With Facebook, you can target your posts/ads to show up on the feeds of people meeting certain criteria (interests, demographics etc.) vs bidding on keywords on Google.

[goodmoneygoodlife]

Amazon's good, but there's a lot of tweaking for the SEO to love you. You'll need to garner reviews from genuine customers (i.e. a lot of active work to recruit ppl on social media to get people going -- not ads, but actual manual reachout to groups which is hard).

You might want to consider Etsy as well? I've sold digital goods on Etsy and have done decently. Etsy's ads are also about 10-100X cheaper than Facebook/Google. Might want to give that a shot. Their organic is decent as well as long as your keywords don't have a lot of competition.

[KarefulKactus15]

Selling anything online isn't easy.  It's got a learning curve. Sounds like your material is niche so that's good.

AdWords can work but has a steep and expensive learning curve. Much money gets pissed away and people get discouraged.