Digital product sales are very popular to internet marketers. They generally include ebooks (I use that term loosely) and videos. Although software is obviously another type of digital product, software sellers are typically less likely to commit the mistakes listed below.

One of the larger genres of ebooks is marketing, itself - ebooks that tell marketers how to market ebooks. These frequently fall into the subclass of "get rich quick" products and profess to tell people how they can quickly generate large amounts of income through the sale of other ebooks. Circular logic at its finest. I'll focus on this niche, but the mistakes marketers make here are commonly made across many target markets.

1 - Overstate Your Product

While this may work for some buyers, most have become numbed to the bold claims made to them by sellers. And when the wild claims of snake oil salesmen do work, it's usually not for long. This model of quick income from a doomed product is frequently used for herbal diet pills and hair regrowth products on television. Watch these types of commercials on TV. They will run heavily for a few months, then disappear. Sometimes they reappear in a few years, but more often, they are gone forever (thankfully).

Most buyers can tell when they are being promised unlikely results from a product. When they recognize this for your digital product, generally at the beginning of a sales or squeeze page, it is unlikely that they will read any further.

2 - Write Badly

Face it - everyone isn't a good copywriter. But potential customers will gauge the quality of your product by the quality of your description of it. If you don't believe that proper grammar and spelling is of the utmost importance in advertising and marketing copy, go back to square one and reconsider your options for earning an income. When a website or an ebook or an email contains badly written text, the potential customer will assume the product itself is created with the same disregard for quality.

3 - Don't Offer Any Free Samples

When you make your claims but don't back them up with a peek at the product itself, you are guaranteed to lose a significant portion of your audience. This is such a common mistake and I simply don't understand the rationale. There is no real cost involved in showing a free chapter from an ebook or a free clip from a video. If your product is as good as you say it is, wouldn't showing a preview actually increase your sales? I can promise that not doing this will lose sales. So easy to fix, yet so often ignored by marketers.

4 - Turn Your Free Offer into a Sales Pitch

A common way of convincing people to join a mailing list is to offer a free ebook or report. That's great - a good idea that works well. Where most marketers fall down is found in the content of the free offering. When you promise an ebook that explains how to do something, then implement it in the ebook by saying they should buy your product to get the desired result, you are guaranteed to alienate customers. This is worse than simply losing them. An alienated customer will be much less likely to consider your offers in the future. Too many marketers have failed to discover the power of giving away something of value. That's right - a free gift that has real value to the customer. Promise them value but instead, give them an advertisement, and your customers will label you as a scammer.

5 - Push Too Hard

When a customer fails to respond to your squeeze page, why in the world would you force them to go through a series of subsequent squeeze pages? It isn't likely to significantly increase your sales, but it is very likely to piss the customer off. Forget the importance of developing a good, warm relationship with potential customers and you can forget about them becoming customers in the future.

6 - Don't Offer a Money-Back Guarantee

People are hard put to part with their money. Marketing is rarely so good that the customer doesn't feel some amount of trepidation when looking at a purchase button. A firm guarantee of complete satisfaction goes a long way toward reducing the customer's apprehension. If you honestly feel that you are selling a good product, requests for refunds should not be much of a concern to you. And if you're staying away from a guarantee because you worry that you will receive too many refund requests, your product likely isn't ready for primetime anyway. By failing to provide a money-back guarantee, you are clearly adding another obstacle to the sale.