Ebooks are a great way to build your brand and generate leads. They also provide a cost-effective way to promote your services or products.

In this article we'll discuss how you can create and sell an e-book using HubSpot.

Let's get started.

Why You Should Sell An E-Book To Collect Qualified Leads 

When you're trying to qualify leads for your business there's no better way than using a paid e-Book.

Why? Because you're able to find the buyers of your niche. If someone buys an e-Book then then the chances of them buying additional products from you are higher. 

Think about it like this. Ever been to a mall food court and see people standing in front of the eatery serving samples. 

They are hoping that you take a sample and you love the food so much that you stop and eat there. But not just on that day. They hope that you'll eat there every time you visit the mall. 

E-books are similar in the sense that they are a preview of all the goodies your business has to share. 

The key is to make the e-book so deliciously informational (pun intended), that they crave more. 

They want more of what you're serving and it's your job to provide the goods. 

Good news is you're using HubSpot, and HubSpot makes it incredibly easy for you to follow-up and upsell those wanting more. 

Before we share how you can sell your e-Book on HubSpot, we recommend checking out their full-guide on creating an e-Book from start to finish

How To Sell Your E-Book On HubSpot

To start, we are going to use Cartfuel, a third-party tool found on the HubSpot marketplace

Note: It's a paid tool but comes with a free 14-day trial. 

Cartfuel is a payment form builder that allows you to sell digital products on your website. It's easy and does not require any coding or extensive learning curve. 

You can get started by installing the app from the HubSpot marketplace.

Once you install the app you'll need to create an account by connecting your Stripe account.

If you don't want to use a third-party tool and rather use HubSpot payments, you can. But you should know that there are some limitations when it comes to functionality. 

Those limitations include: 

  • You can't use your current Stripe account.
  • You can't import past Stripe products into HubSpot payments.
  • You can't use PayPal or other payment processors '
  • You have to live in the United States to use HubSpot payments 
  • It doesn't allow for donation creation.
  • It doesn't have a customer  portal 
  • You can't offer discount/coupon codes 
  • You can't customize the payment links to match your brand 
  • You can't offer order bumps.
  • You can't provide one-click upsells 
  • You can't offer add-ons.
  • You can't offer product variants. 

We wrote a more detailed post on the differences between HubSpot payments and how you can decide if it's the right tool for your business. 

Setting Up Cartfuel

Once you connect your Stripe account and HubSpot account you'll be ready to start creating your first payment form. 

In fact, Cartfuel comes pre-loaded with a payment form so all you need to do is edit it to fit your needs. 

We'll explain how you can edit the payment form so you can start selling your e-Ebook. 

Start by clicking the green 'Edit' button. This will popup our payment form editor. 

From there you can change the name of the payment form. 

For our example, we'll change it to 'HubSpot e-Book'. 

Now, let's edit the product. Click the little pencil icon under the payment form name. 

A new popup will appear giving us the ability to change the product name, price and add additional features like adding:

  • a quantity field 
  • stock
  • taxes 
  • variants 
  • and more

Let's change the name of the product to 'HubSpot' e-Book. 

You can change the price to whatever you'd like. In this case, we'll keep it at $1. 

For now we won't add additional features. We'll click the blue 'Update' button. 

After that you can make the choice to more features to the payment form by toggling on the toggles under the product. 

Those features include:

  • changing the currency
  • charge additional fees
  • countdown timer 
  • HubSpot forms
  • shipping fields  
  • coupons
  • and more

Note: You don't need to add any of these additional features to sell your e-Book on HubSpot. 

You can further modify your payment form by clicking 'Step 2 - Customize'. You can change the text, fonts, and colors of your payment form. 

If you want to add one-click upsells to sell more products to your customers you can do so in 'Step 3 - Upsells'. 

We won't go to in-depth with all of the Cartfuel features, but if you want to learn more you can schedule a demo with their team. 

Click on the blue 'Save' button. 

Once you click 'Save' you'll be presented with two code snippets. We'll use those code snippets to render your payment form on your website or HubSpot landing page.

How To Embed Cartfuel On HubSpot Landing Pages

Go to your HubSpot account and go to the asset marketplace and click on modules.

Install the free 'HTML' module which will allow you to use embed scripts on HubSpot. 

Once installed, go to your HubSpot landing page where you want to sell your e-Book. 

Then follow these steps:

  1. In the left hand menu select the newly added HTML module.
  2. Go back to Cartfuel and copy the first code snippet.
  3. Go back to the HubSpot module and paste the first code snippet. 
  4. Go to Cartfuel and copy the second code snippet
  5. Go to HubSpot once more and paste the second code snippet.
  6. Click the orange 'Update' button

Now you'll see the Cartfuel payment form rendered on your HubSpot website. 

When a customer purchases from your payment form their customer data will appear in your HubSpot contact activity timeline. 

The cool part about the data being present in HubSpot is you can now deliver the e-Book from HubSpot - no additional tools needed. 

How To Deliver Your E-Book Using HubSpot 

Before you send your e-book to your customers, you’ll need to add it to HubSpot. You can do so by using the following steps:

In your HubSpot Account, go to Marketing > Files & Templates > Files. 

Then click the orange 'Upload File' button. 

Note: The recommended upload size is below 1GB. 

Once you have your e-Book uploaded to HubSpot you'll want to create a workflow to send the e-Book. 

How To Create A HubSpot Workflow

HubSpot workflows are an easy way to deliver your content. To create a workflow follow these steps:

  1. Go to the "Workflow" tab in HubSpot and click the "Create workflow" button located at the top-right of the HubSpot website
  2. Select the "Contact-based" option inside the "Start from scratch" section
  3. Click the "Next" button located at the top-right of the HubSpot website
  4. Click the "Set enrollment triggers" and a menu will appear at the right of the HubSpot website listing all the Enrollment triggers
  5. Select the "Cartfuel: Product Purchased"
  6. Select the "Product Name" option or any other option that suites your needs
  7. Select the "Contains any of" and an input text bar will appear under the selected option
  8. Click the "Apply Filter" or "Update Filter" button
  9. Click the "Save" button

Note: You'll want to enter the name of the product that's in Cartfuel

After setting up the product trigger, then you'll want to click the plus icon to add a new email to the sequence. 

You'll want to create a new email and include the e-Book asset that you upload in the above steps. 

You can find the e-Book link by click on the file name. A popup will appear with the asset file link. 

Copy the asset file link and include it in your new created email. 

Voila. You now can automatically send an email with the e-Book to any new customer that makes a purchase on your  website using Cartfuel and HubSpot.

FAQ

What ebook file format should you use? 

Ebooks can be saved in one of several formats. Depending on your end-user, though, you might find a use for any of the following file types:

including Adobe Digital Editions (.ADE), AZW3, EPUB, HTML, MOBI, PRC, PDF, RTF, TXT, XHTML, and ZENKAKU.

There is no right or wrong file format. However, PDF is the most well-known file format. 

How do I monetize my eBook?

The best way to monetize your eBooks is to sell them for $9.99 or less. If you charge more than $9.99, then you risk losing potential customers who would rather spend money on something else. Also, don't forget to include free bonuses such as PDFs, images, and other resources.