Make Money Selling Ebooks
Making Money Selling Ebooks
A. Sell Your Own Ebook
There is serious money in ebooks.
A few years ago there was hardly anything out there on the net. Now there’s an ebook for everything, and everyone who publishes is doing extremely well. That’s because there are zero publishing costs, and minimal advertising costs. With a laser targeted Adwords campaign, you can buy potential customers for pennies. Josh mentioned before a bit about making money through Clickbank. You can also publish your ebook on Clickbank and have other people sell them for you. Ebooks are the quickest, cheapest way to share information, and as electronic reader technology gets better, soon most books will be sold as ebooks.
B. Brainstorming a great Ebook idea
Everyone has a story to share with the world. What’s yours?
If you don’t have one, go out there and get one. Rolf Potts was a landscaper and an ESL teacher before he traveled the world and started writing for Salon, National Geographic Adventure, and got his own travel book published. If you need help with brainstorming, here are a few ideas:
1. Don’t judge any of your ideas as outlandish
2. Think without boundries. How much is really possible?
3. Keep your ear to the ground. What are people asking for or interested in?
4. What book do you wish was already written?
Don’t sit around waiting for the perfect multimillion dollar idea.The main idea is to get started. If you sit around waiting for the perfect idea to pop in your head you miss out on all the smaller opportunities to help people. Remember, building an online business is just like building a physical business, and when you produce what your customers want, they will tell their friends.
So find a problem and solve it. Elegantly.
C. Researching Your Market
The next step is to research your market. Do a quick Google search for your topic and see what free information is out there. Nobody has already given away what you want to write, have they? If not, that’s great. And If so, can you provide more information that would be worth paying for? Free information is great, but it almost always lacks the quality of non-free information.
After you’ve decided your idea could be expanded upon, do another search on Clickbank. This time, search for similar topics to see whether or not your product is already being offered by another ebook company. If it is, I highly recommend you purchase it and see how good or bad it is, and decide whether or not it will be worth your time to create something better. If someone has really written the last great book on sewing dolls with 40 years experience, you might want to come up with another idea.
Also, start thinking about your marketing before you write a single word. If your Google Adwords will cost you $5 per click, (Common for keywords like make money), it might not make sense to do the traditional online marketing. Be creative, and think about how you can leverage your talents to create a whole lot of good publicity for your book once its done.
D. Creating your ebook
So now you’ve got your idea in your head, and all you need to do is get it written down. So start writing. Today. Right now. The biggest problem people have with writing is that they never actually do it. They’ll sit down to begin to write, get distracted, and then stay distracted for the rest of the day. And the same thing happens the next day. Don’t let this happen to you. Decide to write a specific amount of pages every day, and make sure it gets done. This is literally your job if you’re publishing your own ebook, so treat it as such! Destroy all distractions, and get it done.
If you’ve got no idea where to start, or can’t write a full sentance, don’t fret. If you can create an outline or a general overview, you can get your book written by somebody else, for cheap. Again, Rent a Coder is a great resource. Put a bid up asking for someone to write your book for you. People will begin competing to write your book, and you’ll get a complete ebook a few weeks later. You will need to edit this, but most people are more comfortable editing something that’s already been written versus writing over a hundred origional pages.
Either route you go, once you think you’ve finished your book and its ready, sit on it for a while. Give it to a few (close) friends and let them run a fine tooth comb over what’s been written. You’ll be amazed by how many mistakes you’ve made or missed, and just how unclear your thoughts are. That’s alright, though. Your book hasn’t been “published” yet.
Once you’ve got your book in its final copy form, pat yourself on the back. You’re now ready to turn it into a PDF, and start selling it through Clickbank.
1.Turning Your Book into an Ebook and Publishing it Through Clickbank
Take a deep breath. The most difficult part is over, and now you need to do just a few more things before you can begin making money. I’ll walk you through this step by step:
1. Convert your book into ebook format. You can do this for free using PDF Creator. Go to their website and read the instructions. If you need a more robust publishing system, you’re going to need to pay for a full featured PDF system like Adobe Acrobat.
2.Sign up for a Clickbank account. It should only take about three minutes.
3.Create a Publisher Pitch Page, and a Publisher Thank You Page. If you need help with the HTML, get Nvu, and design your Pitch Page and Publisher Pages in there. Need help writing the copy? There’s a whole lot of copy that’s free for you to see on Clickbank. It costs you nothing to view the top seller’s web copy. If you’re interested in making a solid investment in your copy, there’s no better copywriter than The Rich Jerk.
4.Test your links.
5.Submit a product approval request.
6.Activate your account and set your prices.
Congratulations, you now have a Clickbank website and a published ebook. Success will follow, especially after you implement your powerful ebook promotion plan we talk about next.
E. Promoting your Ebook
Creating a promotion plan
Go back and re-read Josh’s guide to using Adwords for promotion. Everything that applies for affiliate sales applies for direct sales. The only difference is, you get to keep a higher percentage of profits, and thus you’ll be able to afford more marketing. I recommend getting as much free marketing as possible, by adding your link to directories and posting comments on forums and blogs with your link included. You can even pay someone to make posts with your link.
Also, a great way to get some rapid promotion is to write an article or two for a big site. In exchange for your article they link back to your website. E-zine Articles is a great place to publish your article. They’ll be sure to get you a few thousand visitors, eventually. Just be sure to include the link back to your site, and make your article one people would want to read.
F. Creating affiliate program
Clickbank makes it easy to set up your own affiliate program. I suggest making it worthwhile for your affiliates by implementing at least a 33% commission for them. Remember, these are customers you wouldn’t have otherwise had, and they may be spending their own money promoting your product. Be generous. They will be generous back.
Selling your own ebook:
Advantages: Start your own affiliate program. Clickbank will give you your own built-in affiliate program. Or, if you’re greedy, you can run one from your own site using iDevDirect. Their software is easy to set up and use. If you accept payments with Paypal, it’s only $100 to set up. You decide what commission you want to pay your affiliates (from 1% to 75%).
Accept credit cards without a merchant account. If your product is downloadable (such as an ebook or software), then for a $49.95 fee you will be able to process credit card and online cheques for $1.00 per transaction plus 7.5% of the sale price.
Over 100,000 affiliates to promote your product.
Receive your paycheck twice per month.
Real-time sales reporting.
Get free advertising with a free listing on the clickbank website and through their search partners such as cbmall.com.
Disadvantages: With over 10,000 product vendors, your product can become lost in the crowd.
