The advantages
of selling information through ebooks should be quite
obvious. There are no production costs, no inventory
costs and no shipping costs. And information products
sell very well on the internet. If you have the solution
to their problem, people are very willing to buy immediately
and pay a premium.
But how do you write and market an ebook? Well, the
focus of this article is more on the actual creation
of an ebook, but let me give you a quick run down on
how to write a best selling ebook in one month. First,
you need to choose a niche and does some keyword research
in that niche.
My favorite tool for this is Wordtracker. Wordtracker
will give you the number of times a keyword or search
term has been searched in the major search engines for
the past 120 days. It will then give you the number
of competing web sites for that search term. Find a
niche that has lots of search terms with high demand
and a low number of competing pages, and you will have
a great ebook on your hands! Wordtracker is like a free
e-book coach.
Your keyword research will tell some of the major topics
for your new ebook, but you can also use a survey to
fine tune the topics and create an outline for your
ebook. Survey monkey is a great way to send a survey
to your niche and it is free.
Now that you have a rough outline of your ebook based
upon what your niche is telling you, it is time to create
your ebook. Your ebook needs to be in a format that
EVERYONE can read. Most people do not need professional
e-book reader software. They already have the acrobat
reader on their computer. So, you need a quick e-book
creator that creates PDF files that all computers can
read.
There are many PDF programs out there that make for
simple e-book creation and fast e-book publishing. Just
do a search at TuCows or Download.net. I suggest you
get one that allows you to create clickable hyper-links
in your PDF so that your readers will click on the resources
and come back to your site. The free PDF programs do
not allow this.
Now, a word to the wise. To overcome the perception
that your ebook is just a PDF file, you need to create
a cover for it. This is the 3-D image you will put on
your web page to add pizzazz and increase perceived
value. There are many e-book cover creator programs
and even some freeware. But spend a little money and
get one that works well. Heck, you may even want to
use this software to start an affordable ebook cover
design business!
Of course, the real question is, "How do I set up a
page to download ebooks from?" There are a variety of
ways including setting the adobe e-books security function
so that your readers need a password to read your ebooks.
Of course one of the main problems is that that someone
might download your e-book and email it to 100 of their
best friends.
If you put your e-book in html form and kept it on
the server, then you could control who viewed your e-book
(only paying customers) through a registration system
and for how long they could view it (that way he doesn’t
give the access code to 100 of his best friends so they
get your book for free!). Meaning, only paying customers
could view this book and because it does not download
to their hard drive, they can not pass it along…they
can only print it out. You could even disable someone’s
access to your e-book if you needed to.
Another way is to use a product like lockmyproduct.com
ebook where you control who downloads your ebook, who
reads it and for how long through a password connected
to their ip address.
Now, all you need is a way to automatically give people
access to your e-book when they pay for it. Meaning,
one of the huge reasons people buy e-books is to get
the information now! Even if it is 2 am. You can either
use a clearing house like Clickbank to accept the money
for you or you can use a shopping cart that is tied
to an automatic payment gateway.
So when your customer pays, they are immediately sent
an email with a registration code that gives them access
to your e-book. You can conceivably sell an e-book,
take the payment and deliver the e-book while you are
skiing with your family in Colorado! Now that is a business
idea worth pursuing!
Stephen Beck is an expert on teaching non-techies how
to start a business on the internet. He has created
an electrifying report, How to Find the Right Products
to Sell on the Internet. For a FREE copy, visit: http://www.familyebiz.com/
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