How To Writing And Making Money (E-Book)

The How To Guide to Writing & Making Money from eBooks

The How To Guide to Writing & Making Money from eBooks
Ever since the decline of legacy media, many entrepreneurs have been attempting to cash in on the success of eBooks. While most people have more success marketing an eBook to generate leads for an email list, or as a free bonus to promote special affiliate offers, there are ways that you can cash in on eBooks themselves. However, not every eBook will sell well in an already over-saturated market. You need to be able to identify a solid and useful topic, write a thorough and valuable eBook, and properly monetize it for maximum sales. Luckily, it’s not as difficult as you might think.

How to Write an eBook

While there are numerous scams out there, promising thousands of dollars when you sign up for a useless service that will “help” you write an eBook (then showing a picture of an actor holding a stack of hundred-dollar bills), there are some people that have honestly had a good return on their eBook. Glen of Viperchill.com wrote an extensive article about his successful eBook, Cloud Living. Ultimately, he ended up making $30,000 from his popular eBook, which taught people how to make a living online.
So, before you start on your eBook, there are a few things that you have to remember in order to be successful:

• Pick a topic that you know well, that people are currently interested in, and that allows you to provide the most value. For example, if you notice that the topic “kids costumes that rock” is trending in Google searches, and you have some experience in sewing, you might write an eBook about how to create your own cheap kids’ Halloween costumes.
• You don’t need to invest in an expensive writing and editing program for your computer. Openoffice.org offers a free word processor that allows you to quickly and easily export any document to a PDF file (the preferred format for eBooks).
• Planning is key. An eBook provides the perfect opportunity for you to practice your prewriting skills. Have a plan for what direction you’re going to take, as well as some notes on the information you would like to include for each section (i.e. create an outline). Otherwise, your eBook could come off as being directionless and vague.
• Don’t worry too much about word count. Information is what’s important. While you might not sell many 1000-word eBooks for $19.99, eBooks aren’t usually meant to be 100,000-word novels. Thoroughly and accurately cover the topic in as many words as it takes, but use lean writing to get your points across quickly.

Choosing an eBook Topic

To find a good topic for your eBook, try using some free web tools that can help you find trending topics, or use common sense to time your eBook’s release with an event that should increase interest.
Google Trends is an excellent tool for finding trending topics. However, you must be careful to choose topics with continuing interest – not ones that will drop in popularity after a couple of days. While “Miss Universe 2011″ is likely going to stop trending soon, a trending search like “earthquake” holds some potential for a profitable eBook.
[http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=earthquake&graph=weekly_img&sa=N]
Looking at the Search Volume Index for the past several years in the image above, you can see that the term “earthquake” has experienced some notable interest spikes, usually coinciding with a major earthquake. You can expect interest to continue with this term over the long run. You might write an instructional eBook on the term using one of the following titles:

• 100 Earthquake Survival Stories
• Earthquakes and Doomsday Predictions: The Historical Link
• The Complete Earthquake Survival Guide

Creating the eBook

Once you have a topic in mind and have performed the prewrite, it’s time to get to work creating the eBook. For the written portion, don’t focus so much on creating a narrative. Instead, focus on providing easy-to-digest and actionable information. eBooks work in the same way as webpage content – white space helps make them much easier to read. Use bulleted lists and headers throughout the content to make it easier to scan. In addition, try presenting information in other ways to help readers get through your work. Charts and graphs are excellent additions to help make information more clear.
For clean and crisp charts and graphs, the program Omni Graph Sketcher is perfect (2-week free trial, $29.99 to purchase) and most eBook creators use it to make their own charts. Although there are some free websites for creating graphs and charts (remarkably, NCES’ Kids’ Zone Creator is probably the best), they lack the customization that programs like Omni Graph Sketcher offer.
Remember that your topic has a lot to do with your writing style. If you’re putting together a study, most readers will expect the information to be scholarly in tone, or written from a position of authority and supported by a large amount of citations. However, an eBook on kids’ Halloween costumes might need to be a little more casual in tone, without many works cited (if any at all).
Finally, no matter what you write, make the investment in a good editor. While your writing might make perfect sense to you, it can be completely lost on the average reader. Spelling and grammatical errors can make it seem like you didn’t put much effort into the eBook, which can cost you future conversions. Hire a good editor early in the writing process, and he or she can help you structure the eBook properly throughout the process. If you have trouble writing the eBook, simply buy a few eBooks yourself to get an idea of what readers expect to see in the content. This can help give you ideas about phrasing and organization as well.

Making Money from eBooks

One of the most important questions you must ask yourself before you begin marketing your finished eBook is whether or not you need an established audience beforehand. It’s almost always better to have a group of Internet readers that already view you as an authority, rather than investing in an eBook that might not return your investment for months. For example, the successful eBook marketer Darren Rowse (Problogger) waited to launch his first eBook until he had been writing for the site for five years. Because he waited so long and acquired a huge audience, he was able to make an estimated $450,000 from a single eBook (priced at about $19.00).
Before you begin marketing your eBook, however, it’s important to make sure it’s protected from duplication. All Media Copy offers a helpful guide on adding password protection to your eBooks, in addition to adding a copyright.
There are a few ways to market your eBook (none of which include just popping it up on Amazon.com and hoping for the best):

• Start an affiliate program: You can contact other bloggers in your niche and ask if they would be willing to promote your eBook in exchange for a percentage of each sale (51%, for example). Most bloggers are constantly looking for ways to monetize their sites, and it doesn’t cost you anything to duplicate your eBook. You might want to use a service like Clickbank to keep things safe and organized.
• Build an interested audience on your blog/site: This really is the best method to selling an eBook. If you really can’t find an audience, you might try something similar to affiliate marketing by contacting a prominent blog owner and setting up a deal where they sell your eBook and offer you a percentage (provided they are willing to put their name on your product). Keep in mind that people who make significant money from selling an eBook get around 75% of their sales from their original audience/email list.
• Organic Search Traffic: You can always use targeted organic search traffic to sell your eBook as well, whether it’s through your existing website or a new one you put up just to sell the eBook. The search marketing doesn’t have to be for the eBook’s exact title. Using our earthquake example, you can set up a website with the domain name earthquakesurvival.com (if that search phrase is searched often) and create a simple sales page designed to sell your eBook.

Creating an eBook is a great deal like creating a long article, but must be very well written and laid out to convince people (who are accustomed to getting valuable content for free) to buy it. Generate a good topic and invest some time and money into the eBook and you should have a quality product. When marketing the eBook, focus on long term conversions for a low rate, rather than pricing your eBook high in the hopes of making some quick conversions for a few hundred dollars.

Autoblog Profits: 90 days Trial

Autoblog Profits: 90 day trial – What we learned…

This is a follow-up article to our 90 Day auto-blogging trial. Three months ago, our 15 sites went live set up by the folks at Profit Jackpot. Our goal was to generate sufficient traffic within the first 90 days to be able to monetize the sites and make some money
If you have read any of our previous posts about our 90 day autoblog trial, you will know that we were getting mixed results. You may also have noticed that we did not post any more updated results over the summer. Nevertheless, our 16+ sites were churning away producing daily content on auto-pilot and Google and other bots were regularly visiting our sites.

First, the good news. As a whole, traffic to our sites grew from an average of 300 visits per day in mid-May to almost 1,100 per day at the peak. Daily Google search visitors grew from an average of 20 per day in May to a peak of 181 near the end of August. This was an encouraging trend, leading us to believe that traffic was nearing a point where it could be successfully monetized. To put this in perspective, our inaugural standard blog (justrw.net) was established 18 months ago and uses traditional author generated posts, now receives between 150-200 visits per day, with us producing new posts at the rate of about 2 per week.
We are starting to make a little bit of money through Google Adsense but it only amounts to about 50 cents a day. We have had some clickthroughs on our Clickbank ads but none has yet ended in a sale. Other revenue streams from Commission Junction and Amazon are also not yet really off the ground, but we have started placing more advertising in the hopes that increased traffic will eventually pay off.

Now, the not so good news! In the last couple of days of August, our Google search hits from all sites in the autoblog network plummeted from the aforementioned high to just 30 hits a day. This is too striking to be ignored. It would seem likely that Google has somehow deduced that our content is not truly unique and has penalised us accordingly   One particular site: Nokia N8 Tips & Tricks, which was receiving almost 200 visitors a day and rarely less than 30 from Google searches now gets just 6! In reviewing the auto-generated content across our network of autoblog sites, I have come to the conclusion that over 50% of the posts are effectively garbage to a human reader, even if a Google bot is not smart enough to recognise it.
Don’t forget that the purpose of any autoblogging site is to make money from the traffic that comes to it. If the reader is greeted with garbled, illegible content, what are the chances that they will click on any of your advertising?
So, what is the next step? Well, since we have been relatively successful in building traffic, all is not yet lost. We have turned off the auto-posting feature on most of the sites and will now be adding content manually. We now have several methods of generating content and will add new posts that are edited, SEO optimized and guaranteed to be unique. We will leave some of the poorly performing sites on auto-posting just to see what happens.
In a future post we will show you the different methods that we use to generate unique content from the autoblog output. In the meantime, we thoroughly recommend that you check out WP-Simplicity, since it alone will enable you to do this and a lot more besides.

How to Boost Your Blog

Boost Your Blog

Yesterday I gave an example of something I’d been putting off doing to improve my blog—even though I knew it would have long-term benefits.
Today I want to continue on that theme and being to suggest a number of areas that bloggers could be investing time into today—and enjoying payoffs from in the future. Some of them will lead to financial benefits while others are just going to improve the effectiveness of a blog.

1. Create a Product

Every time I talk about monetizing blogs by selling a product of your own, I get comments from bloggers telling me that they’re thinking of, planning to, or wondering if they should launch a product of their own.
Yes there’s significant work in creating your own product, but there are also many many tangible benefits of doing it.
Have you created a product of your own?

2. Start an email newsletter

This is another tactic that I know many bloggers are convinced of. But for one reason or another it’s seen as something they’ll do “one day”—maybe when they have more traffic, maybe when they have more time. The reality is that by starting an email list early on (and using it smartly), you’ll accelerate both the driving of traffic to your blog and the monetization of it.
Do you have an active email newsletter for your blog?

3. Optimize your advertising page

When I mentioned I was writing this post on Google+ (connect with me here), Nick Roshon suggested auditing your advertising page.
If monetization through selling advertising is part of your business model, then this one should be a task you build into your regular schedule of pages to update.
Keep your advertising page up to date with the latest options for advertisers to advertise, update your stats so that advertisers know what reach they’ll have, and make sure that this page is prominent on your blog so that they can find it.
Do you have an advertising page on your blog?

4. Optimize other key pages

Yesterday, we talked about pages on your blog, and it might also be worthwhile looking over some of the other key pages on your blog. For example, the About page is one that, on many blogs, is read a lot by new visitors. It’s also a page that many bloggers forget to keep up to date with new developments.
I recently looked over my own About page and realised that while I linked to my first ebook, I had made no mention of subsequent ones. As it’s such a highly trafficked page, I was potentially missing out on sales as a result.

5. Check your metrics for “hot posts”

One of the tasks that I build into my own blogging on a monthly(ish) basis is to dig into Google Analytics. I do a number of things while digging in but one simple task that can have significant impact is to look for “hot posts”—posts that attract a higher rate of traffic than normal posts.
Most blogs have a few hot posts in their archives, and they’re not always the ones you’d expect. These posts are real opportunities—there are people viewing them and chances are that once they do, they then disappear never to return.
Once you’ve identified your hot posts, think about how you can optimize them. You might put a bit more time into optimizing them for SEO, you might want to think about how to hook visitors of that page into subscribing, or you might want to even think about promoting a product (yours or someone else’s) from that post. Really what you do will depend upon your goals.
Does your blog have hot posts? And have you optimized them?

6. Optimize your menus, navigation, and sidebars

One task that I think many of us could benefit from on a periodic basis is a critical review of menus and navigation areas on our blogs.
I include myself in this—recently it hit me that on my photography blog I wasn’t promoting my ebooks in my menus. I just had one menu item pointing to a very dated page that was no longer relevant. I swapped the photography ebook sales page link in and again saw an increase of traffic to that landing page.
Ultimately, it’s about working out what actions you want readers to take when they visit your blog and then making sure that you’re calling your readers to those actions in prominent places on your blog.
Are you doing this? Can you optimize your menus and sidebars further?

7. Interlink your posts

Another task that I try to do on a regular basis (not as regularly as I should!) is going back through old posts in my archives and looking for opportunities to interlink them.
Many times bloggers write multiple posts on their blog on related topics, and each one is an opportunity to interlink relevant content. This benefits your readers, as you give them further reading on the topic, and helps with your search rankings (internal links help your SEO a little).
Pay particular attention to opportunities to link to your own products in older posts—this can be a money spinner.
Do you regularly go back and interlink old posts?

8. Add an incentive to your email opt-in

Chris Garrett suggested this one on Google+ when I raised the topic of this post, and he’s a guy who has seen real benefit from doing it.
Chris offers a couple of ebooks when you subscribe to his list, and from what I can tell it significantly increase the opt-in rates to his lists. Of course, increased opt-ins can lead to many benefits over the life of your blog.
Have you incentivized your list subscription? Can you do it today?

What’s Your Blog Worth? How to Value Web Properties

Worth For You
This guest post is by Sunil of Extra Money Blog.

I have sold an ecommerce website for $250,000 and several other niche websites for a five-figure price tag. I want to share with you one valuation method you can use to put a price on your web property today.
Whether a website owner or a blogger starts with the initial goal of selling their site one day, it is my belief that every successful blog owner has at some point thought about the potential of selling their web property. At least they will have wondered how much their web property is worth—especially when it begins to generate a decent amount of money.

Copyright Jakub Krechowicz - Fotolia.com

In fact, I think almost no one thinks about a sale as an exit strategy when they first start. It’s usually a passion, hobby, or something other than a potential sale that motivates a person to get started making money online—unless of course they run an online business, such as an ecommerce website, from day one. When a website becomes profitable, it has the potential to become saleable. You may deliberately be contemplating selling either because of boredom, because you’ve found a better alternative use of your time, because of a potential use of the financial proceeds, or any of several other reasons.
If so, do you know what your website is worth?
When a web property starts to generate profits, it becomes an income-producing asset, much like a rental property or a small business. Just like property and businesses are valued and sold in the open market, a website or blog can be too. Therefore, valuing a web property is not much different from valuing any other income-producing asset.

The quantitative aspect of web property valuation

The quantitative aspect of valuation is not rocket science, in my opinion.  You take a site’s current earnings and expenses, figure out what the net cash flows are, and then project a value based on an earnings multiplier.
The net earnings, or cash flows, is commonly referred to as EBITDA in the business world. That means: earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.  The multiplier is applied to this number to come up with a value, or price, for the property.
Earnings and expenses are what they are: they are not subjective by any means. But where do you get an earnings multiplier from? Evaluate recent sales of websites that are similar to yours to get an idea of what kind of multiplier was paid for each one. This number will be larger in stronger economic times, and smaller in weaker economic times like those we’re in today.
There is no standard multiplier, however. Similar to real estate, if figures are available from recent blog sales, great. But if not, your website’s value is only as much as someone else is willing to bid for it. Obviously you have the option not to sell for what you might feel is a low-ball offer.
One more thing to consider is whether the website is as monetized as it can be today. Is there opportunity to add more private ads to the sidebar, and generate more profits on a residual basis, for example?  A buyer would definitely evaluate this monetization potential and factor it into their purchase decision.

The qualitative aspect of web property valuation

Here is where the subjectivity in blog valuation comes into play.  An active business sold at an earnings multiplier of two may not be comparable with a same-size passive business, because a passive business requires a lot less effort to manage and sustain. Consider how much cost and effort the owner of the web property will have to invest in the passive business to generate a dollar in profits. Then ask how this compares with an active business.
Factors such as effort, operating cost structure, sustainability, long-term relevancy, and prospects all play an important part in determining what the reasonable value of a particular web property should be. At the end of the day, none of this is exact science, but these are some ways to arrive at a justifiable or rational price.
For example, no one knew the long-term scalability of Google or LinkedIn. In fact, no one knows today.  The market had a certain estimate (multiplier) set at the time each company went public, and has a different one today. It will likely have another one by the time you are done reading and commenting on this post. Expect the multiplier to evolve, especially in an ever-changing and dynamic industry like this one.

A practical example

When I was initially solicited by an Ebay power seller to potentially sell my ecommerce business, the business was generating roughly $60,000 annually in profits. After weeks of discussion back and forth, we settled at a sale price of just under $250,000, or roughly four times the annual earnings of $60,000.
The quantitative piece of the deal was straightforward. The qualitative piece is what dragged out the negotiation.  The power seller had previously purchased a similar ecommerce business at an earnings multiple of three.  They had paid $90,000 for a business that was generating $30,000 in annual profits.  However, I was not willing to accept a price of $180,000, which was three times the annual earnings of my site.  Further, my business showed a consistent rising trend in terms of web traffic, customer acquisition, sales, and profits.  These qualitative measures needed to be “baked” in to the deal for it to be viable for me.  I was able to persuade the buyer of that, and we sealed the deal at four times the annual earnings.
The key lesson here is that although acquisitions based strictly on earnings multiples sound good in theory, they rarely work out practically, whether at my level or at the Fortune 500 level.  Our repeated attempts to narrow the nature of deal making to a pure science have never worked, and likely won’t in future.  Valuations, although driven mostly by the underlying financials, rely heavily on qualitative aspects that are subjective and unique to each buyer and seller.
What do you think of this valuation method? Do you have any alternatives to share? Is this a fair way to value your web property? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
If you want to be brave and bold and open your kimono to me and fellow readers: what do you believe your web property worth is today in the open market, if you use this valuation method?
Sunil owns over a dozen profitable niche websites and is the author of How to Go from $0 to $1,000 a month in Passive and Residual Income in Under 180 Days All in Your Spare Time, a FREE report you can download instantly from his Extra Money Blog, where he discusses how to create multiple streams of passive and residual income, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, blogging and personal finance.