Writing an eBook is a great way to either boost your traffic, your email sign ups, earn some income for yourself, or some combination of all three. Today anyone can write an eBook completely free of charge and begin selling it through a reputable online merchant like Clickbank.
If you are planning on selling it you can also easily, depending on the quality of your eBook and sales page, drum up a ton of affiliate support to help you market and sell your book.
To the right is a picture of one of my eBooks and my incentive for encouraging people to sign up for my mailing list: “The No Nonsense Marketing/Making Money Online Handbook”.
This is over 50 pages of affiliate marketing information which is based on everything which I have learned in my 6 years of affiliate marketing. I wrote it over the course of a few months and have gotten a lot of great feedback on it since I recently released it.
Let’s look at how to write an eBook because it’s not as difficult as it might seem, but there are some things to consider.
How to Write an eBook
First you should find a niche which has a market for informational products. Even if you’re not planning on selling it, you’ll get a lot more downloads of your eBook if people would be willing to buy a book in that niche.
You can check out some forums on that niche to see how desperate people are for solutions, or more immediately you can take a look at the Adwords situation for a keyword related to that niche to see how competitive and therefore valuable that keyword is. The more people willing to bid on keywords related to that niche, the more money there is presumably to be made because it’s worth the advertisement.
When it comes to beginning to write the content, you have a choice to make as to whether you want to write it yourself or outsource it to someone else. A lot of marketers choose to outsource and I know a lot of instances where marketers will outsource this task to very capable writers overseas in places like Vietnam where these writers are able and willing to work for very cheap compared to what you’d pay someone over here.
I won’t get too far into addressing that right now as that’s a whole other ball of controversial wax which I’m writing an upcoming post on. The point is that if you don’t have the time or expertise to write it yourself, there are options for outsourcing.
I personally have never outsourced anything in the conventional sense. It’s my feeling that if I’m going to be selling or even giving away an eBook, it’s a reflection of my name and I don’t trust anyone else to do it for me. Plus I only create products for sale in niches which I have a great deal of knowledge in myself, so I just assume take that knowledge and write it myself.
Now in getting back to how to write an eBook if you are planning on writing it yourself, a nice strategy to employ is to turn and compile previous content on a subject into an eBook. So if you have written a lot of articles either for an article directory or your own site through blog posts, you’ve likely written those posts each on a specific and different aspect of your niche, targeting a different keyword with each one.
Not only has that content likely brought you a lot of traffic in the past, but now you can get further use out of it by taking it, oftentimes without having to tweak it too much, and turning each article or post into a section of your eBook.
Maybe you can’t structure each one into its own chapter, maybe you can, but at the very least you can organize each post into groups with other relevant posts within that niche to form the basis of your chapters.
Whether you have existing content to work with or not, remember that every effective eBook should first identify the reader’s problem, offer a solution and perhaps explain why it’s the best solution above alternative methods as it relates to the reader, and finally explain that solution in length. When all is said and done, the reader should know exactly how to fix their problem whether that’s clearing up a pimple, getting their ex back, or learning how to patch up a carburetor.
Don’t make your eBook longer for the sake of making it appear to be a better value. While people might feel more validated about purchasing an eBook if they find that it’s 70 pages versus 50, they more likely don’t want to be reading 20 superfluous pages which could have easily been left out and which negatively affect the overall quality and waste their time when 50 pages would have delivered the same solution.
Finally, for ACTUALLY writing the eBook, you can use freeware like OpenOffice. It’s very much like the Microsoft office program “Word”, but it’s open source so it’s completely free to download and use. You can then write and edit your eBook using your margins, fonts, etc. of choice, then when it’s finished you can export it as a PDF file with just a couple of clicks. PDF is the typical and preferred format of most eBooks today.
Once it’s completed you can upload your new eBook to your server and place it on a special download page for free so it can be used as an incentive to motivate your traffic to fulfill one of the actions I mentioned in opening, or conversely as I also mentioned in opening you can sell it through an online merchant like Clickbank and find affiliates to help sell your book for you.