How to make money by creating your own eBook

A good way to earn money online is to sell eBooks. One easy way you can do this is to buy pre-packaged Private Label Rights packages that you can sell. Some of these even come with a pre-built sales website you can use with sales scripts like the 7dollarsecrets.com. That’s great if you can find a Private Label Rights package in a niche that your keyword research indicates would be good target for your marketing efforts. But, what if a product isn’t available? What you can do is create your own eBook.

I won’t get into the specifics of creating an Adobe PDF eBook in this article but it isn’t that hard to do technically. I recommend using Open Office to create your eBook since it’s easy to use and free. If you need some ideas on the basics of doing this from a technical perspective feel free to ask me and I’ll either answer you there or do a post on it.

One of the easiest eBooks to create and one that is likely to sell well is a quick reference guide, how-to or study guide eBook. People who’re looking for them are usually in a buying mood because they’re looking for answers to a particular problem that they’re having. You should know that people who have a need are willing to shell out a few dollars for an answer.

These books can be rather short, generally 10-30 pages of content, and are thus easy to create. So, where can you get the content? Well, not surprisingly, you can find most of the content online and in the public domain or under a liberal Creative Commons license. So, why can’t people find it when they Google for it? Because (a) they don’t know how to Google well and (b) it gets outranked by good marketers, ie us.

But, getting back to creating them, one option is to outsource them to a ghost writer. This usually costs more than having someone write a package of 10 blog articles. I’ve seen prices from $30 on up to several hundred dollars but remember, you get what you pay for. A quality eBook will produce more sales both upfront and on the back end. Since I like to think I’m a pretty decent writer and I’m kind of cheapskate I’ve been writing my own. The way I see it is that you have to decide where your talents lie and the time available to you and make the best use of them in the way you see fit.

Let’s assume that your eBook has been written, either by you or someone else, the next step is to add monetized links to your eBook. At key points in your book, add links to affiliate offers or other sites where you can earn cash from visitors who click them from your eBook. This could be links to eBay searches, links to complimentary Clickbank products, Commission Junction products and so forth. It could even be a link to another product of yours. The nice thing about this is that it allows you to lower the cost of the eBook or even give it away and you’ll still make money.

I prefer the idea of using a PHP redirect on these links. This gives you a lot of flexibility to change offers after the book is published.

I’ve also been experimenting with having a link to an up-sell page that has a ’second chance’ for the one time offer as well as other promotions. This is something new so I’m not sure how well it will work yet but the idea is to try things out to see what works and what doesn’t.

Now that the eBook is ready to sell, you’ll need to create and setup your sales copy page. This is something you can outsource or do-it-yourself and you should know where to best use your talents and time.

After this, it’s just your usual promotional methods with link building and so forth to attract targeted, ready-to-buy, organic search traffic.