If you’re searching for side hustle business ideas with an
element of passive income attached to it, I can tell you that learning how to
write an ebook is the best way to get started. There are so many ways to make
money online from writing an ebook and distributing it globally or locally as
the case may be.
In this blog post, I’ll lay everything bare for you to hit
the ground running if you’re determined to start writing ebooks for money. As a
matter of fact, there are creative ways to make passive income online with your
ebook writing skill. I’ve been writing and selling ebooks online for decades now
and, at a time, I thought the rising popularity of video marketing will obscure
electronic books on sale. Hey, I was damn wrong!
A lot of readers out there still prefer electronic books to
videos for personal reasons plus the cost of data involved in downloading
videos especially in most developing countries of the world. But what you’ve to
take home from here is that ebook marketing
and consumption is not fading away any time soon.
So, if you learn how to write an ebook and make money from
it, you’ve learned one of the best digital skills of all times. I’ll break down
the ebook writing process for you which you can take to the bank if you’re not
lazy to write your first ebook for sale sooner rather than later.
As a first ebook author and going forward, there are so many
benefits that will accrue to you if you can write an ebook to sell for profit, or
give away for free online marketing, or to demonstrate your expertise or
thought leadership on a subject matter or simply use it to build an email list
of subscribers in your target niche market.
My tried and tested steps of writing an ebook successfully
and taking it to the marketplace are:
- Choose a niche market or target audience to serve
- Research your target audience’s pain points that need
urgent solutions
- Choose an overarching and in-demand topic to write about
- Create an ebook outline to guide you while writing
- Write the ebook
- Proofread and edit the ebook
- Format the ebook
- Write the sales letter to promote your ebook
- Price your ebook
- Set up sales page and download page and other essential web
pages
- Promote your ebook
- Set up email marketing software, affiliate program or joint
venture (JV)
- Track and analyze your traffic metrics
- Make money selling ebooks
- Scale, rinse and repeat in other niches
First, you can write an ebook and sell it online from your
own website or simply go to any third-party websites such as Amazon KDP (Kindle
Direct Publishing) where you can upload your ebook on the go and sell to an
already existing market. There are benefits attached to any of the methods which
you decide to make use of over the other.
But if you understand the process to a Tee, you can do both
and be in more profits. If you ask me, creating and selling digital products is
a game changer for any entrepreneur who wants to learn how to make passive
income online, month in and month out.
Now, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of writing and selling
ebooks online. Frankly speaking, ebook authoring is not rocket science; anybody
can learn how to write an ebook and make money online as you’ll discover
shortly.
Step #1:
Choose a Niche Market or Target Audience to Serve
In writing an ebook, you cannot
be everything to everybody. No! You want to be recognized as a specialist or
expert on a subject matter and not a generalist. A generalist is like a rolling
stone that gathers no moss. The only way your target audience will take you
seriously in your ebook marketing campaigns is when you’re perceived as an expert
in your specific field.
So, your starting point is to
choose a niche market where you sincerely believe you know and have a lot of
information you can teach and share with your potential readers. This is why
niching down is very important for every successful online business owner.
For instance, if you know much
about money matters and budgeting, you can write an ebook on personal finance and focus on that niche. You can
even dig deeper if you think there is a unique angle or knowledge where you can
have an edge and be able to stand out from the crowd.
There are many niches out there
that you can choose from if you want to write your first ebook. From off the
top of my head, I can talk about niches such as make money on the internet, parenting,
relationship and marriage, green energy, business, investments, travelling and
tour, self-help and personal development, weight loss and fitness, health and
wellness, beauty and lifestyle, diet and exercise, career and professional
development, just to name a few.
What you’ll be concerned about is
to evaluate your interest vis-à-vis profitability of your target market. A good
intersection is where your potential profits will be able to cover your
expenses and then some to reward you for your time, energy and efforts invested
in the ebook business without compromising quality.
Because you’ll be selling downloadable
digital product, you’re almost guaranteed 95 to 98 percent profit for every
ebook sold. The best part is that you’ll take more profit if you sell ebooks
from your own website by setting up a simple payment gateway like PayPal.com to
receive money from buyers.
Creating PayPal payment button is
the easiest way to start selling ebooks on the internet.
However, choosing a niche market for
your ebook writing business, you’ve to consider these criteria:
- Have above average expert
knowledge on the topic or you’re willing to learn and research.
- Make sure there is enough demand
for the topic that you want to write about.
- Discover if your potential leads
or prospects have disposable income to spend or willing to buy your digital
product.
- Create a mailing list, if
possible, to test the waters and gauge the response or outcome of your target
audience.
- Start a blog in your target
market, create content related to your intended ebook and follow the comments
section to measure the interest of your readers.
Even if the demand for an ebook
will not be profitable to you, creating a blog in that niche can help you to make
money online through other blog monetization channels such as Google AdSense,
sponsored posts, and so on.
Step
#2: Research Your Target Audience’s Pain Points that Need Urgent Solutions
If you find a market to serve,
the next step is to research their pain points that need urgent solutions. This
is where market research is vital to understanding the solution your target
audience will take a bite on, embrace and pay for.
I’m not talking about
run-of-the-mill solutions which are basically generic and can be found for free
online. No! You want to professionally present answers to burning questions, proffer
specific solution to desperate problems or provide detailed information or
guide on a subject or topic.
If you’ve been on the World Wide
Web for any length of time, you’ll agree with me that most information
marketing and digital products for sale are regurgitated pieces without adding any
tangible value to people’s lives. Your goal is to be a problem solver or
solution provider by unleashing quality information in the ebook to add value
to people’s lives.
You cannot discover problems which
people are facing by guess work. You’ve to hear from the horse’s mouth by
asking and listening to them. And you can do this through niche forums
membership, questions and answers sites, surveys, questionnaires, email list,
blogging, making use of keyword research tools, and having conversations via
social media channels.
You can really get creative with
this. Make the efforts to find out where your target audience congregate or
hang out and be part of them. Listen to their challenges, rantings and the
solutions they have subscribed to in the past and didn’t work exactly as they
expected. You may not re-invent the wheel per se but you can look out for
content gaps to fill up and make money with your ebook.
Information marketing is big
business and a huge industry. You’ve to find a unique angle to attack it from
and make money online. Every day, people are frantically searching for
information on the World Wide Web to achieve specific and desired results and
you can be the gateway (for a fee of course) to make it happen!
It’s the problems which you’ve
discovered from this step that will form the foundation of choosing an
overarching topic to write about in the next step of this ebook writing course.
Step
#3: Choose an Overarching and In-demand Topic to Write About
The topic you choose to write
about should obviously have subtopics cluster that will address the problems of
your target audience with your ebook solution. For example, if we look at
personal finance again, you’ll have subtopics such as earning income, students’
debt, budgeting, savings, investing, and so on.
You can decide to create an ebook
on how to start side hustles to pay off student loans in record time. As a
matter of fact, I’m making serious preparations to start a personal finance blog to teach and help my
readers on how to build wealth and prosper in this age of technology. It’s
going to be a no-brainer blog on building wealth on a budget based on my
experience, education and training as an accountant and entrepreneur.
If you create a blog and start
building an email list of subscribers, it will be easy for you to send out
questionnaires and conduct online surveys to elicit information from your
followers about what they want to learn from you. You can sign up for my
business newsletter and download my free ebook on how to start a blog and make
money from this link.
As soon as you’ve a topic to make
an ebook, you can use keyword research tools to double check the average
monthly search volume of the major keyword in the niche. This is to further
confirm if there is enough demand beyond your circle of followers or tribe.
You’ve to conduct your due
diligence to evaluate and access the competition as well. Look out for other
merchants, vendors and authors who are actively promoting similar products on
the same topic. This will help you to discover if you’re missing out any
relevant information which should be included in the electronic book.
At several instances, I do
subscribe to email newsletters of these book promoters to learn about
complementary bonuses that they are also adding to the ebook for sale. As an
ebook author or writer, you must not leave any stone unturned if your goal is
to sell high volume of your book in the foreseeable future.
Your primary target is to get positive
book reviews at the beginning which you can wield as testimonials and social proof
to sell more of it.
Step
#4: Create an Ebook Outline to Guide You While Writing
Before now, I guess you’ve been
taking down notes of every conceivable ebook idea or subtopic to incorporate in
your writing project. Creating an ebook outline will guide you while writing
your piece without missing out on essential points which will make the ebook
worthwhile for your potential buyers.
I always take the time to create
an ebook outline because it may eventually double as my table of contents.
Also, while writing the sales letter, I’ll use the detailed outline to create
bullet points of the benefits derivable from purchasing my ebook.
Some years back, I wrote an electronic
book on how to write an ebook and make money. One of the subtopics I discussed
was how to secure your ebook on your web hosting servers from unauthorized
downloads so that you can sell more of it.
Although I retired the book after
some years of selling it, I had a lot of sales because I made sure every
information I wanted to write about and include in the ebook were in the
outline. It made it easy for me to write a compelling sales letter that was all-encompassing
and I did not have refunds.
Every chapter will focus on an
integral topic with subtopics associated with it. A good outline helps to
organize and guide your thoughts while writing an ebook. However, some authors
can prefer to use mind map tool to achieve the same goal as it’s visually
appealing to follow through.
Step
#5: Write the Ebook
Writing an ebook is where the
bulk of the work is. If you’re lazy to the bone, you may not be able to complete
your first ebook writing project in a year or so. But always bear it in mind
that the relevance and quality of your book is paramount to your target
audience.
The common saying that the taste
of the pudding is in the eating comes to mind here. You want to sell an ebook
on a topic where you’ll get rave reviews from customers who are satisfied with
their purchases. This is why expertise on the subject matter is important as well
as your internet research skills to find vital information to include in your
work.
While creating your ebook outline
is the planning stage, writing the ebook is the execution phase. In other
words, your book outline is the skeleton, and the actual writing is the task to
flesh up the skeleton and make it visible and tangible in the marketplace.
First, you’ve to create a
deadline to finish writing your electronic book and make sure you follow
through. Otherwise, you may continue to procrastinate endlessly without any
result. As much as you can, don’t bother about editing and proofreading at this
stage. Your ebook draft is not a finished product yet.
There will be a time to cross
your t’s and dot your i’s. You can call this the “brain dump” stage.
Your main concern is to write all
the ideas in your head on paper or computer which is the crux of the matter. So,
re-organizing your thoughts for coherence and cohesion will come later.
You’ve to weave in stories,
facts, figures, statistics, quotes and references where necessary to buttress
your credibility and authenticity on every information you’re sharing. You
should not forget that writing an ebook is the building stage while editing is
the decorating phase. Your goal is to complete the writing work as soon as
possible and start decorating and formatting it into the final package that
will be ready for the market.
If you’re determined to take this
as your main side hustle business, you’ll soon discover that learning and
mastering how to write an ebook and make money is a piece of cake. It’s all
about what you know or willing to research and be willing and able to pass on
the information to your intended audience succinctly.
This is why your writing style,
tone and lexicon of your ebook should resonate with your target audience. It
helps to clear the fog! But you’ve to be conversational and friendly in your
writing of course.
Step
#6: Edit and Proofread the Ebook
At this point, you’ve done 70
percent of the writing work. This is the time to start putting finishing
touches to your digital product package. How well you edit and proofread your
ebook will determine the high perceived value people will attach to it.
Obviously, it’s expensive to hire
a copyeditor but there are other ways to go around it. You can engage your
close family and friends to do it for you. If you have an eye for details, you
can edit and proofread the ebook yourself. The only thing is to leave it for 2
to 3 days after writing an ebook before you start editing it.
Allowing some days to elapse
before editing and proofreading a book will give you a set of fresh eyes and
mind to quickly spot grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, sentence structure,
and so on.
Step
#7: Format the Ebook
At this level, you’ve an ebook to
sell but you’ve to make it presentable and attractive. Formatting and designing
your ebook start from the ebook title and cover image. If you don’t know how to
make an ebook cover with free design tools like Canva, you can hire a
freelancer to do it for you for a fee.
Aligning the chapters, pages and
images of your ebook so that it will be good and easy to read is what matters.
I started using OpenOffice.org writing software
which is free open source and it has been awesome. I only invest few dollars to
create an ecover to paste on the front page of the ebook and I’m done. I focus
more on the meat (i.e. content) of the book that I want to write.
Step
#8: Write the Sales Letter to Promote Your Ebook
Now that your ebook is ready to
launch, what is the next step? You’ve to write a sales letter to promote your
ebook. A sales or landing page is where the sales copy will be uploaded if
you’re selling the ebook from your website.
Even if you’re not selling from
your own website, it’s important you register a domain name and buy web hosting
to start a blog targeting your niche. Blogging is one of the best digital
marketing strategies you can deploy to promote your ebook, digital products and
services on the internet.
Getting a domain name and website
hosting is cheap and affordable. HostGator web hosting is highly reliable, and
I’ll gladly recommend them for your needs. I use HostGator web hosting company
to host majority of my blogs and websites. Click here to sign up with HostGator and check out the hosting plans that fits
your budget and requirements.
The content of your sales letter
includes several points which I’ll list here:
- A compelling or catchy headline.
- Sub headline reinforcing the
benefit stated in the main headline.
- Introduction of your ebook as
solution to identified problems.
- Statement of the problems which
you’ve an answer or solution to.
- Bullet points of the benefits of
buying your ebook.
- Call to action (CTA) directing
your readers where to buy it i.e. the order page.
- Testimonials and social proof,
if any, to encourage visitors to open their wallets now.
- Money back guarantee to remove
fear and doubt from your leads and prospects.
You can look at your competitors’
sales letters to pick their brains. Your landing page can make or mar your
sales funnel. So, you must spend time to write a good sales copy to sell your
ebook. In my next blog post on how to write an ebook and make money, I’ll
discuss the remaining steps to help you get started in earnest.
