The Smart Passive Income Blog » ebooks

How to REALLY Profit From Your Blog

Pat — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:53:13 +0000

Last week, a good friend of mine asked me out to lunch. He said he was dying to discuss a potential internet business idea and wanted my honest opinion. Naturally, I accepted.

I was excited, not only because we were having sushi, but because I love helping people, especially those who I can tell have that drive and passion to succeed. Many people ask me about what I do online, but only a handful actually ask me how to setup an LLC or use Google Optimizer to increase conversion rates.

At lunch, after some catching up and small chit-chat, I finally asked him, “So what’s this business idea of yours?”

Here’s the rest of our conversation:

Friend: I want to start a blog about X.

(X is “code” for his niche of interest)

Me: Sweet. Go on…

Friend: I want to start a blog about X because I’m already considered an expert at it. People come to me for advice all of the time, it’s something I’m totally passionate about, and I can see myself doing this full-time for years down the road.

Me: Nice. Those are all important things to consider when choosing to decide what niche you want to get into.

Friend: Right? So what do you think? Do you think it can work?

Me: So you want to start a blog?

Friend: Yeah. Why, what’s wrong with that?

Me: Nothing is wrong with starting a blog, but what’s the business? How will you make money?

Friend: Well, I thought the blog was the business. Don’t you have blogs that you make money from? I could advertise on it. Then maybe I could start other websites and make money from those too from advertising. How about that?

Me: You can make money from advertising – yes, but think about it. When you advertise, you’re the middle man. Would you rather be the middle man, or would you rather be the man?

Friend: [head nod]

Me: Okay then. So, my question to you is this: after you start this blog, how will you make money? How will this blog turn into a business?

Friend: Um…

Me: What comes next? What comes after the blog?

We actually ended up talking for a couple more hours, mostly about how one can use a blog as a launching pad for a business. I’m happy to share what we talked about with you.

Turning a Blog into a Business

If you’re at all familiar with how I got to this point in life, you know that when I started my exam prep blog, I had no intention of making money from it whatsoever. It was only after I got laid off that I eventually started to monetize it and mold it into a real internet business.

And even then, I started monetizing it by utilizing Google Adsense, which eventually led to selling advertising space on my blog. At this point, could you call my blog a business?

Maybe.

I was directly dealing with third-party companies to fill those advertising spots. I was, in fact, “conducting business” – but I wasn’t seeing the kind of income I really wanted (and needed) at the time. Not even close.

It was only after following the example of some of my favorite bloggers (like Darren and Yaro), and some excellent advice from the Internet Business Mastery Academy that I knew I had to do something more than just blog to make some real profits. Soon after, I formed my LLC and leveraged the authority and trust I had earned on my blog to launch a profitable internet business.

It’s my belief that anyone with a blog, passion, and a good work ethic can do the same thing.

So, as my friend and I sat there eating our spicy tuna rolls, we discussed how we could possibly take his idea of “just a blog”, and turn it into some kind of profitable business. Here’s what we came up with:

Write an eBook

This is the most logical step for many of us “just bloggers” out there. We already write on a blog, so it’s not all that difficult for us to write an eBook too.

In many cases, we can simply reformat what we’ve already written on the blog and turn that into an eBook. Even though our readers could get most of the same information for free, if you’ve established yourself an an authority, people will gladly pay you for a neatly organized and formatted eBook.

Here are some other examples of bloggers utilizing an eBook in their business repertoire:

If you’re interested in writing an eBook, please check out my comprehensive free eBook guide.

Oh, and don’t forget about the audio guides and videos you could add to your product line.

Write a Book Book

Maybe you’re not an eBook kind of person, and that’s okay. Many bloggers use their blog as a stepping stone to get an actual printed book published.

This is something I would love to do someday. I would love to take my son into Barnes & Nobles or Borders, point to a book on the shelf and say, “Look son! I wrote this book.”

Someday.

Anyways, it takes a lot longer to build your reputation as a blogger to have the ability to write and publish an actual printed book (not including those who self-publish via sites like LuLu.com), but doing so can definitely skyrocket ones authority in a niche and income potential as well.

Here are some examples of bloggers who have gone to the next level and have published an actual printed book:

Ramit Sethi’s book I Will Teach You to Be Rich, from IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com.
Darren Rowse’s book Problogger: Secrets For Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, from ProBlogger.net
Leo Babauta’s book The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limited Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life, from ZenHabits.net
J.D. Roth’s book Your Money: The Missing Manual, from GetRichSlowly.com (Feb. 18th)

All of these guys were at one point “just bloggers”, and now they’re authors (or in J.D.’s case, a soon to be author – congrats man!).

Why can’t we do the same?

Start a Membership Website

A membership website is probably the most attractive business model for most bloggers who don’t want to be “just bloggers” anymore. Usually, these membership websites have either premium content or exclusive content that cannot be found on the blog and require a recurring payment to access. Here’s what really makes membership websites attractive:

Let’s say we set up our own membership website and charge a $20 monthly fee (which is relatively low, but a nice round number I can use to prove my point).

In the first month, we sell 50 memberships. That’s $1000.

In the second month, we sell another 50 memberships. That’s $1000, plus another $1000 from the 50 members from the first month. That’s $2000 total in the second month.

In the third month, we sell 100 new memberships. Now we have 200 total members, which is $4000. And so on and so forth…

Obviously, people drop out and don’t stay members forever, but still – profits can add up quickly. Setup your membership site once, and just reap the benefits month after month.

Sweet.

Here are some examples of membership websites with premium content:

Will Hamilton’s Tennis Membership Site (post from Entrepreneurs-Journey.com)
Cici and Shaun from LearningIndonesian.com
Darren’s Problogger Community
Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips

Create and Sell Courses

Somewhat related to membership websites, you can create a full line of courses to help teach whatever it is you want to teach. The difference between a membership site and selling courses, is that the courses don’t necessarily have to be something that is only accessible online. Think DVD packages and audio CDs.

Here’s a great example from a site that helps people learn how to play the guitar:

John’s Online Guitar Lessons at LearningGuitarNow.com

Become a Consultant / Start a Service

Many bloggers use their leverage in the blogosphere to actually launch their own consulting or service businesses that are related to their niche. Think about the type of businesses that a successful graphic artist and blogger could create. Or how about a social media expert, or an interior designer?

Yes, these kinds of businesses aren’t as “passive” because they require your direct services (at first), but it’s definitely a viable way to start earning a profit as a result of who you become on your blog.

Here are some examples:

Maren Kate from Twitterpreneur.com (A Twitter PR Firm)
Sergio from SOSFactory.com (Mascot, Logo and Web Designer)

Sell Something You Actually Make

This wasn’t an option for my buddy, but it might be for a lot of other bloggers. Maybe you knit really awesome sweaters, or build record breaking remote control cars. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t be able to develop a following and begin to sell your creations online.

What about food? (Although – I’m sure there are some strict regulations for selling any kind of food online. Better check on that before you sell your Grandma’s cookies online.)

For you software developers and coders out there, maybe you’ve created some type of awesome software or program that does something we all wish we had the ability to do.

How about a WordPress theme?

Something Innovative That’s Never Been Done Before

When it comes to innovation and blogs, the first thing that comes to mind are Jason and Evan from iwearyourshirt.com. If you haven’t heard of them, they basically get paid to wear company t-shirts. That’s it.

Maybe you’d call it a flash in the pan, or a gimmick, but these guys are making bank. They are pretty much sold out for the year 2010 already. (Today’s date, by the way, is January 20th, 2010…for all of you future readers out there.)

Here’s their “buy your spot” page, where you can see the few spots that are left, which are going between $516 to $538 a day.

Props to Jason and Evan for their success, seriously.

After Our Lunch

At the end of our lunch, my buddy thanked me and said:

Friend: I have a lot of options.

Me: Yep! But keep that enthusiasm you have with your blog, because it can take you places.

Friend: I will. But what should I do after the blog. I mean, what’s my next step? An eBook, like you?

Me: Maybe, but I wouldn’t worry about that right now. If you go into building your blog knowing that you’re going to launch an eBook on such and such date, or start a membership website right away, you’re going to fail. Work on your blog, build it naturally with the primary purpose of helping people. If you do that, you’ll gain authority and by then you’ll know what you should do next. Keep everything we talked about in mind so you’re ready when that happens.

Friend: Cool, thanks Pat.

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How to REALLY Profit From Your Blog

The Smart Passive Income Blog Makeover and eBook!

Pat — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:21:54 +0000

Well – it’s finally here! The *NEW* Smart Passive Income Blog!

I’m happy to begin the new year with a fresh and clean look to the blog. Less clutter, more room in the main content area, and a touched up logo, along with some new features that I’ll quickly point out for you:

New Archive: Before, the archive was basically a huge list of every single post I’ve done, and that’s it. Now, it’s more organized and divided into dates, categories and tags, so you can easily navigate through my older but still useful content.
New Podcasts Section: Here, you’ll get a list of all of the podcasts episodes I’ve recorded. There aren’t any there yet, but I do have a few recorded already. I’d like to get a few more done before I go live on iTunes. I can’t wait!
New “How-To Videos”: This is an awesome gallery (thanks to the TubePress plugin), that compiles all of the YouTube how-to videos I’ve done. Now, you don’t need to go to YouTube to watch the videos that you need to get stuff done.
The “Did You Know” Bar: If you look below the navigation menu, there’s a little “Did You Know” section where I’ll just put in a small little fact about me (or whatever) every couple of days. Just thought this might add a little bit of fun to the blog
Smaller Subscriber Area: If you watched my video that explained what I was going to change in the new redesign, I pointed out how my old subscriber area was taking up way too much space. I think I was taking up a 300×400 pixel chunk of real estate for what I can do in that little bar you see at the top.
Tabbed Area: On the right hand side, below the Opt-In Box for the eBook (which I’ll talk more about in a sec), I’ve organized the hottest posts (the posts that have had the most views in the last week), the most popular posts (the posts with the most comments), and the top commenters (names and links to those who have commented the most each month). Before, all of this information was crowding the left hand side of my blog, but now, it’s compact and neatly organized.

There are a few other improvements that I made that aren’t as significant as the ones I mentioned above, so I’ll leave you to come across them as you look around.

My New eBook Guide!

As most of you know, I’ve been working on my eBook guide for the last couple of months. I’m proud to say that it’s finished, and it rocks! I’ve actually never spent so much time on any eBook I’ve ever written, so I’m really happy that I can give you this hardcore, quality eBook for free. I’ve already gotten some really nice comments about it already, since it actually went up yesterday. I look forward to hearing what you think too.

Trying to find a name for it gave me a major headache, but thanks to all of you, I was able to come up with something that I think fits perfectly with this blog. It’s called eBooks the $mart Way – A Complete Guide to Publishing, Marketing, and Automating a Killer eBook. You can see a 3D representation of it here.

Thank you all for your eBook title suggestions. I would especially like to thank Ms. Freeman for her idea to use “$mart”, which matches my logo and has become sort of the image of my “brand”, so that works perfectly. I’d also like to thank Dominique Goh, for her suggestion of the word “Killer”, which I really liked. And lastly, I’d like to thank Henri for helping me realize that I had most of the tagline figured out already. The three people that I just mentioned will receive a free copy of the new 4-Hour Work Week. I will email you within the next day or two to get your info.

If you’d like to get your free copy of my ebook guide, and also get exclusive online business and blogging tips in my weekly newsletter (with stuff you can’t find on the blog), please fill out the form in the sidebar at the top of this site or directly below.

Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy! Here’s to an awesome year!

The Triple Threat of Informational Products You Can Easily Create

Pat — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:57:24 +0000

It doesn’t matter what industry or niche you’re in – different people prefer different ways of learning. If you can cater to each of these types of people, you will not only expand your customer base to those who wouldn’t normally purchase from you, but you’ll give those who would of purchased from you anyways the tempting option to send a little more cash your way.

There are three basic methods to learn new material: reading, listening, and watching. Keep in mind that particular order. While doing business online, we can cater to those who prefer each of these methods by creating eBooks, audio products, and video, respectively.

Reading via eBooks

Most internet marketers and entrepreneurs start out with an eBook as a product to sell. Why?

Creating an eBook is relatively easy, it’s cheap, and it can be started today. All you need is a Word Processing program, and you’re well on your way to a finished product you can sell online. There is no wonder why my How to Create an eBook series page is one of the most visited pages on this blog.
Anyone with a computer can read an eBook. Reading is the most common form of learning new information. It’s what we’ve done since we started school.

An eBook is great, but why stop there?

Listening via Audio

If you have an eBook, why not create some audio to go along with it?

Today, more and more people are learning “on-the-go”. In their cars, waiting at the airport, at the gym, on a walk – audio is perfect for these kinds of people. I remember when I used to take the train from San Diego to Irvine every day (I don’t miss it), I’d prepare my iPod with various podcasts to listen to on my commute. One was actually the Internet Business Mastery Podcast, which ended up being the real reason why I’m where I’m at today with my online business. I’d also listen to Fantasy Football podcasts, and Dave Ramsey’s financial podcast too.

Anyways, the creation of an audio product could not be easier – especially after already having an eBook. Your eBook is your script. You can record the audio yourself, but I recommend hiring a professional voice talent to do it for you. It will cost a little bit of money (maybe some money you’ve earned with your eBook already), but it will save you time and the quality will be superb.

To give you an idea, the creation of my audio guide helped me go from an average of $200/day, to nearly $600 (and often more) a DAY!

But wait. Let’s not stop there…

Watching via Video

So we’ve got the eBook, and now the audio – why not top it off with video too? This will cater to those visual learners who are more used to learning in a classroom/lecture hall type setting.

The video can simply be a slideshow presentation, or even just a person speaking on screen. I’d recommend taking advantage of the video format by adding pictures and examples (if appropriate for your niche), which can’t be done in an audio format.

Many people don’t use video because they think it will be tough to create, or it just won’t be useful. Well – you have an eBook already which can be formatted into a slideshow presentation, and you have your audio which can be used on top of the slideshow presentation…it’s practically made already!

Furthermore, video is seen by consumers as a “higher-end” product, so you’ll be able to use that to your advantage as well when converting sales.

The Triple Threat

With an eBook, an audio and a video product, you can easily cater to all types of people and their learning preferences. But again – it doesn’t stop there. (This is where it really get’s exciting…)

You can easily get more from your customers by combining your products and offering deals and discounts! There are a million different possibilities and combination of offers you can do with three different products, but here is one example:

Let’s say you sell your eBook at $25, your audio at $35, and the video for $50 (remember…high-end!) – separately. Combined, that’s $110.00. You could offer something like the eBook and Audio both for $50.00, which is a nice $10.00 savings. You could offer the eBook and video both for $60.00, which is a nice $15.00 savings – or, you could offer all three items, the eBook, Audio, and Video for a total of $85.00 – a substantial $25.00 savings! You’ll have people spending $85.00 who would of been happy with one item separately.

They’ll be happy, you’ll be happy, and your bank account will be happy too.

(p.s. currently I have an eBook and audio guide, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I am working on that third element – the video, as we speak)

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 10 – Affiliate Programs

Pat — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 22:23:04 +0000

This is the last post in my “How to Publish an Ebook Series”. I kind of took it a step further and instead of just talking about publishing, I threw in some selling and marketing techniques too. After today’s talk about affiliate programs, you should have the foundation and knowledge to create, sell and market your own eBook and start earning some passive income!

In regards to writing an eBook, I’m pretty sure I can guess what’s going through your head right now. It’s one of two things:

You want to write an eBook, but you don’t know what to write about (or you don’t think you’re qualified to write an eBook).
You want to write an eBook, but you don’t have the time.

Or maybe, it’s both. Regardless, these thoughts are barriers that must be crossed in order to succeed online. In the near future, I will go over some helpful tips and hints about what you could write about, and also how to create more time for yourself (by finding time and being more efficient too). For now, don’t let those thoughts stop you from achieving your dreams, or at least earning a little extra cash on the side.

Let’s move on…

Recap

Your Own “Sales Force”

I’ve talked about how cool it is to sell other people’s products and do some affiliate marketing in the past. You don’t have to create a product, you don’t have to deal with customers, and the only transaction that really happens is when you get paid, all because someone clicked on a link you provided and bought a product. Sweet.

This is the mindset you should have when it comes to selling your own products online. You have to understand how OTHER people will want to sell your item because of what I just described. You want more customers – and they want easy money. Everybody’s a winner! Your affiliate program is your way of creating your own “sales force” that is ready to work the front lines for you.

A Commission

Yes, in order to build your “Sales Force”, you’re going to have to offer a commission on your product. It’s up to you to determine how much you’d like to offer your affiliates, but how much you offer will impact your sales. Don’t be too shabby. Here’s why:

A Low Commission

If you set your commission to say, 15 to 20 percent the product price, for an eBook that’s usually not too much cash ($5.00 on a $30.00 book) and won’t provide much incentive for any of your sales force to sell your eBook. You might not even get much of a sales force to begin with, because a lot of the reason people join an affiliate program for a specific product is because of the commission.

A Higher Commission

A higher commission means a few (awesome) things. One, you’ll have a greater sales force, and two, they’ll do a better job of promoting your product. It’s pretty standard to actually see a 50% commission for eBooks nowadays.

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Offering a Higher Commission

You might be thinking, “Hey Pat, I understand what you mean about the benefits of a higher commission, but wouldn’t I be losing more money than I could have made if I sold those eBooks to those customer’s myself?!”

My quick answer is: Yes.

But, that’s not really the point of affiliate marketing. If you are thinking this way, you’re probably thinking you’re just giving money away and helping your affiliate team more than yourself. This is wrong.

I like to call your affiliate team a “Sales Force” for a reason. They are out there finding customers that you wouldn’t of been able to find on your own.

An Example Sales Force (with Numbers, yay!)

You have an eBook, which sells for $30.00. You offer a $15.00 commission.

On your own, you sell about 8 books a day. That’s $240.00…not bad at all. Enter your Sales Force.

Let’s say you have just 2 people on your “team”. Person 1 owns a blog that has about 3000 subscribers. Person 2 has an email list from his website that has 1000 people on it.

Person 1 writes an entire post, a review perhaps, about your eBook and includes a link to your website. On that day, maybe 300 people click on the link, and only 20 people actually purchase your eBook. Looking at the numbers, that’s $600.00 in sales, half of which goes to Person 1. That’s still an extra $300.00 for you from customers you probably wouldn’t of reached without Person 1′s help (for the most part). And that’s just from that one day. Person 1 also includes a link in his sidebar so anyone at anytime who reads his blog can click over to your eBook and you’d get $15.00. It’s like putting an ad on his blog for free.

Person 2 sends out a newsletter to her email list and includes a link to your eBook. Let’s say she also produced 20 sales for you, which equates in an extra $300.00 in your pocket. You probably wouldn’t of been able to reach those customers either without her help, and even if you able to reach them, you might not of completed a sale. The fact that it’s a recommendation coming from Person 2, who they trust as we can tell since they signed up for her newsletter, makes your product more sellable to those people.

This is the power of having an affiliate program. From just two people on your sales force, you earned an extra $600.00 in just one day. Plus, you’ll have continued support since they’ll keep promoting your eBook. Sweet.

Now imagine having a sales team of 10 people. How about 100 people! And now imagine how many of those people have their own blogs, newsletters, twitter accounts, facebook friends, etc.

Now for the best part. After you sell to all of these customers you weren’t able to reach on your own, you’ll then have their contact information. When you sell future products…you’re golden (then you can have an affiliate program for those products too).

Basically How it Works

If you have E-junkie, or you use ClickBank to sell your eBook, there’s already an affiliate program already built in. There are other programs out there that are just for building an affiliate program and advertising your product (some of which do a really good job of finding people to promote your product for you, like marketleverage.com or commission junction - but they may require a little bit more work to get accepted and require additional fees). So for my examples, I’ll just use e-junkie for now, but it all works the same way.

So you sell a book through E-Junkie. When you setup your affiliate program, you’ll be given a link. This link is for those people who you want to be on your “Sales Force”.

You can hand this link out if you’d like, to people you know will help. Or, you can even put it on your website so anyone who wants can become a part of your team. Another great way to sell more eBooks is to include this link in your actual product, so people who buy your book can help sell it too! (It’s best to include a separate

Anyways, this link is how they sign up for your program. Once they sign up, they’ll be given a link that is unique to their ID, and whenever anyone clicks on that link (with their unique ID in it), they’ll be given credit for the purchase.

At the end of each month, you’ll usually be given a report with your affiliate sales, with email addresses (or street addresses) of each person on your force, and how much you owe them. There’s a bit of trust involved here, and I would make sure you pay them the amount they deserve as soon as you as able to. They will be happy, and work even harder for you the next month.

Thank You!

I’d just like to thank everyone again for sticking with me and reading my eBook series. I know it’s been a long one (almost an entire month posting every other day), but I feel it will be helpful for anyone who wants to create an eBook, which is a great method to start your online presence.

I will be turning this series into a free e-Book and giving it away for free sometime in the near future, so look out for that.

I wish you all the best of luck, and feel free to contact me if you ever have any questions.

Thanks!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 9 – Other Marketing Techniques

Pat — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:57:13 +0000

Ok, so you can do all of the free marketing techniques you want – sometimes you’ll still feel the need to fork over a little bit of cash to reach more customers. Today, I’ll summarize some common services and programs you can use to advertise and market your eBook.

Recap

Google AdWords

Most of you are probably familiar with Google AdSense, the program that allows you to put content generated ads on your website for click-through earnings. However, I’m sure not all of you are familiar with Google AdWords, which is the other end of the advertising equation.

With AdWords, you pay to have ads that you create either show up when people type in certain keywords in Google, or on related websites (or both). The nice thing about this type of advertising is that you don’t pay until people click on your ad and visit your website (PPC advertising).

The hard part is making sure you’re targeting the right customers, so that when they do click onto your website, they are more likely to buy your eBook.

Now, there are a billion different resources out there about how to optimize your earnings with Google AdWords, and honestly I’m not an expert – and even if I was it would take about 20 different posts to go over everything (it’s easy to use, but tough to master…it’s really become a science). So in short, I won’t go over all of the details. I will tell you, however, about a few key highlights that you should understand.

The most important parts are your ad copy (what you say in your ad), and the keywords or websites you choose to show your ad on. You might think that you should try to show your ad to as many people as possible, but that’s not what you want to do. You might get a lot of people coming to your website, but you’ll get people who don’t want/need your eBook, and you’ll have wasted their time and your money.

You want to show your ad to as many people as possible who are most likely to buy your product. This is done through filtering by your keyword choices, what you say in your ad, and you can even do it geographically within AdWords as well.

I’ve used AdWords for a few affiliate marketing campaigns (not selling my own products, but selling other people’s products for a commission), and I have to tell you, you can lose money real fast if you don’t know what you’re doing. Here are some good starting points if you’re interested in Google AdWords:

Google AdWords Homepage
AdWords for Dummies (links to Amazon)
AdWords Blog – Good Tips and Optimization Tricks

Just so you know, a click can cost you anywhere between $0.02 per click, and $5.00 a click (and probably more). A lot of it depends on they keywords you choose and how competitive they are.

Facebook

Facebook is pretty awesome. Not only because I can stalk follow my friends and know exactly what they’re up to, but because there are millions of people that you can easily reach to promote your eBook.

If you have a facebook account, you can start advertising. All you need to do is find the “ads and pages” or “ad manager” facebook application, and you’re ready to go.

The best part is, you can get highly targeted traffic that fills the profile of exactly who you want to sell your eBook to. Again, this helps with the “weeding” process so you don’t waste money on clicks that don’t generate profit.

Here is a screenshot of how you can easily target whoever you want:

It’s pretty cool because you can see how many people your ad could possibly be shown to.

For me, when I use Facebook to sell my study guide for the LEED exam (which I do every once and a while), I would choose the following target:

Location: United States (because that’s where the exam is taken)
Age: 21 to 55 (because those are the ages of people who are most likely to take the exam)
Education: College Grad (because most test takers are engineers or architects who are college grads)
etc.

The ads that I create would only be shown to these type of people.

If I wanted to be fancy, I could create a bunch of different ads for specific locations within the United States. My ad copy (the text on my ad) would mention the location and that could draw in more clicks, since it will seem more personalized.

So, if you were writing an eBook that was specifically for new mothers, you could specify females ages 25 to 40, engaged or married, and you’ve have the right audience to see your specific ad.

What do the facebook ads look like? They usually come with a small picture and a bit of text underneath, which are shown to your targeted audience in their sidebar:

The thing is, there are specific rules and guidelines that must be followed, or else your ads will be denied and you’ll have to try again. They are pretty strict, so when you get your ad manager up and running from the applications menu, please read the terms of service and the rules before you begin.

You can pay anywhere from $0.30 to $3.00 (or more) per click, but you’re getting good traffic here.

Private Advertising on Specific Blogs

I’ve talked about how I sell private advertising spots on my blog at greenexamacademy.com. It’s a great way to earn a little extra side cash for doing almost nothing.

If you’re on the other end and you need to sell something, advertising on a specific blog isn’t a bad idea at all either. Why? Because if you find the right blog, which has the right audience, there’s definitely potential to get some customers.

Payments are made usually on a month to month basis, with discounts for longer term commitments. It depends on the specific terms on the blog that you find that offers advertisement space. Prices could range from $5.00 to $500 per month, or more! The main factor in determining the price is usually the traffic, so you’d most likely be getting what you pay for.

To find a blog you can easily just do a Google search and type in the keywords that your eBook is related to, and also add the word blog to that ans see what comes up. If you find a blog that doesn’t seem to offer advertising spots, and you really think it would be good for you to promote there, feel free to send a friendly email to the webmaster and ask if they would be willing to work with you.

Up Next

These are just a few ways you can pay to advertise your eBook online. I hope it provides you with a good start once you start searching for a specific kind of traffic.

I believe my next post will be the last of the eBook series, and it will be all about affiliate marketing and how to get other people to sell your eBook for you. It’s a powerful, viral technique which can put tons of cash into your pocket. Stay tuned!

Thanks everyone!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 8 – Free Marketing Techniques

Pat — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 07:05:25 +0000

Welcome to the 8th part of the “How to Publish an eBook Series”. It’s been a fun series so far, and it’s pretty cool to tell my story along the way and re-live exactly what I did to get to where I’m at today. The fact that this series is so long should tell you that it does take a lot of hard work and time in order to be successful, but your hard work will pay off.

I have a little something cool planned for The Smart Passive Income Blog in the near future, probably sometime in May. There will be a slight redesign of the website and the addition of a newsletter as well. The newsletter will incorporate the complete eBook series as a free gift for signing up. I’ll go over these things with you in more detail later on as they are being implemented. Then, you’ll be able to not only read about how to incorporate a newsletter into your website, but watch it as it happens on mine too. Sweet.

Today, I’m going to go over some free marketing techniques that you can use as you launch your eBook which will hopefully increase your sales.

Recap

Wow, this is a lot of stuff, but it’s all important in my opinion:

Create a Buzz Before You Launch

Before you actually launch your eBook, it can be a really smart tactic to create some buzz about it beforehand if possible. If you do this correctly, you can have massive sales on your very first day!

I’ve heard of a few people launch eBooks and courses that had such a big buzz, that they earn upwards of $15,000 – $20,000 on their first day! Craziness. This was something I regret not doing during the launch of my eBook, so I’m letting you know now – create buzz!

So, how do you create buzz? Here are some things you can do:

You can talk about your progress on your eBook as you’re writing it on your website or blog
You can have a webpage dedicated to your upcoming eBook which collects people’s email addresses for a newsletter. In your newsletter, you can broadcast to your followers about your eBook and just basically hype it up and be able to let them know when it’s ready for sale.
If you know anybody that also has a related website, have them help you hype up your book too! They’ll want to help you, especially if you offer to sign them up for your affiliate program once it’s ready and you offer a nice cut. I’ll talk about the specifics about affiliate marketing later.
Create YouTube videos about your product which links to your website.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to let people know about your eBook before it’s even finished.

Playing With The Price

As I mentioned in Part 7, it’s really easy to change the price of your eBook. There are a few things you can do with it to help you sell more books:

Promotional Pricing

Whenever you want, you can lower the price of your eBook slightly to help boost sales. You’ll want to make sure people know the price is lower so they’ll feel the need to “get it now” before the price goes up. Here are some examples of when you could do this:

when you first launch your book
any sort of holiday
when a certain deadline is approaching
just because

Y ou want to make sure your customers know you’re holding a special promotion, so you’ll want to update a graphic just for the occasion. Here is a graphic I normally have on my website with a “stamp” on it just for promotional purposes.

Here are some sayings you can use to go along with your promotion:

Special Offer Today!
Today Only!
For a Limited Time!
Promotional Price!
[Holiday] Special! (i.e. New Year’s Special!)
XX% Discount!
etc.

Take Advantage of Discount Codes

DIscount codes (sometimes called coupon codes) are codes that when entered in to a shopping cart, immediately give your customers a discount. If you use e-junkie, it’s really easy to set up different discount codes for your products. See the screenshot below for an example (these are not the real discount codes I use):

As you can see above, the discount codes are meant for specific groups of people. It’s smart to do this because if your offering a discount within a newsletter, for example, when people see the discount code “NEWSLETTER”, the readers will know the discount is just for them, and they’ll feel more compelled to take advantage of it.

You can also use this same philosophy to offer special promotions to people during certain times of the year. So, if you want to offer a Christmas special, you don’t have to lower the price of your book, but instead just offer the discount code CHRISTMAS (or word of your choice) to people instead.

Front-Line Marketing

Some of my most successful marketing efforts were done for free on other blogs and forums related to what my eBook was about.

When my eBook was finally finished, you could find me in a bunch of the related forums promoting my book. BE CAREFUL THOUGH! When promoting your website or products on other websites, the last thing you want to do is sound like that’s all you’re there for. Forums are meant to help people, and if you’re there just promoting your product that isn’t much help to anyone. It’s just hurting you as you gain a reputation as “that guy” (or girl). Don’t be “that guy”.

My tip would be to first register for the forum and then answer questions, join in on conversations, and start your own topics if you want – but don’t make any references to your eBook just yet. You can, however, put your website link in your signature. That way, if anyone is curious, they can click over.

After a few days and some posts, then you can reference your eBook, but only if the opportunity presents itself. What I mean is that if anyone has a specific question, or if there’s a topic that being discussed about something your eBook addresses, offer your advice and just ever-so-slightly mention your eBook in there.

Here is an example of something you could say:

@Craig, I know Pay-Per-Click advertising can seem pretty difficult to understand at first, but it’s all about your ad copy more than anything. How you choose and use your words within your ad can make a world of a difference. There are tons of examples out there of both good and bad ad copies. I actually did a whole study on ad copy optimization which I published in my book, which can be found at [my website's html]. If you need any help, let me know and I’d be happy to help you out.

I just made that up, but do you see how the book reference is just a small part of the answer and it’s relevant? It’s a lot friendlier than: “Hey I just wrote this book, check it out here!”, and more people will let it slide, because it actually helps. If you can hyperlink your book, instead of writing out the entire website link, that would be preferable too.

This same idea goes for blogs too, although you have an even greater chance of your comment being deleted, since the blog owner is usually more picky and observant about what is said on his or her blog.

The best part is that if you do offer good advice, people will begin to learn who you are and mention any resources that you have to others when you’re not around. This has happened to me, and I’ve since laid off posting on the forums, but I still visit it sometimes and see intheleed.com being mentioned.

My recommendation to you would be that if you ever plan on writing an eBook about a certain subject in the future, even if it’s months or even a couple years away, get involved in related forums today. Make a presense, answer questions, and ask them too if needed. When it’s time for your eBook to launch, your community on the forum will definitely back you up if you’re not “that guy”.

What’s Next

In my next post, I’ll be going over some techniques to market your material that you’ll need to front a little bit of money for, such as advertising with Google Adwords and Facebook. If you don’t do it right, you can easily lose a lot of money really fast. Stay tuned!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 7 – Pricing Strategies

Pat — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 17:58:10 +0000

What is the price that will maximize whatever you’re selling online? That’s the question we’re all trying to figure out, and it’s not an easy thing to do. Where do you even start? We’ll get to this…

Recap

Here is what we have in our eBook series so far:

Today I’m going to go over how you can begin to price your eBook.

The prices we see in stores and online are carefully determined, well researched prices that are there for a reason. The pricing game is a crazy psychological battle between yourself and your potential customers, and here’s my take on how you can figure things out.

Remember: I’m not an expert and you may have a better way of determining a good price for your products. This is just what I did and I’m passing it along to you.

Check Out Your Competitors’ Prices

Competitor prices are important to realize before you get into the market yourself. They give you an idea of what people are paying for material that is similar to yours, and it provides you with a good starting point. Don’t just look at the prices of other eBooks, but similar hardcover books being sold online and offline too. It’s really easy to check prices on amazon.com, just type in a few keywords that are related to your subject and see what comes up.

How much you charge in relation to your competitors is up to you, but going higher or lower will have an impact on how you should market your material. Why? Because it’s a lot easier nowadays for people to comparison shop, especially since it’s usually just a keyword and click away. Let me explain:

If You Price Higher Than Your Competitors…

…then you better have a reason for doing so. In this case, you wouldn’t highlight your price more than you would the highlight the benefits and features of your eBook.

People aren’t going to buy your item if they can get the same item for a lower price somewhere else. Another way to think about this is, you’d better show them why you are able to charge more than your competitors (i.e. your item has better value).

Therefore, your strategy here is to create some kind of features or benefits chart that will attract the attention of the customers on your sales page. Make this stand out, since it’s the thing you want your potential customers to see the most. Don’t highlight your price. If people see your price before they see anything else, you may lose some customers right away. Your job is to make them drool over your product first, and then when they are in “I want this” mode, that’s when you shoot them the price (at the end of your sales page). Usually, they’ll already have their minds made up and won’t care if your price is a little higher.

In addition, you’ll often see actual comparison charts that show that there are more benefits and features of a product being sold compared to those of it’s competitors. Of course, the item being sold is always shown having more. If you choose to do this, don’t put the price of the other products in that chart.

If You Price Lower Than Your Competitors…

…then you’ll want to make sure you highlight your price throughout your sales page. Make it stand out! Your price becomes a selling point.

This is the strategy that I chose with my book. A lot of the material that already existed for the LEED exam was super expensive (as well as the price to take the test itself), so I chose to market my eBook as “the most inexpensive LEED study guide you can buy”. I made sure to mention that I could have chraged more, but I realized how much money people were spending already. I’ve gotten emails from customers who told me they appreciated the fact that my eBook was reasonably priced and well worth their dollar.

If You Choose A Low Price, Be Careful – Losing Money

Choosing a lower price can be great for the reasons that I just mentioned, but be careful about how low you go. It can hurt you more than it helps if you’re not careful.

For one, if you price too low, you might lose out on potential earnings because people might have been ok with paying a little bit more. Let me give you a real life example:

When I first launched my eBook, I was worried about charging too much. I knew I was pricing lower than my competitors, but I wanted to make sure my price still wasn’t so high that it would drive customers away. So, I charged $19.99.

I was selling books slowly at first, but then the momentum started to pick up. Then, I got this email from somebody:

“Just my opinion, I think you could raise the price of your LEED Walkthrough Guide. You’re already well below the competitor’s price, and I anticipate you will have the volume to support it and an additional 5 to 10 bucks will be a big difference in your bottom line. People will pay it.”

It’s crazy to think that one of my own customer’s actually wrote me this email, but I found out he was just really surprised with how low my price was, and because the eBook helped him out, he figured he pay me back by giving me this tip. Well, that was over a $20,000 tip. Let me explain:

To date, I’ve sold about 2000 eBooks (this doesn’t include the eBook + audio package, just the eBooks sales alone). If I had sold them all at $19.99, that’s about $40,000 total. If I had sold them all at $29.95, which is the price I sell it now, that’s about $60,000 – a $20,000 difference! It’s crazy to think about, but raising the price of my guide less than $10 earns me $20,000 more.

The moral of the story: don’t price your guide too low.

If You Choose A Low Price, Be Careful – Losing Credability

One other reason you want to be careful about having a low price is that it might be so low that people won’t think it’s good. Yes, it may be cheap, but customers may be thinking that they’ll get what they pay for: a book that isn’t worth much.

I heard a funny story once about a guy selling something for X dollars (I apologize I forgot the details, but bear with me). He was doing okay, but just for fun he raised his price 10 times the price he was originally charging. Guess what happened?

Not only did he make more money because his product cost more, but he was getting more customers too! So wait…he raised his price, and got MORE customers? Yes, this is right. Why? Because people saw the larger price as the product having more value than it did at the original price. People were thinking to themselves “At this price, it must be really good!”

That being said, you can price something too high, obviously. Using the last example, if the price is too high, people aren’t going to be thinking it must be really good, but rather “this price is ridiculous” instead.

Finding the Perfect Price

It’s our job to find that perfect price that isn’t too low, but not too high either. Luckily, we can change our price at any time with the click of a button. This is the online advantage that we have.

If you were selling products in a retail store, just imagine how many steps and how many days (not to mention how much money) would be involved in doing a price change, especially if the price was printed on your product.

Working online, if we think our price is too low or too high, all you have to do is go into E-Junkie (or your shopping cart of choice), and change the price. You’ll have to update your price on your website and any graphics as well, but this isn’t too much work considering what exactly you’re trying to do.

It’s all about experimentation. It’s going to take a while to find the right price, and make sure when you make a price change to not base any of your decisions on just 1 or 2 days of sales. A good week is usually sufficient enough to see if your price change has made any difference in your numbers.

Price Changes Are Scary, But They Don’t Have to Be

At least for me, I was a little reluctant to make any price changes at first. Why? Because I was scared of two things:

1. People seeing a price higher than they saw before. I was worried that a potential customer would see that I raised the price and they would email me and ask for the price they saw earlier. Let me tell you why this is nothing to worry about.

For this to happen, a customer would have to come by your website once, and then again after the price change. This may or may not happen too often, but even if it did, the customer would then have to take the time to email you and request the lower price, which definitely happens even less. Even if it does happen a few times, it’s best to just answer their request and give them the lower price. There’s nothing wrong with that, and they will definitely appreciate your understanding and probably spread the word about your website and the great customer service.

2. I was also worried that if I lowered the price (this is after I raised the price too high at first), then previous customers would then request a refund for the difference.

I had raised the price of my eBook initially from $19.99 to $39.95, but after a week I noticed the number of sales drasticaly decrease. I wanted to try for a happy medium, so I changed the price to $29.95. Out of about 100 customers who purchased my eBook at $39.95, no one ever contacted and asked for a $10 refund.

I think people understand that prices will change, but even if a few customers email you, I would just go ahead and issue them the refund. Again, they will probably appreciate your customer service, because I’m sure they won’t expect you to say yes.

Summary

You can follow my advice (or not) all you want, but it’s important to never forget that you have the power to do what ever it is you want to do. If you believe your product should be sold for much more, then do it! Try it out and if it is successful, that’s awesome. If not, you know you can easily change the price and find that price that works for both you and your customers.

Don’t be hesitant while doing business online. Whatever you do, do it with authority and the belief that what you’re doing is the right move.

There are a lot of ins and outs with pricing your eBook, and I’ve only begun to hit the surface. I plan to write one more part in this series about pricing, specifically about certain promotions and techniques you can use to increase your sales.

Again, thank you for all of your comments and questions. Cheers!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 6 – 10 Steps to a Great Sales / Landing Page

Pat — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:29:36 +0000

You can have the best product in the world, but if you don’t know how to sell it, you’re going to be dissapointed. In other words, marketing your product is very, very important. Just think, big companies will spend millions of dollars on marketing and making sure people buy their products. It kind of makes it hard for people like us who don’t have millions of dollars, but thanks to the internet, we have a shot.

And thus begins the marketing segment of the “How to Publish an Ebook Series”. Let’s do a quick recap.

Recap

Here is what we have so far:

In the online world, especially when selling an eBook, the most important element is the sales page (also known as the landing page). Often, this is even more important than the eBook itself because as I said before, you can have the best eBook ever created, but without the right sales page, it won’t sell jack. If you have a great landing page, you will be able to sell ice to Eskimos. Let’s get to it.

A Good Landing Page is JUST Like an Infomercial

Have you ever bought something you saw on television? Maybe, maybe not. But did you ever notice how almost every infomercial is exactly the same?

Well, there is a reason for this, and it’s because they work. You may not realize this, but the format of each of those commercials is not an accident, it’s the result of years of infomercials and marketing research/testing to see what earns the most money. A good landing page is just like today’s infomercials.

Step 1: The Problem

Like all good infomercials, the “annoying task” or “problem” is what is always mentioned first:

“Are you tired of wasting your time doing thousands of sit-ups without seeing any results?”

“Are your dry feet and calluses embarrassing you?”

“Are you tired of your pets scratching the furniture, only to then cut their nails and make them bleed and hate you as their owner?”

Ok, you get the idea. Up front, you want to present the problem.

Step 2: Leading Up to the Solution

Then, usually there’s some kind of teaser or “hope” that there is a solution to the problem:

“What if there was a way to lose weight without doing all of those sit-ups?”

“What if you could walk outside with heels and not worry about people looking at your feet.”

“What if your pet loved it when you cut their nails?”

Before you unveil what your product (eBook) is, you’re giving them an idea of what it can do for them. For example, here is an excerpt from my LEED website’s landing page:

Don’t you want to pass the LEED AP Exam as fast as possible without having to read all 400+ pages of the Reference Guide? Don’t you want to pass now before the newer and harder LEED 2009 exam starts in about 6 months? You’re in luck! The only guide you’ll ever need is right here, and I promise it will help you understand everything you need to know.”

Sweet.

Step 3: Present Your Product

“Finally, the Ab Cruncher 9000 Xtreme Body Building Machine!”

“The Foot Cheese Grinder Thing!”

“The Pet Grinder.”

Nothing fancy here, just show them the your solution. Any graphics or logos should be presented here as well.

Step 4: Testimonials

Testimonials are very important. They give life to your product, and security to your potential customers that what they are about to purchase is the real deal.

In the infomercials we see on TV, we always see testimonials. That hot girl with the tight abs, with the before picture next to her. The person who used to have really nasty feet who now just has kinda nasty feet. And the proud pet owner who says she used to hate cutting her dog’s nails, but now she loves it.

I wrote an old school post about testimonials back in November, but I’d like to reiterate a few key points:

Real testimonials are always better than fake ones. If you try and come up with your own, it doesn’t matter how good of a writer you are, people are going to see through it. Give away a few copies of your eBook to friends and family, and just ask for a testimonial in return. Make sure to let them know it will go on your website though.
Always use the name (and location if possible) of the person who wrote you the testimonial. Again, it gives your potential customers a feeling that those are real people talking.
If you want to spice it up even more, use a small picture of the person too. Again, make sure it’s ok with them before you put their picture online. Try and have the picture relate to your product somehow too. So, if your eBook is about losing weight, use a photo that shows off the person’s body. If you’re writing about dog training, have a picture of the owner with his or her dog in it too.

A highlighted box or a different font used for your testimonials would work – just make sure it stands out.

Step 5: Details About Your Product

This is where you get into the details, features and benefits or your product, all adding value to it and making it irresistible to any potential customer.

On television, you might see some sort of 3D representation that explains how everything works, as well as examples of it being used. On the internet, all you need is a bulleted list of items that goes over everything you think people would want to hear.

Step 6: The Price

Now that you’ve got them drooling, now is the time you want to give them the offer. As on TV, you never see the real price first, you see some made up price that is ridiculous that they would never dare charge you:

“The Pet Grinder could easily sell for $1000.00, or even $5,000.00! But today, for a limited time only, you can get the Pet Grinder and the happiness of knowing your pets will love to get their nails trimmed, for ONLY $9.99!”

Again, you get the idea. Be realistic though, because that is what works best. How much do you think your eBook is actually worth? How much money and time will it save them? If you want, you can present the “ridiculous price” in this fashion as well:

“This package includes this and that, and also this, which together retails for over $500.00! For you today, you will only have to invest $99.95, that’s a savings of over $400.00!”

The pricing game is a lot of fun, and I’m not just talking about The Price is Right. How you price your product can make or break your business too. I’m going to dedicate Part 7 of the eBook series to the pricing and how you can play with the price to optimize sales and profit.

Step 7: But Wait, There’s More!

Yes, you always see the “bonus gift” on the infomercials:

“Buy one today, and get another one absolutely free of charge!”

“If you buy this, we’ll give you 10 free replacement heads!”

You should include “gifts” when you sell your eBook as well. So what can you include?

The best thing to include are things that you have in your eBook already. Huh? Let me explain. If you have an eBook, with 10 chapters or sections, why not say there are only 9, but the 10th one is included for free? It really helps people to click that buy now button if they are unsure about it. Here is an example from my eBook’s sales page:

These are things I was going to include in my book anyways, so all I did was pull them out…and put them back in as a bonus! Put a price on it, and it’s like you’re giving them free stuff. Nice!

If you have any exercises, calculators, or can get a hold of any free software (please check with the developer first), please include those in your package and don’t forget to take advantage of it.

Step 8: The Guarantee

I wrote an entire post about the importance of a guarantee and how it can help boost your sales. You may have to refund a few people, but you will get more customers and profit because of it.

Click here to re-visit that post about guarantees, with examples from my own website.

Step 9: Better Act Now, Or Else!

On the infomercials, you’ll sometimes see a countdown timer as to when their offer expires. You mean to tell me that if I call 1 minute after that clock hits zero that they won’t sell me that product? Yeah right…but this just shows you that the “Better Act Now, Or Else” motive does work.

Online, there are a few things you can do that relate to this. You can have your price followed by “for a limited time only.” Another example is that you could have a bonus gift (or a “bonus gift”) that is only given to the first 100 customers. And, you can even state that you will only sell 500 copies of your eBook, because the information is “so valuable, you don’t want it to get into too many peoples’ hands.” I’ve seen all of these examples used online on successful landing pages before. Again – they are there for a reason…because they work.

Step 10: Split Test the Heck Out of Your Landing Page

It’s funny, because just one color on your landing page can drastically impact how well they perform. I won’t go into detail about what split testing is here, because I already wrote an entire post about how you can do this for free with Google Optimizer.

The point is to find the best combination of words, colors, testimonials, etc. to maximize your profit and have the best landing / sales page you can have for your product.

Up Next

I apologize for the length of this particular post, but it’s very important stuff. In my next post, I’ll go over how you can determine a price for your eBook and how you can play around with it so you can maxmimize your profit and sales.

Cheers everyone!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 5 – Tools and Automation

Pat — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:38:21 +0000

Have you ever seen something awesome and then say to yourself, “That is SUCH a good idea!!!” I’m sure you have. I do this all of time – especially when I see a vending machine. Yes, I think vending machines are awesome. Whether it dispenses toys, sour coated gumballs, or Doritos – the fact is that there is somebody (who is not present) making money for doing basically nothing. That person (or company) took time to set it up, stored it full of goodies, and after that just waits for the cash to roll in. Genius.

This is the same kind of idea (and really the huge advantage) of selling an eBook online. How I setup the automation process (my vending machine) with my eBook is what I’m going to go over today.

Recap

We’ve covered quite a bit of information so far already:

Now that the eBook is done, it’s time to set up your system. One of the most common questions I get is what websites and services I use to automate everything. I’m excited to share this with you, but before I do, let’s again look at automation and where we stand in the equation.

In my post titled, The One Thing You Must Know About Passive Income, I described that automation is the most important aspect of setting up your passive income empire. If you remember, I showed you this basic chart:

As you can see, the only way we should be involved in the system is on the receiving end of some cash. Here are the tools I use so you can do this:

E-Junkie Shopping Cart

Although it has a funny name, if you’re selling stuff using the internet, e-junkie is a great option. I love it. Here is a quote from their website summarizing what they offer:

“E-Junkie provides shopping cart and buy now buttons to let you sell downloads and tangible goods on your website, eBay, MySpace, Google Base, Craigslist, and other websites using Paypal Standard, Paypal Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, TrialPay, ClickBank, and 2CheckOut.”

How Does it Work?

Once you have your product, you upload it to e-junkie. You specify a price and then it spits out a code for a “buy now” or “add to cart” button that you add to your website. That’s basically it!

Here are a couple screenshots of what it looks like on my end:

Product Configuration

Button Code Generator

Instead of using their buttons, I used a different one that I found that was proven to increase sales, which I actually wrote an entire post about. Anyways, to give you an idea of the user experience, here are some screenshots from the customer’s end, using e-junkie:

A Button on my Sales Page (click here to see it live)

The button takes them to the shopping cart:

After checkout, they fill out billing info:

After the payment is finished, their web browser is redirected to a thank you page on my website. I’ll talk more about the thank you page later, but it’s useful because it provides confirmation of the purchase, and it can have the instructions for download (i.e., they should get an email within 5 minutes), and if they have any problems to contact me, etc.

Within the email that gets sent to them (automatically), there’s a link to download my eBook to their computer. Then, the transaction is complete, and everyone is happy. All of the emails are sent automatically, the products are delivered for you…what more can you really ask for?

How Much Does it Cost to use E-Junkie?

You’d think they would take a percentage of each sale, but they don’t. If you have between 0 and 100mb of product(s) stored on E-Junkie, it will cost you a whopping $5.00 per month. Above 100mb it’s $15.00 per month, and so on. Not bad at all. Really, it’s a small price to pay for such a good service.

Personally, I pay $15.00 a month because the audio files are quite large, but one-third of one sale pays for the service. Sweet.

Other E-Junkie Notables That I Took Advantage Of

A free one-week trial
Good customer service and forums
You can create your own discount codes for promotional offers and friends
- I’ll go into more detail about this later in the marketing segment(s).
Affiliate management for your products
Customize emails that get sent to your customers
Can broadcast emails/newsletters to all of your previous customers
You can easily update your products and change prices if you wish

There are other websites that are similar to e-junkie, but I found this one to be the best for what I’m doing.

To use e-junkie, however, there is one more thing you’ll need, a payment processor. I use two: Paypal and Google Checkout.

Paypal

I’m sure most of you have heard of paypal before, and probably have an account too.

When you sign up normally, you are free to use the “Paypal Standard” features on e-junkie. This means that in order to receive payments, they must be from a customer who also has paypal. This narrows down your customer base…bigtime. In order for people to use their credit cards in your automation process, you’ll need to get what is called “Paypal Websites Payments Pro”.

When you apply for Paypal Payments Pro, you are given an API number which integrates right into E-Junkie. You have to prove that you’re going to be selling something and doing business online. Paypal will ask you (via phone) questions when you apply, and you should be ready to answer them.

Don’t worry, you can easily get approved if you can explain what you plan to do. Make sure you mention you’ll be integrating Paypal with E-junkie. Also, ask give them your website url and your sales page if you have one already (I’m kind of working backwards here, but I’ll go over the parts of a landing/sales page in my next post), and even offer to show them your eBook is you’re comfortable with that. This should do the trick. Be professional, and you should be fine.

After you’re approved, integration with E-junkie is fairly straightforward. I won’t get into the details here, but there are easy to follow instructions on E-junkie’s website that can you can use.

Cost

The price to use Paypal Payments Pro is only $30.00 a month. Before my eBook went live, I was pretty reluctant to commit to this much each month, but having the capability to accept credit card payments and automate is essential and really, $30.00 per month is again a very small price to pay.

Also, paypal takes a small commission for each transaction. To give you an idea, paypal takes $1.17 every time someone purchases my $29.95 eBook. It’s not much, but it does add up. There’s not really anything you can do to avoid this, but do know that you can write off these fees on your taxes (if you’re a business entity).

Google Checkout

Google checkout is basically the same thing as paypal, and I created a merchant account with them and also integrated it with E-Junkie so I could receive google checkout payments as well. All I’m really doing is giving the customer the most payment options. It’s not a bad idea, even though most people will probably pay by credit card.

To give you an idea, about 90% of my customers pay via credit card, 7% via Google Checkout, and 3% via their own paypal accounts.

Up Next

So I hope this answers a lot of your questions about what exactly I use on my website to help me with payments and delivery of my online products. I’ve shown you all the parts of your “vending machine”. Next, I’ll go over where you should put it and how you can make it better.

To be exact, in my next post, I’ll talk all about the landing page – the page people will see and read about your product before they take action and purchase it. This is such an important topic, I might spend two days on it – we’ll see. You can have the best product in the world, but if your sale page sucks, you’re not going to sell anything. Make sure you come back and check that out soon.

Thanks for your continued support and as always, comments and questions are welcome!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 4 – Getting Ready To Sell It Online

Pat — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 14:31:27 +0000

As I’ve mentioned before, making money online doesn’t happen overnight. I think that is well reflected in how many posts it’s going to take me to finish my eBook series – but I just wanted to thank you again for the great comments and encouragement for me to continue.

One quick thing I’d like to mention is that yesterday I was featured in an article on examiner.com by Jerrie Dean, who I actually met through the forums on eHow.com. Again, this is a great reminder of how important it is to connect with other people, as many new opportunities will inevitably arise as a result. Jerrie, if you are reading this, thanks again for the opportunity to share my story.

Recap

So far, we’ve covered the following:

Today, I’m going to go over how I turned my book in Word into a PDF that was ready to sell. I know there are a lot of other formats that you can distribute to people, and probably more secure ones too, but I’ll go over why I chose a PDF and why you shouldn’t worry about people stealing or giving away your information for free.

Also, I’ve received a lot of questions and emails about marketing and testing and all that jazz. Let me assure you, I’ll go over as much as possible in the next week or two, so bear with me and stay tuned!

Moving on…

Different eBook Formats

There are over 50 eBook file types you can convert your Word file to. If you don’t believe me, you can check them all out here on wikipedia. Know that some those on the list are dead and some are specialized for just a few mobile devices. The most popular ones are:

AZW: Amazon
MOBI: MobiPocket
LIT: Microsoft
PNPd: Palm eReader
BBeB: Sony
PDF: Adobe

I should add, you may or may not know about the Kindle, which is Amazon.com’s portable eBook reader. It’s fairly popular among eBook readers. To make your eBook compatable with the kindle, you’ll have to go through amazon.com itself. I did not go this route (and I’ll tell you why in a second), but if you’re interested, you can read more about how to do this here.

I chose to go with a PDF format.

The Power of the PDF

I like love the PDF format. Why? Because I’m very familiar with it and most of you probably are too. In order for someone to read a PDF file, all they need is a PDF reader (usually from Adobe), which can be downloaded for free onto anyone’s computer.

I’m speaking from my experience in the industry I was writing my eBook about, but I knew for sure that all of the architects and design/construction professionals (who were hopefully going to be my customers) used PDFs for everything and were comfortable with that format, and they would be less likely to read a book that was geared for just the Kindle or a Sony Reader.

Also, documents from a PDF are easily printable and there are a lot of cool things you can do with a PDF to make the user experience a little better while going through your eBook.

Anyways, you can see some of the cool things you can do:

You can set the eBook to always open on the front page and in an optimal size.
You can have a navigation sidebar (bookmark area) where users can jump to and from any section they want. I thought this would be especially helpful for my customers since my guide was a study guide that had many sections to memorize.
The bookmark area can be hierarchical to create easy-to-navigate drop down menus.
You can set it up so you can have buttons that go to certain pages or print certain pages.
You could create forms and embed tools and calculators and cool stuff like that.
And I’m sure there are thousands of other things, both useful and not, that you could do to enhance the reader experience with a PDF.

I’m not an expert, but I did find out how to do most of these things by performing random Google searches. A lot of the information can be found on PlanetPDF.com as well. Pretty much anything you can think of is possible nowadays, and if you can’t find out how to do something, you can always pay someone a little bit of money to do it for you via elance or odesk.com.

All of the above things are done with Adobe, not in Word. Let me step back for a second.

The Conversion from Word to PDF

This took about a minute to do. If you have the capability of “saving as a PDF”, or “printing to PDF” (which is the same thing), that’s all you have to do. When you do this, you’ll want to make sure your Word document is proof-read, edited and all ready to go. Please do this, because it’s a lot easier to edit a Word file.

If you have (or can get) Adobe Acrobat Professional, that would be the best way to go because then you’ll be able to easily do any of the features that I mentioned above. I actually used my computer at my old office (during lunch, of course), to convert the Word file into a working PDF format.

After it’s converted, that’s when you sync the page numbers, put in all the bookmarks and navigation things, the print icons, etc., and then once you’re satisfied you’ll have to save it once you know it’s all ready to go.

If you don’t have Acrobat Professional, and don’t really need all of that fancy stuff going on with your eBook, you can always convert it using a free online “Word to PDF” file conversion service. I don’t have any experience using any of these, but there are definitely a lot to choose from, which I’m sure work just fine.

PDF Security

Ok, so I’m sure you might be wondering “what’s stopping people from giving away your eBook to others for free?” (aka. piracy) The honest answer is – not all that much. With a PDF format, as far as I know, there is very little you can do – which kind of sucks.

It’s funny because I got an email the other day that said, “Hey Pat, thanks for your eBook, it’s super helpful. My friend gave it to me after she passed, and I have a really quick question for you…” I was like…really?

But I can’t get mad, because I knew it was going to happen. It’s like the music, dvd or movie industry: there’s always going to be a few (million) people who burn illegal copies or download pirated music, but that doesn’t stop movies from making millions of dollars or music artists from succeeding. There are still a lot of honest people out there. I know, because they’ve supported me too.

There are a few security precautions you can do to possibly reduce the occurrence. With an Adobe PDF, you can set a password up to access the document, but this is pretty annoying to all of your loyal customers who were honest and paid you, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

I do recommend, however, that you set it up so that the document can’t be changed or edited, or any part of the text copied. You can also set it up so readers can’t print it, but again, it depends on what kind of eBook you’re writing. Mine in particular had exercises that required writing, so of course I had to allow them to print it out. All of these settings can be done

One last thing you should include in your eBook, which I’ve seen in a few eBooks before, is just to simply put a page in there that explains how hard you worked on your eBook (which is probably the truth), and how you would appreciate it if the customer didn’t give away free copies and you would and just ask that they would continue to support your cause. For the most part, this works.

Maybe PDF security is something I lack a little knowledge about, so I’m really interested in hearing what you have to say. Or, if you’ve had experience writing eBooks too, what have you done to “secure” your product?

Ready for Sale

So, that’s basically it! A Word document that is converted into a PDF, decorated with some features, and booyah…you have a product that’s ready for sale.

In my next post, I’m going to show you how to take your product and make it available to your customers. I use a couple of websites to make this happen so that payments and delivery of my eBook is automatic, so make sure you check that out later on. Then, I’ll get into some tips and tricks to improve your sales online.

Thanks for sticking with me! Cheers!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 3 – Important Things About your Ebook

Pat — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:05:44 +0000

I’m super stoked. Why? Because many of you have given me some really nice comments and feedback about this series so far, and I’m really excited to continue to pretty much outline in detail exactly what I did to get where I am today. Please, keep your comments and questions coming – it’s a great motivator for me.

Recap

So far, we’ve learned the following:

Again, I’m not quite sure how many parts this will be. It’s funny because I originally wanted to write this out in just 2 posts, but there is just so much helpful and necessary information for me to pass on to you. By the looks of it so far, I’m guessing it will be more like 8 to 10 posts. I hope you don’t mind.

Writing Your eBook

As I mentioned in Part 2, you’d better have your outline finished before you start writing. It will be your road map to completion. Don’t forget, always begin with a section that you’re comfortable with – it doesn’t have to be the very beginning or introduction.

Also, Sarah from Lifestyles of the Organized commented in my last post:

“One of my college professors gave me a writing tip a while back that I’ve continued to use time and time again: when you “finish” one section and decide you are done for the day, try to start the next section just a little (like a sentence or two) so that when you pick it back up the next day you can just sit down and keep on writing where you left off. It really works!”

Thanks Sarah, this is a great tip.

The Template

In your word processor, it’s a good idea to create a one-page template that will be the model for the rest of your eBook. Once you have your template, you can start a new section of your eBook and “save as” without having to reformat your new file for each new section. Sweet.

You should think about the following as you are creating your template:

The correct page size you want to format the book. Most common are the traditional 8.5″ x 11″ and the 6″ x 9″ formats, as those are best viewed on most computer screens and easily printable.
The font type you want to use. Don’t use a fancy font. Yes, it may look cool on one line, but after 30-100 pages of it, it can really hurt the eyes. I like to use a simple font, such as Arial, but not Times New Roman. Maybe it’s just me, but Times New Roman is used way too much. It makes any document look like a book report or school essay.
The right font sizes. Yes, that’s plural. Why? Because you should have different font sizes to differentiate the different sections and hierarchy of your eBook. Just like in this post, it clearly helps the reader organize where they are and what they are reading about. Since most people will be using a computer to read the document, you’ll want to make sure your font sizes are optimized for that. The following font sizes are just an example of what I used, but I recommend trying it out for yourself to see how it looks to you on your screen. Also, send your template with different section headings on it to your friends or view it at work too to make sure it’s able to be read well on other computers. Remember, everyone has different screen sizes and document readers, so you’re kind of guessing what will work for most.
- Header 1 (For words like “Introduction” or “Chapter 1″, etc.): Size 22, bold.
- First Subset (For words such as “Section 1″, for example): Size 18, italic
- Second Subset (For words such as “Part 1″): Size 16, italic
- Third Subset (if necessary): Size 13, bold
- Body and written text: Size 13, normal
Your header/footer. A header or a footer is a great place to put information that will help the user navigate a little better. Your page numbers and possibly the title of the section their in is always helpful. I also included my email address here so at any time, if anyone ever had a question they could easily find my email address.
Any graphics or logos you’d like included on each page. Some people go all out with this, but I like to keep it at a minimum. It’s up to you though and you may want to include cool graphics on each page, depending on the style of your book or guide. All I did was put a little border around each page, which makes the document look less like an essay and frames the information a little better, and also my logo in the footer and my website url.

Writing Style

After you have your template, you’re all set to go full blast. Have your outline handy so you can check off the sections you finish as you go along.

As far as your writing style and language are concerned, the most important thing to understand is who your audience will be. What kind of people will be purchasing your book?

Most likely, as was the case for me and my study guide, your customers do not know much, if anything about the subject which you are writing about. Start at the beginning and make sure you are able to guide people along the way without going too fast. They can always skip sections they already know, but will not be able to learn things you don’t include.

In my case, I really made sure to “dumb down” everything I knew and start right from the beginning. I hate to use the words “dumb down”, but I think you know what I mean. Your customers will more than likely appreciate how easy it is to follow your words, instead of bash you for presenting

something as if they are stupid.

Other Things to Make Sure You Include In The Contents of your eBook

A Well-Designed eBook cover: This will be the first thing people see when they open your product, and first impressions have a huge impact on how well your eBook is received. Also, you can use your eBook graphics for marketing purposes as well. I designed my own cover, since I have photoshop experience from work, but if you have a friend who knows photoshop, have them create one for you for a dinner in exchange or something. If you don’t know anyone, you can always go with a service such as eCoverDesign, which does professional looking eBook cover and product graphics. Here is my eBook cover along with a marketing graphic I created using the same cover:

A Disclaimer Page and Copyright Wording: Even though you may think you know everything about what you’re writing about, some people may interpet it another way, or you may even be flat out wrong. You’ll want to cover your butt just in case some psycho decides to sue you for whatever reason. If you wanted to be sure that you cover all of your bases, I would recommend hiring a lawyer who could write something out really quick for you, but usually it’s says that the information you provide either canot guarantee something or it’s just your own opinion and people should form their own conclusions about the information you present. Also, it’s good to site companies you use in your eBook that you aren’t afiliated with, as well as the statement we all usually see about “no part of this publication shall be reproduced or transmitted without prior consent of the author, etc.” You can read more about copyright language here.
A Preface about Why You Published the eBook: It’s always good for your customers to know what your intentions are, and it can increase your creditability too. A story or a history about the eBook or the subject can be placed here. You don’t have to include this, but it sets the mood without diving into the hardcore material yet.
An About the Author Page: For the same reasons as the preface, an about the author page is good because it’s nice to get a little personal with your customers. Usually, this is found at the end of the eBook, but if you have lots of credentials, you may want to include this page at the beginning so people come across you and your qualifications earlier. Then, they’ll be more excited to learn from you.
Links: One of the best parts about writing an eBook is that you can link to certain webpages to help get your point across. If you link to your own webpage, that’s a great way to provide additional information or tools beyond what’s in your eBook. If you’re going to link to a third-party website, please make sure it’s ok with them. Usually, people don’t mind because it’s giving them free traffic, but if they found out you mentioned them in your eBook without any compensation, they might get angry. Usually, a nice email before you publish does the trick. You’ll want to footnote the link in your text with the actual link on the bottom of the page you reference it on. This is so just incase the hyperlink doesn’t work, people will still be able to type in the website into their favorite web browser.
Helpful Tools, Exercises, Calculations, etc: It’s a really smart idea to add some tools or helpful calculators or anything that can help your customer further their experience with your eBook and better learn the material. I added a couple of exercises at the end of my eBook to help people memorize the information, and this is a hit. It does a couple of other things for your eBook as well:
1. It makes your eBook look more professional and helpful. With the exercises and tools inside, customer’s will know it’s a great all around package, not just a reading tool, but a “doing” tool as well.
2. You can use this as a marketing tool. I’ll talk more about this later, but basically you can say that you’ve included these “extra” tools for free, even though you were going to include them anyways. Man, I can’t wait until the marketing part of this series, it’s going to be fun. Sorry, I digress.
A Way to Contact You: Including an email address to you is a very good way to make your customers feel more confortable with their purchase, and let them know that you’re always just an email away if they have any question or come across any technical problems. You may want to create a separate email address just for this purpose, just for organizational purposes. I included my email address on every single page in my eBook, and I got a lot of comments about how nice that was, and it make my customers feel like I wasn’t hiding and was right there with them any time they needed help at any time.

It’s funny, after reading this, it kind of sounds like I’m talking about starting a blog. They are kind of the same thing as you’re trying to provide helpful information to as many people as possible, so many of the same rules apply. If you have a blog or have written articles online, writing your own eBook shouldn’t be that much different.

How Long Does This Process Take?

For me, it took me a little over a month to complete my study guide. I wrote for about 2 hours each day, sometimes more, sometimes less, but it was completed in about 1.5 months. I was lucky because I was living at home with my parents and was able to close the door to my own room and crank it out. For some, I know this can be difficult, but as long as you try and keep a schedule, and tell your family that you’re working on something important, you should be ok. You may need to sacrifice something like your favorite t.v. show or your nightly read, but it can be definitely worth the sacrifice in the end.

If you want to know how long it will take you, create your outline and then plan out how much time you’d like to spend (or you think you should/will spend) writing each part. Add up the days, and you’ll have a rough estimate. Time to get started, yea?

What’s Up Next

After you’ve completed your product, it’s sitting there in a document format in Word or another word processor. The next step is to convert it into a PDF format and get it ready for sale. In my next post, I’ll go over this a little as well as what you can do within Adobe to protect your final product as much as possible.

Then, we’ll go over what websites and tools you need to automate the entire process, or as Ron Popeil like to say, “Set it and Forget It!”

Cheers!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 2 – Getting Started

Pat — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 07:05:44 +0000

I know that when I read a “series” of posts on other people’s blogs, it can be a drag at times, usually because the information is really specific and can sometimes be a bore. I can’t guarantee this all of the material I write in this eBook series will be super interesting, but I guarantee that it’s super important. I want you to succeed like I did, and so I’m going to go through everything from the start.

I want to keep you motivated, so check this out…since I published my own eBook 5 months ago, I’ve grossed over $82,000 in sales. Here’s a screenshot to prove it:

So there are over 6 billion people in this world, and I’ve only sold something to 2600 of them, which is more than enough income for me to live comfortably on. That’s a very small percentage, in a very small niche, in a very large world. There’s got to be something that you can create that a small part of the world will pay for. Just keep on reading and I’m sure the ideas will flow.

Moving on…

Recap

In my last post, I went through my thought process about why I chose to write an eBook as opposed to a hard copy. Here are my responses to some of your questions since:

Why Not Publish Both a Hard Cover and an Electornic eBook? My choice to sell only an electronic book is based on a couple of reasons. One, I did not want to deal with having inventory. Having inventory means having to process orders myself and deal with shipping and possibly losing items. Secondly, the electronic book was an instant download, meaning that when the customer pays for the item, he or she gets an email sent to them automatically and they can have the item on their computer within a minute. A hard copy would mean shipping time, even if it was print-on-demand. For those studying for the exam, they want the material as soon as possible, and it’s my educated guess that they could care less about how the information gets to them, as long as they have it. Also, the electronic book could is printable, so if they really wanted a hard copy, they could print it out themselves.
What Are Your Thoughts about eBook Piracy? I’m going to dedicate a good chunk of this series to this subject, so look out for my full answer later on. In short, it’s gonna happen, but there are some things that you can do to mitigate piracy of your eBook.
How Did you Turn your eBook into an Audio Guide? I’ll get to this after the eBook section is completed, I promise.

Keep the questions coming, because I want to make sure I don’t skip over anything important you might be wondering about.

How to Get Started

Honestly, when I started writing my eBook, I had no idea how I was going to format it, market it, sell it, deliver it, and even collect cash for it if it even sold. All I knew that I had to start writing. I’ve mentioned this before, but every day you don’t have something online to sell is a day of potential income you’re missing out on.

First Things First: Plan it Out

One of the earliest posts on The Smart Passive Income Blog was about how I used Mind Maps to organize my ideas and the creation of my eBook. This step is VERY important. You must write down your ideas and by using a mind map, you’re able to easily organize them, see the flow between ideas, and follow-through and esaily perform the next and most important step: creating an outline.

Think of the outline as your future table of contents. For my LEED study guide, mine was broken down into different hierarchical parts. You can use sections, parts, chapters, whatever breakdown you think is appropriate for you. Here is the beginning of my outline/table of contents from my eBook:

Introduction to LEED
- Section 1: What is LEED?
- Section 2: What is a LEED AP?
- Section 3: How to Become a LEED AP
  - Part 1: What is the Exam Like?
  - Part 2: Which LEED Exam Track is Best for You?
  - Part 3: Signing Up for the Exam
- Section 4: Exam Material Breakdown
  - Part 1: Prerequisites and Credits
  - Part 2: The LEED Certification Process

Of course, the order was different when I first wrote this down, but I used the time before I started writing to figure out the order I wanted everything to be presented. The order of the material you present can MAKE or BREAK your success.

Think about what makes sense for your specific material. To best do this, imagine you don’t know anything about what you’re writing about. How would you, as a totally brand new person to the subject, best learn and benefit from it.

The Tools You Need To Start Writing

To start publishing your book, all you need is a word processor. I’m pretty sure we all have one, so that means you can get started today! I prefer Microsoft Word because it easily converts to other formats which you can use to format your eBook right before it’s ready to sell. Don’t worry about that right now, you can always figure out how to get your text into the right format later no matter which program you use. For now, just know that all you need is a word processor and your writing skills.

If you’re worried about your writing skills, don’t. Just write how you normally write, and you can always hire someone to edit/transpose your text into correct grammar later.

How to Start Writing

Getting started is the most difficult part. What do you say? Where do you begin?

Most books begin with some kind of introduction or preface, but if you’re having trouble starting with that, you can skip to another section that you feel more conformatble with.

One of the best tips I ever received was to write and save your eBook in sections (based on your outline). This way, each part of your outline is basically like it’s own article or blog post. Once you finish a “post”, cross it off, and then you will see exactly what else you have left to write. This is how it can be really easy to keep your book in order while you write out of order. At the end when you’ve finish all of your “posts”, you can then format each of the text in your files into a larger, “final product” file.

So, your file names might look like this, but it’s up to you really (from example above):

0-Introduction.doc
01-WhatisLEED.doc
02-WhatisaLEEDAP.doc
03-HowtoBecomeLEEDAP.doc
031-WhatisExamLike.doc

…and so on. The numbers in the front are so that they show up in order in your windows explorer or finder. It may be a smart idea to create all of the file names first from your outline, just so you get them out of the way. If you know some sections are tiny, you can combine them if you prefer.

Again, start with the sections that you know you can bust out right away, and worry about the parts or sections you’re not quite to sure about or that may need more research later. Just having part of your book done will motivate you to finish the rest even more.

Up Next

In the next installment of the “How to Publish an eBook Series”, I’ll go over the sections of the actual eBook that are important to include and how I formatted the document file into a file that was ready for sale. Until then!

How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 1 – Hard Copy vs. Ebook

Pat — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:05:11 +0000

Ok, so I’ve talked about income, marketing and building relationships with customers – but I haven’t really gone into how I actually wrote my eBook. I plan to go over this process in a series of posts for you, because it will take more than one – for sure. I’m honestly not quite sure how many it will take, but pay close attention, because I’m going to go over exactly what my thought process was and how it was all accomplished.

In the Beginning

Before, all I had was a website which was earning about 50 bucks a month with adsense. I had not planned on writing a book, but after a few “OMG, your website is so helpful, you should write a book” comments, I figured I might as well give it a shot. I mean – it was only a couple hours of extra work each day, which I found by cutting out things in my life that wasted my time. If it didn’t work out, all I lost was a little bit of time and a few dollars to set up the shopping cart – that’s it.

It’s not like I was forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars for a start-up that may or may not succeed, it was just a book/study guide which required some research, time and effort – not much as far as start up capital is concerned. As you can see from my most recent sales report, I’m very glad I decided to go through with it.

The Hard Copy or Electronic Copy Debate

After making the decision to write the book, the question was whether it should be a hard copy or an electronic book. These are a few of the pros and cons with each that I was thinking of at the time:

Publishing a Hard Copy Book

PROS: easier to read, people are more comfortable buying a hard copy book online, possibility of seeing book in retail stores and amazon.com, more difficult to “pirate”
CONS: more expensive to create, publisher fees, printing copies, shipping to customers, possibility of not having enough books for number of customers (backorders), possibility of having too many books and no orders (oversupply), inventory space, only portion of sales price is profit, once it’s printed it’s really hard to re-issue a revision.

Publishing an Electronic Book

PROS: easier to create, can automate the delivery process, don’t have to worry about oversupply or back orders, don’t have to be present to complete a sale, all sales are 100% profit (no printers or publishers to pay), easy to give “free copies” to people for reviews and gifts at no cost, easy to correct errors and send updates.
CONS: harder to get people to buy an eBook, easy to “pirate” (security), harder to read on screen, less satisfaction because it’s electronic and not a “real” book.

I’m really glad I wrote these down in my “idea notebook” so I could share them with you almost an entire year later. Anyways, I did some further research, and ALMOST went with a service that offered on-demand printing.

On Demand Printing? What’s That?

When I found out about on-demand printing, I swore this was the method I was going to choose for my study guide. I found one service via LuLu.com, and it sounded very promising.

Basically, you self-publish your book, submit it in a PDF or Adobe Illustrator format, and then you set up a shop. When people come to your shop and purchase your book, LuLu will print it “on-demand” in a custom book size and cover type you specify. The best part: they also send it to the customer for you and take care of the printing, shipping and they also handle your cash flow too. Pretty freaking cool! And I still think it is, but there are a few reasons why I didn’t end up using this method.

Here is a screenshot from LuLu.com’s cost calculator that is similar to the size of the eBook I published.

This would be how much it would cost for 1 copy of the book. Note that the pages are front and back, so the total number of pages here is actually 186 (My guide is about this size). This doesn’t include any special services LuLu offers, like designing a cover, editing services, getting an ISBN number, etc.

$9.20 goes to LuLu.com for every one book I sell. My profit depends on my retail price. If I set it at $29.95, for example, I’d earn about $20.00 profit for each book. Not bad at all, especially with no inventory, no shipping and little hassle.

So what’s wrong with this model?

Nothing is wrong with the on-demand model, but there are a few things I liked better about selling an electronic book from my own website:

I ordered a couple sample books from LuLu.com (a couple fiction stories and a sudoku puzzle book) and the quality was just ok. Also, I did some research on the PDF (or AI format) to hard copy book conversion process, and it takes a little while to make sure all the settings are correct to get the right looking final product.
I wasn’t too excited about setting up a storefront on LuLu.com to sell my book either. This meant that people would be directed from my site to a page on LuLu.com where the “purchase” button is located” and I probably wouldn’t be able to customize much. By selling an eBook from my site, the potential customer feels like they are always with my site with less steps involved (the buy now button is on my website). Remember, the less steps that are involved between when a customer is interested in your product and the purchase page, the less chance there is for the customer to leave (aka. bounce).
Why give away $9.20, when I could keep that all for myself. The electronic book model I wanted to setup handles all the transactions and deliveries automatically too, and I get to keep almost 100% of the sale price for profit. So, for every $29.95 book I sell, I get to put $29.95 into my pocket (less about a dollar for fees). Over hundreds of books, that adds up to a lot of money. In total, I’ve sold about 3000 books, so if I had gone with the on-demand method, I would have “lost” $27,600 (since my book does actually sell for $29.95).

And The Winner Is…

So obviously you know already that I chose to write an eBook

My next post will be about how exactly I created a final eBook product for sale. You’ll be interested to know that you can very easily get started on your own today. After you have your idea, the first step is to just start writing in your favorite word processing software (like Word), like I did! It’s easy!

More about my eBook journey to success to come…enjoy!

Passive Income Tools of the Trade

Pat — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:59:59 +0000

I thought it would be helpful to create a resource page that you can always come to for all of your passive income needs. I’ll add to it as I learn more, but you’ll notice that in the future I will reference this page quite often. I recommend bookmarking it for your reference and convenience. Enjoy!

Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links to products that will earn me a commission. These are all things that I have experience with that I am recommending because they are helpful and are companies that I trust, not because of the commissions that I may earn from you using these products.

Blogging

WordPress: The #1 Blog Publishing Platform. Free and easily customizable with wonderful support. All of my blogs use WordPress.
WordPress Plugins: Download any plugins, widgets, or customizable elements for your WordPress blog.
Woo Themes: The ultimate resource for premium looking WordPress themes.
Revolution 2: Another resource for premium WordPress themes.

Hosting

Bluehost: All of my websites are hosted using Bluehost. Easy to use, 1-click automatic WordPress installation, and good customer service.
PowWeb: Another fantastic and easy to use hosting service. Also includes 1-click WordPress installation.
Amazon S3: The Amazon Simple Storage Service. Reliable internet storage, which is great for putting large files like podcasts and videos, so you don’t create bandwidth problems on your own website.

Product Distribution & Shopping Carts

E-Junkie: The shopping cart I use to sell my eBook. It’s compatible with Paypal Standard, Paypal Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, TrialPay, Clickbank & 2CheckOut. Works like a charm, very low price to use. Comes with a decent affiliate program for your products.
Clickbank: Another digital products retailer. Probably the most popular. Decently priced, but comes with an amazing affiliate program for your products.
Paypal.com: Paypal is just ok for selling your own products through them, but you’ll need an account anyways to configure with and accept payments from the above shopping carts.

Keyword Research

WordTracker Free Keywords Tool: Spits out a number for the popularity of a keyword of your choice. Search volume numbers can be compared to find the perfect niche, or to choose keywords for your blog posts.
Google Adwords Tool: A tool to help you decide what keywords to use for your Adwords campaigns. You can also check to see the popularity of certain keywords and the competition for ads for those keywords as well.
Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool: Another fantastic keyword research tool, with even more information and numbers to compare and select the perfect keywords.

Advertising Stuff

Google Adsense: Make money by placing relevant ads on your website that are generated from advertisers using Google Adwords. This is free to use, but you have to register for an account.
Google Adwords: If you want to begin advertising on Google, you can select keywords and locations and you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement.

Email Subscriptions & Marketing

Aweber: The internet’s most powerful email opt-in service and email marketing/broadcasting tool.

Testing Results

Google Analytics: Google’s free website tracking and analytical tool. A must have for anyone with any type of website.
Clicktale: You can use clicktale to watch actual recordings of how people use your website. It is actually like watching their own computer screen, so you can then optimize your website if you don’t like what you see. You can view a small sample of website viewers for free. It will cost more for a larger sample.
Google Optimizer: This is another free tool from google where you can test different webpages of the same content, only changing one or two things, so you can see which one works/converts best. It’s basically a website optimizer testing tool.

Outsourcing Work

Elance: Hired service for just about anything you can think of.
Odesk: Another outsource website for freelancers, IT companies, programmers and web designers from abroad.
99Designs: This is a unique website that you can use if you need a logo design. It’s in a contest format. You submit the description of what you want, and designers will compete against each other to win money.

Health Insurance

eHealthInsurance: Here, you enter your information, and it generates a number of different health care plans for your particular situation with a variety of different prices and specifications.
The National Association for the Self-Employed: NASE has a variety of different benefits to it’s members, including a unique, customizable health insurance plan for the self-employed.

Legal Stuff

LegalZoom: Easy online incorporation or LLC creation.

Books

The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich: Pretty much the most awesome book in the entire world. I reference this quite a bit in my posts.
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse: The best book about blogging from the number one online blogger, Darren Rowse.
Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanik Silver: I also own this book and it’s really what insipired me to go full time working online. I finished it in 1 day because it’s so good.

For eHow Users

If you can think of any more great tools and resources, please feel free to leave a comment below. I will review it and add it to the list.

A Little Known Way To Increase Your Product Sales

Pat — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:37:50 +0000

I love doing business online. There are so many advantages that we have over other kinds of businesses, such as being able to automate almost everything, and having our “front doors” open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to the entire world. It’s truly an amazing thing, and if you’re doing business online, you’re giving yourself a great chance to succeed. Another advantage we have, is something called continuation.

Continuation is the ability to keep customers or readers after the first point of sale or action has occurred. For example, if you had a newsletter on your website, that’s one way you can continue to connect with people after they have subscribed. Another example is if you sold a product to someone, you could easily contact them again to provide them new information or sell them something else.

Just Ask

While I was taking a gander at my October Passive Income Report, I was thinking about how my 300+ eBook customers were doing with their new purchase. Were they satisfied? Did they love it? Did it actually help them? I honestly didn’t know, but I really wanted to find out. So, I just asked them!

With the services I use to automate everything for me, I am able to send out a newsletter style email to each one of my buyers at my disposal. That’s continuation. I sent a newsletter to each of my buyers asking them what their opinions were about their my book. I sent it and went out for lunch. When I got back an hour later, I was amazed to see more than 10 responses waiting for me in my mailbox.

I was a little scared, but after reading each one, I’m delighted to say that they were all really positive responses. Here is my favorite:

“As you probably know, I purchased the walk through Friday night. Since then, I printed and read the entire publication and it is exactly what I was looking for. I previously printed the credit summaries from your website but the way your walk through summarizes them is more concise and more to the point. I also like the way you emphasize key points that we should pay extra attention to in preparation for the exam…So to finally answer your email, the walk through seems great. I will make it my bible for the next 5 weeks. Bottom line – it’s the best 25 bucks I spent in a long time. Thanks for everything. I will definitely keep you apprised of my progress and results.”

Taking Advantage

It always makes me happy to read such things about the work I’ve done. But do you know who else likes to read things like this? Future customers.

That’s right, potential buyers LOVE to read testimonials. If you are selling something online, and you don’t have testimonials for it, get some and place them all over your landing page. Now.

To give you an example, I took this testimonial and a few others and sprinkled them throughout my landing page. After a week of testing, I’ve noticed a 5% jump in sales in just the first week. 5% may not seem like a lot, but after a quick calculation, that’s an extra ~$400 a month. It only took me about 10 minutes to send out that email and another 5 to put the testimonials on my landing page. 15 minutes for 400 bucks…sweet.

So the moral of the story is: testimonials will help you sell.

About Testimonials

I know it can be really tempting to make up your own testimonials, but really – you shouldn’t. Most people can tell when a testimonial is fake or real, so do yourself a favor, and find some real ones.

Here are some helpful tips on how to get some good, legitimate testimonials on your website:

Give away a few of your products to some of your trusted colleagues in exchange for a testimonial.
Send out a newsletter or email, like I did, asking for their opinions on your product. When asking for their opinion, you can also include some or all of the following statements:
- What are your initial thoughts about [your product]?
- Please tell me what you like about [your product], and what you dislike about it.
- Would you recommend [your product] to anyone else to help them [goal or solution]?
- What would you suggest to improve [your product]? (This isn’t for your testimonial, this is just for your information so you can make your product better.)
Make sure you file all of your testimonials into a dedicated folder. You may not need to use all of them at once, but if you ever wanted to rotate them to give your landing page some new spice, or maybe test different ones, having a central location where they are all located can really help.

Thee are just a few tips and suggestions based on my own experience. I’ve also read a lot of great tips on Copyblogger.com about testimonials too. You should definitely read these to help you even more if you’re serious about getting some good testimonials:

If you sell anything, or even if you only own a blog – try and get a testimonial or two to help boost your sales and or readership. Good luck!

The #1 Tip for Starting an Ebook Is…

Pat — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:28:19 +0000

Write your outline first! The easiest and most beneficial thing that you will ever do to prepare yourself to easily crank out that ebook you’ve been thinking of writing for the past 3 months is to write yourself an outline.

It may seem like an obvious thing to do, but numerous people have emailed me asking how they should get started. We all have an urge to dive right into writing, but all too often after the first few pages – we get stuck. Follow the advice here to help build yourself the perfect outline foundation for your upcoming success.

What Good Does an Outline Do?

There are many reasons you should hold back from writing your content and first start with an outline.

An outline will:

break down the entire book into smaller, manageable pieces. Each section or subsection can be treated as a different “article”, kind of like in a blog, that can be written on it’s own. This way, you can check off articles you have finished, see which one’s you have left, and when all of the articles are complete – your ebook is practically ready for sale.
give you an easy way to create a completion schedule.
help you visualize the order of progression in your book. It makes it easier to see if things are out of order and should be moved around.
organize the ideas in your head on paper. You can easily tell if any parts should be omitted or added to increase the value of the information in the book.
tell you what other things you can write about if you get writer’s block while writing a particular section. (See #2)
give you a visual roadmap for success right in front of your eyes.

An Example Ebook Outline

First, I’m going to make up an ebook that I could write. I’m going to expand on the idea of sack lunches based on ideas from my mind map exercise.

Now before I get into the outline, I’ll just tell you why I chose sack lunches. For one, everybody eats lunches. Secondly, everybody wants to save money. Thirdly, everyone wants to be healthy. If i wrote about about sack lunches, highlighting the money saved and healthy easy-to-make recipes – I could have a good selling ebook.

Now, I haven’t done any further research, which I’ll talk about later – but this post is only about the outline, so this is what my “Sack Lunches” outline would look like:

TITLE: Something about Sack Lunches (Don’t get caught up in finding the perfect title right away. I’d actually recommend saving this for last. The focus of your book could easily change as you write.)

Introduction: who am I, who am I writing for, why write this, what value does the book have to the reader

Table of Contents

Section 1: Why Sack Lunches

Subsection 1: Money

eating out costs a lot

statistics, personal experience, interviews

gas money to drive at lunch

potential to save lots of money

personal experience, interviews

grocery store vs. dining-out prices

Subsection 2: Time

eating out costs us time

normal lunch hour and productivy stats

stress levels

other things to do during your lunch hour

Subsection 3: Health

eating out can be really unhealthy

statistics and reports, interview

benefits of eating healthy

productivity

energy and life at home

Section 2: The Recipes

Subsection 1: Sandwiches

recipes

Subsection 2: Comfort Foods

recipes

Subsection 3: Pastas

recipes

Subsection 4: International Foods

recipes

Subsection 5: Salads

recipes

Subsection 6: Soups

recipes

Subsection 7: Vegetarian

recipes

Subsection 8: Healthy side dishes

recipes

Section 3: How to Package Your Sack Lunch

Plastic vs. Foil

Lunch Boxes

lunch box history

sample lunch boxes

the most expensive lunchbox story

Section 4: How to Stick with the Plan

How to make a lunch schedule

How to make your weekly lunches on Sunday night

How to get other’s to join you for lunch at work

Section 5: Conclusion

Section 6: About the Author

Again I’d like to emphasize that you don’t have to write your book in the order that it’s going to be read. As you can see above, it could be very easy for me to write any of these “articles” on it’s own, and just save it for the completed product later.

Now, I have to say that even while creating this outline and looking at the flow of the book – I came up with an even better idea. Instead of breaking the recipes down into types (pastas, sandwiches, etc.) if I instead created “weekly sack lunch recipe” that had 5 related items that highlighted a single grocery store visit each week, that could be even more beneficial.

Again, this is just a made up ebook, but you can see how even while writing an outline, your book could become even better.

So before you start writing, be smart and create an outline.

Ask the Reader:

Can you think of any other benefits to first writing an outline for an ebook?

The Methods of Making Money From an Informational Product

Pat — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 22:01:10 +0000

Everybody wants information. This is why we search on Google, watch the news, read non-fiction, ask for help, etc. Consequentially, providing useful information online is the best and easiest way to make money on the internet. Everyone is looking for information, so if you can provide it you have the ability to profit. Think about how much time you spend online each day. How much of that time are you looking for answers or information? Probably a majority.

There are many different methods that you can use to give information to people and generate an income at the same time. Each method has a unique way of organizing the information and the user experience is different as a result. A lot of profitable websites sometimes provide their visitors with a combination of more than one of these methods. Think about which of the following method(s) would best suit you for your niche. (in no particular order):

A Blog

A blog, short for “web-log”, is a great way to easily organize your information online because the blogging platform does all of the organizing for you. This website, for instance, is a blog. Whenever I want, I can log into my WordPress account, write in the “new post” area, click Publish and the website updates automatically.

It’s quick and easy, and the best part is that you can set up a Blog for free. There are many different blogging platforms, but the most popular seem to be WordPress.com and Blogger.com, so check those out if you would like more detailed information about blogging.

Pros:

Easy to start, edit and manage your content
Builds an online community with your readers
Establishes you as an expert in your field
Blog can be used to promote a product of yours (i.e. an Ebook)
Can be free

Cons:

There may be many similar blogs in the same niche already (how will you be different?)
It takes time (sometimes months or years) to establish yourself as an expert
Requires upkeep and constant attention to update content and respond to comments

How money is made:

Advertising. (Google Adsense, Text-Link Ads, Private Advertising, etc.)
Affiliate Links (Linking to a particular book and getting paid for leading a sale. Amazon.com for example)
Donations. Yes, if you provide useful information and a donation button, some people may be kind enough to donate to your cause.

Helpful Links:

9 Little Known Traits of Successful Bloggers at Copyblogger.com
How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs at Problogger.net
How to Get Started with a Blog (and why all writers should) at WritingforyourWealth.com

EBooks

An Ebook, or electronic book, is also a fantastic way to organize information and distribute it to people. Usually Ebooks come in an EXE or PDF format and can be easily viewed on most computers. Ebooks are becoming even more popular today, especially with Amazon.com’s new Ebook reading device, “The Kindle,” out on the market.

Pros:

If you write and sell it yourself, there is no printing press to pay (it’s electronic, no paper!), no publishers and no retailers to take a chunk of the profit. Practically 100% of each sale is all yours.
There’s little or no upkeep once it’s finished.
It can earn you money for a time.
It’s easy to set up an affiliate program to have other websites sell your book for you too.

Cons:

An Ebook can take a lot of time to write.
It’s difficult to sell an Ebook from scratch. In other words, if you don’t have an established audience already (i.e. from a blog or membership website), finding people to purchase your book can be a challenge.
Once the Ebook is published and is sold, the information inside cannot be updated if, for example, something you wrote has become outdated. This is why you’ll see different editions or versions of books come out sometimes.

How Money is Made:

Visitors click on a “Buy Now” button on your website, which takes them to a form to fill out with their billing information. After processing, money is put into your account.
Clickbank.com and E-Junkie.com are the top two methods of selling electronic files online. I prefer E-Junkie, because they will also deliver the product for you, and they don’t take any money from your sales. Clickbank, however, has a better affiliate program, which is also important.
If you start an affiliate program, you can find affiliates who will sell your Ebook for you off of their website. You pay your affiliates a small “finder’s fee” for bringing in the sale.
Through an ebook distributing website such as Amazon or Ebooks.com.

Helpful Links:

How to Create Ebooks That Sell at Copyblogger.com
11 Tried and Tested Strategies To Market Your Ebook at BloggingBits.com
How to Create and Publish Your Own Ebook with a $0 Budget at SkellieWag.org

Membership Sites

A membership site is a website that can be accessed with a password. People usually pay a one time or monthly fee to become a member and gain access to the information inside. I think membership sites are a powerful way to generate an income online, and I’m hoping to get involved with this very soon.

Pros:

Immediately creates a sense of membership and community within the site.
Continuously updating and providing information in this way can guarantee that people will stick around and keep feeding you money each month.
As an owner and administrator of a membership site, you’re immediately seen as “the expert”. This is powerful because it can help you bring more members in, and also have the ability to easily sell things to the members you already have. (Although, you should never become too greedy!)
The payment system in a membership website, and is kind of a snowball effect. For instance, month one, you have 10 paying members. The next month, you gain 10 more paying members, for a total of 20 paying members.

Cons:

Creating a membership site definitely takes a lot of hard work, time, and effort. You want to make sure that you are able to give your members what they are paying for. If you don’t, they’ll feel betrayed and leave.
Again, it can be difficult to bring in members if you don’t have an established audience or reputation already. Some money may be needed to invest in marketing the membership website to be able to get it off the ground before it takes off.
Although money is generated automatically, you can’t just dissapear and leave the content static. It’s reassuring to the members if new there is new stuff available every once and a while, which is good because it decreases the potential number of cancellations.

How Money is Made:

Members will be charged a one-time lifetime fee or a monthly fee for access to the information on the site.

Helpful Links:

The Continuity Snowball at Continuityblueprint.com (warning: 30 minute video, but it’s worth it)

In addition to the methods above, you can also sell tools and templates, newsletters, audio or visual products, and learning methods.

As you can see, you have a lot of options to choose from. You can also combine two or more of the metods to create an even bigger resource for people – it’s really up to you and what you feel most comfortable with.

If you are in no rush to make money, I would recommend starting with a blog, building readership and trust, and then sell an ebook or start a membership program to take your informational marketing to the next level.