How to Create, Market and Sell an eBook for Branding & Profits

These last few months have been pretty big for me, with the fact that I’m no longer taking on new clients (and ending work with current clients) I’ve been able to focus more time on the blog and helping others through the information I have to offer. One drawback to that though is the financial pain you feel when you aren’t getting a nice monthly income.

Apart from other sites that I run which help top up my bank balance, I’ve been in the business of creating and selling eBook’s, most notably to you guys with my guide to Online Reputation Management. In this post, I’m going to look at the exact steps I took (which you can replicate) to make a very tidy income and increase my authority online.

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Creation

When I first decided I want to create (another) eBook, It was mainly for 3 reasons:

• I had something to say
• I wanted to position myself as an authority on a topic
• eBooks can be a great income stream

If you are just doing it for the money, then I promise that it is going to be a very tough and boring experience, I have a lot of knowledge on the subject of Online Reputation Management (ORM) so it wasn’t too difficult to write over 80 pages about it in a few weeks. Ideally, you should pick a topic you are passionate about as it will keep the experience fun and you should have some unique information to share or have an intriguing angle on information already out there.

I understand that some people create eBooks to simply make money i.e. hire others to write it, create a landing page and then promote it via PPC. And while it can be a great revenue model, that is not me and not what I’m talking about in this post. I wanted to make something thorough and authoritative, similar to what the SEO Book was in the SEO industry. Not only would this help me sell copies but it would help me achieve my other goal as positioning myself as an expert on the subject.

In terms of actually writing the information I picked up a copy of OpenOffice, it is free to download and comes with a great feature that allows you to export to PDF (and keep links) for easy creation. I spent about 2 months putting everything together, mostly due to time constraints with work. I actually think it would be wise for anyone doing the same to do small bits at a time so you don’t get frustrated thinking about the project ahead and just give up.

Marketing

In terms of marketing the eBook (over 40 sales at $19 in one month) I used a number of very common methods; I’m not going to pretend these are groundbreaking but it should help you market your own if you are in that stage of creation.

1. - Using Your Voice - What I mean by this is by mentioning the eBook on places where I have an audience. If you are already being social online this shouldn’t be too difficult. I was able to promote the eBook on this blog where I have over 400 feed subscribers, on twitter where I have over 300 followers and on other networks such as Facebook where I am very active.

2. - Giving away Review Copies - Because I’ve already built up some form of reputation, people thought that the product I was giving away would be of decent if not excellent quality. To help even more people know about this I utilised the audiences of other blogs by giving away a copy for a review or link on the person’s website. This worked out well with 7 links from very popular blogs which have thousands of feed subscribers that helped get the word out.

Another thing I like about the PDF model is that unlike services, you can show what you’ve got without doing any extra work; I simply had to email my creation in order to get the reviews which meant doing practically nothing on my end. Wiep covered this in great detail on his post about link building strategies, you should also check out the rest of his blog as he has some great link building tips.

3. - Sprinkling Promotion - By ’sprinkling’ I mean sprinkling the product via small effort marketing around the web which may increase more sales. Such examples of sprinkling include:

• Promoting to an email list / newsletter
• Posting the product on relevant forums
• Driving traffic to the page via PPC
• Paying for reviews on blogs
• Create & rank a landing page for relevant keywords in search engines

All of these methods can help you promote your eBook and the little things you do can turn into much bigger results where sales are concerned. The main sales drivers for me where utilising my voice and giving away review copies.

I’ve also just launched an affiliate option so that others can get paid to promote the item. I haven’t done many of the sprinkling tactics but even doing one of these effectively can have some massive results so try them out.

Selling

Once you have the product and a hungry audience, you need a way to distribute the product. You could use the old manual way of having people paypal you the money and then you send them the product once the email has gone through, but that was too slow for me. I wanted an automated solution so first took at a look at Payloadz, needless to say the service is poor and they have some methods I despise so I decided to use e-junkie who have been fantastic. You can use the word CRAFTBOOM to get 3 months service for free.

$80 in 4 days isn’t bad when there is no work involved

With e-junkie I’m able to upload the eBook, set a price, and have it integrated directly with paypal without doing anything. Once a purchase has been confirmed, e-junkie will then automatically email the product to the buyer, to help prevent fraud you can set limitations on how many times they can download the file and within how many hours.

You may also want to look at promoting your product with services like Clickbank or dealing with a JV (Joint Venture) partner who can help push your product to their audience whilst taking a cut.

In Summary

My personal method of only creating eBook’s on topics I’m personally interested in is not necessarily the way you have to go. I did briefly mention that some people hire others to do all the work while they are the brains of the business that make a profit, just take a look at Andrew and Daryl Grant who are making $250,000 a year doing this.

As a result of the hard work that I’ve put in with creating information products and building up my brand, I was able to make over $1,000 in May doing absolutely nothing. You see, once you have a product out there you can keep on selling it and selling it, part of the reason I no longer offer services. You don’t spread yourself thinly by trying to give more and more people your personal time; instead you can give them a product that fills a need, whatever it may be.