What to do with an ebook
June 6, 2007
When I started traveling in March I started working on a new eBook. I haven’t done much on it since I left Thailand, but just looked at it again today. While perusing the Lonely Planet’s travel forum last night in the living abroad forum, I thought again about the ebook and how it could appeal to people wanting to live and travel overseas while making money.
It is getting to a point where people are not surprisingly fairly skeptical about making money ebooks. I have only had one sale this of the ebooks I created last year. The options I have is to give it away free and try to make money from including affiliate links, like what John Chow recently did with his money making ebook or at least try to capture a person’s email address before they can download it, so I can at least build my own email list.
I have never been a fan of email lists, but if you go to any internet conference, people will judge you not by what exciting things you might be doing on the internet, but by the size of your list.
I have written over 20 pages of the ebook now and looking over it today, I think it is getting to a point where I could release it.
Japan working and living guide
August 1, 2006
My latest ebook has finally gone live. You can buy it from: expatjapan.com.
I think even the domain itself could have some value.
To submit multiple products with clickbank you only have to pay the $50 once. The instructions are a little unclear in this regard.
Ebook submitted to clickbank
July 29, 2006
Following up on my goal of getting my next ebook finished this week, I finally made the final touches to the pdf and made the landing and purchase pages.
I am using clickbank again. I think the only reason why you would use clickbank is to take advantage of the affiliate program option. It costs $50 for each product you sell in clickbank, which you would need to sell a few ebooks to recover the costs.
I was under the wrong impression that the original $50 was for an unlimited number of products! It takes up to 3 business days to get approval, so I might just be able to get it live by next week.
Update: Actually you only have to pay $50 once for multiple products. I wish clickbank was a little clearer on this.
First full ebook sale
July 25, 2006
I made my first non-affiliate sale today with Clickbank! I can now submit my product into the Clickbank marketplace. I am not sure if this will have any effect on future sales, but it is exciting to have made at least one full sale.
To stay in the marketplace, you need to sell at least one product a month. I am hoping at the minimum to be able to achieve this.
My next ebook is almost complete. I really want to submit it for approval by the end of this week. I have even more confidence with this next one.
There is a lot of discussion going on in the forums over the changes Google has made with landing page websites. You really need to be familiar with these changes if you are using Adwords to promote a single sales page.
July Goal
July 18, 2006
I am currently working madly on my next eBook. I have looked at a few related products on the market and it should be fairly unique. It is not a very exciting topic and the subject matter won’t surprise readers of this blog. My goal is to get it complete by the end of this month, before I go away on holidays in August.
Day off from work
July 14, 2006
Japan has a public holiday this coming Monday, so I am having a four day weekend. I am getting ready now to go off to the bank. It is pretty hot and humid here today. I will probably follow that with a trip to the book store, gym and then the local pool, with a bit of blogging in between. It is amazing how the day can get away from when you don’t have a fixed shedule, but then again having a day off is pretty rare for me, so I think I can be forgiven for kicking back a bit.
For my summer holiday I am off to Thailand. For me, a relaxing holiday has to be in a warm climate by the beach. I am still thinking whether I should take my laptop. I figure that even though I am holiday, I will have time to do some writing while waiting for planes/buses/ferries. I also find I can write better if I am in a different environment.
First eBook with Clickbank
June 24, 2006
I have uploaded my first eBook to Clickbank. There is a one-off charge of $50 to add a product, so I will need to sell at least two books to get in the black with this new venture.
You can check out my fairly crappy sales page I made last week here. It still needs a bit of work which I will revisit at a later time.
You can sell it on your site if anyone is interested. Sign up here.
I just counted all of my link sales with Linkworth and I am now up to $480 a month!
First Clickbank product
June 22, 2006
I have submitted my first product to Clickbank. I received a reply back from them with a couple of things I needed to fix up with my sales and “thank you” page.
I don’t think that I will doing any heavy PPC advertising with it. I think I will probably just put some links up on my own sites and also try it push the affiliate angle.
The content should stay fairly relevant and shouldn’t need too much updating, so I am hoping it will turn out to be a nice, quiet passive earner for me.
I have created another 1 page sales page for another idea I am working on. I have been trying to promote it with Adwords. Up until now I have most relied on sites getting free organic traffic, so it is an interesting experience.
I know that sales pages are created just so someone will either sign up to a newsletter, or buy a product, but I am really tempted to add a blog/forum. When you have been creating sites centered around SEF content, it is not easy changing tactics like this.
Podcast on selling eBooks
June 12, 2006
I must say I truly underestimated eBooks. I could never understand why people would pay money for information they could generally get for free on the Internet.
The fact that eBooks are so successful, goes to show that not everything is freely available, or at least it is not in an easily consumable format. I also wonder, what is the percentage of people who buy ebooks so they can print it out in an easy to read format. Going from the people in my office, I believe this is probably very high.
Yaro has a very fine interview with an Australian lady who with her husband has made over $250,000 from selling ebooks.
I believe the important points from the interview interview are:
- research your market before you do any writing
- find a niche that people need information on - an inch wide, a mile deep
The interview is part one of a two part interview. I am very keen to hear part two, to hopefully pick up some ebook marketing tips.
I suppose I am going through a bit of an ebook fad at the moment and currently working on two new books. I have already made the first mistake of not researching the market well enough first.
One is a Tokyo guide and another is on how I made money on eBay. eBay is a totally saturated market, but I believe I can capitalize on a niche area. I doubt that my books will be a raging success, but the beauty of ebooks is that it is totally passive income. Once you have written it, it is all pure profit thereafter. Of course you will need to update it occasionally, but as long you aren’t writing about technology type of stuff, updates do not have to be too big.
The other advantage of ebooks over regular published books, is that they never go out of print!
