ebook

Most sites are disappointed by the nickels and dimes that come in from advertising. If your site gets massive amounts of traffic, it can work, but if not, you’ll want to find a much more profitable source of revenue.

But most of us find that it’s not all that easy to translate high-quality content from your blog into a high-quality product for sale.

Four or five years ago, you could have slammed together an ebook over the weekend and created a decent income with it. But in the current environment, buyers are more careful with their money, and you’ve got an awful lot of competition.

The good news is, most of your competitors still think it’s 2003, and most of their products are astoundingly lame. And there are still lots of buyers who need to solve their most pressing problems.

So there are still plenty of opportunities to monetize with an ebook. But it has to be terrific.

So what makes a terrific ebook?

For an ebook to work in this climate, it needs to:

  • Solidly address the problems, concerns, or desires of a well-defined target market. Vague, fluffy or irrelevant junk isn’t going to cut it.
  • Be a meaningful extension of the relationship you’ve already created with your audience.
  • Stake out a compelling position in the marketplace.
  • Reflect the confidence of top-notch content.
  • Provide an exceptional return on investment for buyers.
  • Be supported by an intelligent marketing system that fuels your customers’ need to buy.

The enemy of the successful ebook

So to create an ebook that works today, you’ve got a few more steps to take.

First you’ve got to research your market. Then you need to build a list and drive buying readers to your blog. (There can be a big difference between fans and customers.) Then research, outline, and actually write the book. And then you’ve got to figure out the whole launch thing: creating buzz, recruiting and managing affiliates, writing a sales page.

We bloggers are pretty good at taking action. We can do any of these things individually. And to tell you the truth, none of them is all that hard.

But take them all together and we find ourselves overwhelmed.

Before we know it, it’s been six months or a year, and we’re still trying to make it happen. Not because it’s beyond our abilities, but because without a detailed map, it’s easy to get lost in the process.

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