The thought of having our own ebook and selling it online as a new profit stream is not just a dream for many, it becomes an obsession.
More and more we hear stories of working people who have spent years dreaming of writing a book or ebook and suddenly, within months that dream has come true…some achieving incredible heights of success with their very first ebook.
The key message though is that everyone who completes their first ebook acknowledges that the second one will be MUCH easier, having learned several lessons on the first go-around.
What Is Standing In The Way Of Your Own Ebook?
Standing in our way though are some pretty significant hurdles, not the least of which come from within.
For instance…the assumption is always that writing an ebook and selling it online will take months of work and may be beyond your ability in the first place.
That thought can be quickly dealt with by understanding the step-by-step system for picking your ebook topic and then using the powerful outlining system shared in a system like The Ultimate Information Entrepreneur’s Success Package – even the most ambitious ebook projects can be completed in 30-days or less.
The next challenge is how we can test or estimate the profit potential in a given market and ebook idea or topic we may have.
What if we had an idea to write an ebook about helping our kids learn faster or helping teens better manage stress…how can we be more certain that these topics will make us money?
Having written dozens of ebooks over the last 14-years, we have gotten pretty good at reading markets – we do this using 5 primary methods…
1. Study Amazon
You can get a read on sales rank of books and Kindle ebooks paying special attention to when the book was released, comments, recent sales, etc…This is incredible valuable information.
Imagine walking into your competitor’s store and everything in the store is marked with a sales rank that indicates the relative qty of that item that has sold over the last few months. That’s exactly what Amazon sales rank is giving you…a read on which books in which categories are selling best. How easy is that?
2.Google Search Is Your Friend
Do Google search for “my niche” + ebook, + dvd, +seminar +report +course, etc… I like to enter markets where there is the opportunity to go higher-end, not just ebook but something larger back-end so I try and prove demand on higher-end as well. If you struggle to find quality examples against these searches then that tells you something is off in terms of your keywords which may mean your topic needs to be adjusted.
3.Study Top Authority Sites In Your Niche
Look at top authority sites in that niche and see what they are selling (as affiliates). It stands to reason that well established sites have gotten that way partially because they have done a good job in monetizing their sites. Look at what they are selling for clues into proven demand and proven top sellers. Sort of feels like detective work doesn’t it?
4.Other E-Commerce Platforms For Books and Ebooks
Amazon is the grand-daddy for sure, but don’t ignore niche demand triggers provided by sales rank and popularity on e-commerce platforms like Clickbank, Commission Junction, Ejunkie and Lulu.com You can find some interesting and highly profitable sub-niches within these platforms that can be extremely profitable.
5. Test And See…Adjust For Demand
Incredibly, we now live at a time when launching a free blog right from within your web hosts control panel can be done in minutes, leverage free or low cost themes or templates and voila, you have a fully operational website waiting for your content. Blogs lend themselves to daily activity – blog your opinions, tips, insights, news, or hot resources and soon you will be attracting some decent traffic to your site.
From there you can test your ebook topics by running traffic to lead capture page and then test different offers – sometimes affiliate offers to pre-test the topic, sometimes my own report for $5 or $7 before digging into something more involved and ramping up marketing.
There is absolutely no excuse for not being able to find or be relatively certain that your ebook topic will be in demand and sell online. Do you have an ebook idea you can run through these 5-steps? Leave us a comment and let us know how your ebook project is coming along.
