Operating the leading mentoring site for e-book writers and information marketers we obviously get a truckload of questions around how you can write an ebook from scratch and succeed.
In many cases people come to us with some history, a passion, a life experience, past career success, a professional client base, or some spark that ignites their interest in enhancing their income and market presence by writing an ebook or book.
But, is it smart to just jump right in with the first ebook idea you have and spend the next few weeks producing your product, or is there a better way to write your ebook…a way that makes your chance of earning a tidy profit that much better?
Having years of experience writing and operating information product businesses in several niche markets and helping hundreds of others to do the same, there is a way to get started that is simple, smart, low-risk, that significantly improves your chances of getting it right the first time.
Write Your First (Or Next) E-Book This Way…
Instead of jumping right in and spending hours, days and weeks putting together your ebook uncertain if it will ever sell or earn you a profit, a better approach is to start with an outline, test the content and based on the feedback and pent-up interest from your target market, successfully launch your own high-profit ebook to the market you have already waiting for your product.
How do you do that?
Follow these 3 steps:
1. Outline a product you believe would help your target market the best…if you have chosen the fitness niche (for example), you outline a program that you feel BEST addresses a burning desire within that market – perhaps how middle-age men can regain control of their weight and get back that 25-year old form. You would outline a series of steps, tips, techniques used to reach that objective and a set of potential obstacles and how they can avoid or overcome them.
Now, because you are not confident yet in that topic, your content or if you can reach that market…you simply stick to 1-2 hour outlining exercise for now.
The outline will be a guide NOT for your ebook (not just yet), but will act as a guide for content you will develop over the next couple of weeks.
2. Start a blog and begin to create content aligned to your outline, this will accomplish several things for you
a) Get some initial traffic and readership
b) Give you insight into which topics and blog posts get you the most readership and participation (very valuable feedback you can use to fine-tune your info product)
c) Provide some content you can -re-use in your ebook
d) Can be used to start building a list…using your blog as jumping off point to eventual sales funnel
Day 1, you blog about the step 1 in regaining control of your weight as a middle aged-man. Day 2, you cover some of the basics around slowing metabolism and how that leads to weight gain. Day 3 you cover the role stress plays in middle-age weight gain, etc…
Over the course of 2-3 weeks you will have a couple dozen posts that will begin to attract traffic, gain you loyal readers/visitors, provide some comments and feedback, allow you to track the stats of how many visits each post gets, etc…all very valuable to you assessing the commercial value and angle of an ebook you will launch around this topic.
3. When you have a better sense for which content is hitting the mark, you can package that into your first spin at an ebook – continue to develop your blog and let it feed your ebook business. If your content is NOT hitting the mark (little traffic, no participation, short visit times, etc…) then you can either tweak your formula for writing the content or determine this may not be the best ebook idea at this time, move on to the next idea…it only takes one hot topic to really get your ebook business humming.
This method of combining blogs (supported by social sharing) and writing ebooks is an extremely powerful pairing that will take the risk out of writing your own ebook and dramatically improve your profit potential.
