We hear from dozens of people each month who are either in the planning stages, developing or have already taken the plunge to write an ebook.
A very common question is where do you find the content for your own ebook if you know something about a topic but not enough to complete your ebook – oh yes, and of course, you want to get it written fast!
I’ve never been an advocate of writing a bunch of ebooks on topics that you know nothing about – even though it can be done, it doesn’t make a great deal of strategic marketing sense when you understand that an ebook is often the lead-in to a much more profitable back-end business that requires greater degrees of knowledge and specialization.
Put simply, if you spend all of your time writing $27 ebooks about topics you know very little about, then you are missing out on the $397, $997 and $5,000 back end products and services you could produce if you work in a market that you know more about or are active in.
Of course, even those that have solid knowledge in a certain topic often have to figure out how to fill in the blanks – to find content that they are missing.
Here is a 4-Step Process to Finding Content When Writing Your Own Ebook
The real secret to quickly adding valuable, in-demand content to your ebook is to make sure you have discovered the valuable, in-demand questions your market want answered.
Investigate discussion forums, think about the question behind magazine article titles in your field, look at what your competition is answering.
Once you have the questions, then the answers become your content…you can:
1. Research web to find various answers – even use services like Yahoo answers to get your content
2. Research offline – local library, bookstore…I can’t tell you how many hours (and cafe latte’s I’ve downed) studying what has already been written allowing me to become more knowledgeable and better able to formulate my own opinion on a topic.
3. Interview others who do know about your market – they could be experts, or merely participants who can give you answers to your questions
4. Outsource the content development of some or all of your questions.
By using these 4 techniques for finding content to write an ebook, you can get your content within hours or days instead of taking months or even years to become an expert on your topic.
Jeff
