How to make money selling e-books

The internet is a big market, big enough to make money in, even if your business exists only in remote places cyberspace. With an online presence to market your product, you can keep selling a single product over and over again without any need to re-stock.

Virtual products like e-books are the way to go when it comes to selling online and millions of such are being sold yearly.

Perhaps, this e-book may not be too wide but it contains basic steps you should take in order to start benefiting from online income by selling digital items such as informational e-books.

Selling e-books

When we talk about e-books, we refer to virtual books which are not tangible as books you get from your shelf. E-books are informational resources that have been created in a non-physical form such as pdf, doc and so on. They are books or guides that are designed for computers or mini computers. You can’t really hold them or flip pages are you would do to a physical book but the good thing about it is that it saves a lot of cost when compared to traditional books. You don’t need to be printing a new book or make many copies to satisfy customer demand as it saves printing costs and makes the world greener. Once you’ve created an e-book, you can keep selling that same item over and over again and that’s where the real money is. Most e-books nowadays are created in pdf format and this is a more popular format and it can hardly be edited once created. It can also be easily delivered to the end users over the internet via email and downloads. So selling e-books is where the real money is and the main work really lies in the creativity of the writer and his ability to write in a way that satisfies the buyers need. The type of e-books that sell fast and well on the internet are the ones that teach people how to do stuff.

Nowadays, even books are being converted to e-books because it has a lot of advantages and saves a lot of trouble.

What you will need

In order to be able to sell e-books online, you would need to first setup a couple of things and decide if you would do just the writing or sub contract it. Produce and market your e-book and how best to get paid. Nowadays, the internet world is almost saturated and choking especially in developed countries but niches still exists. Even you could sell e-books by target new untapped niches in developing and emerging nations in Africa and Asia where the internet may just be beginning. When you see a niche that has low competition but is useful to people, you should not waste time in taking the opportunity.

Making internet income requires a lot of things and you can’t get started empty-handed and so in this topic which I titled: How to make money online selling e-books, here are a couple of things you will need:

- Ability to create your own e-book
- Ability to receive money online
- A website to display your product/service
- A dedicated email address for this business
- Record keeping for all your customers

It also depends on how skilled you are in online business, but for a simple starter, the above items are what I would recommend

The Strategy

So how do you really get started with selling e-books? I know you are itching to learn how?

After you have decided and written the manuscript of your intended e-book, you should then consider the following steps:

Well, here is what you need to do:
- Create a single e-book.
- Advertise it online
- Let people buy by first paying you online using Payza, Liberty reserve or any other service that uses Instant payment notification (IPN)
- Automatically Confirm the payment using with your Ipn handler or logging into your account. This works without you being there.
- Deliver the product as an attachment to the customer using email from your IPN handler

(If you don’t know how to setup IPN handler on your server, you can get a web programmer do it for you. If you can’t also use online payment, you may consider other forms of payment)

You see that even when you are offline, interested customers who feel your product would satisfy their need would buy your e-book even without you being there.

Creating your e-book
There may be a lot of virtual products you can produce and keep selling online but one product I would advise you to create and sell online is an e-book because it is so easy and uniquely created by you.

An e-book is an electronic book. It consists of information on a particular theme and it gives insight to the reader on a topic. An example of an e-book is like this one that you are reading. You can create an e-book that dwells on Food recipes, Snail farming or other kind of knowledge. Your ebook could be long or short and the shortest e-book I have seen is about 20 pages. To create your e-book, you first need to choose a theme – a range of topics that you can write about and then select a topic.

Selecting a topic for your e-book
You may need to study internet trends and find out what people from your target market are searching for on search engines like Google and Yahoo. You can also visit Google trends to see what is hot and you can localize it to that market to see what we users are consistently searching for and create an informational book to satisfy that query. How profitable or successful your e-book will be will depend on how popular your topic is, your price and the delivery methods (instant delivery or by email).

Converting your e-book (product)
Once you have finished writing your first informational product or e-book, what you now need is to convert it to the right form. You would normally write your book first with Microsoft word and then convert it to pdf which is a popular format for presenting e-books. You may use Adobe professional pdf maker or other pdf making software to now convert from a .doc to a pdf document, once created it can no longer be edited by someone else. I would recommend using the Adobe professional because it’s an excellent pdf maker.

Advertising your e-book online

One you have your product already on your computer, in order to make money with it online, you also need to present it properly online. You need to inform people who are on the web about your e-book and how it can help improve their lives. There are many ways you can advertise online but I am going to talk about 3 ways – Google advertising, Forum advertising or Product Blogs.

- Google adwords:
With Google adwords, you can get your advert listed on Google search results page in as little as a few minutes. All you need it to create the ad and provide a link from where users can buy your e-book and then add funds to your Google adwords account. Google adwords accepts most credit and debit cards so you need not worry about rejection. Also, you may also need to set a budget on your adverts, for example, you may set your daily budget as $5 and the pay per click cost as $0.01 so if 500 people clicked on your Google ads, your ads will stop displaying and Google will no longer charge you for that day until the next. So think of it, if you are selling a book for $10 and pay $5 for advertising, then you would have had 500 visitors to your landing page and you know probably 10% would want to buy your book and that translates to 50*10 = $500 in a day with just $5 advertising costs. If people are not buying despite the fact that you are driving traffic, then all you need to do is to recalculate your strategy or do away with Google adwords for the moment. Google adwords though guarantees faster results.

- Free advertising on forums/classifieds:
If that does not work, then you may also try free advertising on community forums that has a lot of traffic. Forums are an easy way to advertise your product and all you need to do is register as a member and add your product link as your signature. This will ensure that whenever you make a post, your link will show ups as your signature and you don’t need to pay anything for it other than the sacrifice of being an active member. You may also advertise the product entirely on forums but it may be regarded as spam. Other places you can advertise your e-book are on classified sites.

- Product Blogs:
This is a more professional way to sell your virtual products online. This belongs to you and you may as well say anything you want on your website. All you need to do is buy a domain name related to your product, host it and then run blogging software on it using wordpress.org or blogger.com. For instance, if you are interested in offering web design services online, then you can set up a blog domain called webdesignng.com and keep writing around web design topics. This will keep your website high in search engine results related to your blog and bring more traffic causing increase in potential sales of your web design service. So a blog is a good way to promote a product or service.

Related costs for setting up a blog would include:
Domain name = $10, Hosting = $50, total = $60. (Look for a web host that also provides free blogging software or capability)

How to receive payment

There are many ways you can chose to start receiving payment for your ebook and it may be online or offline. For online payments, the ones that work for Nigeria includes Payza, Liberty reserve. Your payment system should be designed in such a way to allow buyers to get access to download almost as soon as they have made a successful payment.

You may also sell your goods with a third party website that helps host and immediately delivers your product immediately after payment. This is called instant delivery method as it transfers funds to your account immediately to your account while also allowing buyers to instantly download your product. Websites that can also do this for a commission are kdp.amazon.com, plimus.com and e-junkie.com. So whatever method you use, consider the limitations and benefits.

For offline payments, it is common to accept bank deposit into your account from the buyer who then notifies you by sms and then you would send their ebook to them afterwards.

Delivering your product:

After you must have set up your payment system, the next thing is how to deliver your product to users.

Delivery options:
- Manual delivery
- Automatic delivery

Manual delivery: This involves delivering the ebook manually by sending it as an e-mail attachment to the buyer and you would only do this after you’ve manually confirmed payment to your account. You can then send this ebook to the buyer’s email using your mail attachment and sites like Yahoo and Gmail allow this.

Automatic Delivery: The manual method works well but doing that for thousands of orders can be cumbersome. What do you do when you start receiving orders that are in thousands? You would then need to automate both payment and delivery such that It gets delivered to your buyers immediately after payment and on autopilot. This works without you being there. If you have also got a webmaster or you have programming skills, you can set up your own website and create your own payment listener script that creates temporary download accounts for users and allots each of them a maximum number of downloads, say 5 times. So the simplest way to deliver a virtual product like your e-book is by email attachment but it would not be ideal with thousands or orders. So you need to automate downloads or delivery of e-books to buyers especially if you are expecting over 1000 buyers. How that works is by simply setting up an IPN handler to deliver the e-book to buyers automatically.

How to keep selling your e-books:

So you must have sold your first product online and you are keen to make more. What you need to do is develop newer products around the first one. You may also easily re-write your first book as a review and include customer feedbacks from the first one. One good way however to ensuring that you e-resources never expire is by writing in such a way that your information is useful for all users at whatever time period in the future. There are certain kinds of knowledge that do not change over time so books related to non-changing information would still be relevant for many years to come.

To keep making money online, you need to be innovative and offer newer and more interesting products. Clients who felt satisfied by your past services would have created a bond with your and you would command respect as far as issues related to your niche are concerned. For instance, whenever there is any need to talk about photography supplies, your name or website is recalled. If it is web design, development or hosting, your opinion or product would be sought. You need to build trust and a good relationship with your online clients if you want to continue making money online. A second step would consolidate the first and help you stay longer in the game. So offer a second product soonest.