Making Money with Direct Sales

This is the most obvious way to make money with an ebook. Write quality content that informs, entertains, and/or solves a problem, and you have something people will potentially buy. You can sell ebooks directly through your website or blog (if you’re not a tech-stud, you may need help setting up a shopping cart) or through various marketplaces. Clickbank and E-junkies are both options; they offer you a place to sell your digital products, and they also help affiliate marketers find and promote your ebook.

An example of an ebook that makes money through direct sales is WriterGig’s How to Earn Passive Income at eHow.com: Residual Income for Web Content Writers. She worked her way up to making $1,000+ per month from eHow and makes additional money by selling her instructional ebook for $25. An affiliate program, which offers a 50% commission, entices others to help her promote it.

You could do the same thing, turning a little bit of expertise into an ebook that others help you sell over and over again for continuing income.

Making Money by Embedding Affiliate Links

Affiliate marketers have long used ebooks as a way to embed affiliate links that are related to the material in the text. If the reader clicks through and buys something from a merchant you’re associated with, you make a commission. An ebook that you give away for free on your website can end up making you a lot of money this way.

Some enterprising ebook writers will sell their ebook to the reader and embed affiliate links, so they have the opportunity to get paid twice. My recommendation is to do this with care as readers may feel gypped if they pay good money for the ebook and then find they have to buy another product in order to find the solution they were seeking.

An example of an ebook with affiliate links is Rosalind Gardner’s Super Affiliate Handbook. Almost since the beginning of selling on the web, she’s been making a high six-figure income by promoting other people’s products. Because of that, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that her ebook sells for $47 and includes affiliate links. Fortunately, she incorporated her links in a way that didn’t leave me feeling jilted when I read the book. For example, when she suggests purchasing your own web hosting and domain name rather than using free sites, she uses affiliate links to send you to web hosting sites. Sure, she makes money, but she’s recommending products you would have had to buy anyway if you wanted to follow her style of affiliate marketing.

Whether you sell your ebook or give it away, embedding affiliate links can be profitable.

Using Your Ebook to Promote Other Products

This method of making money requires you to have other products people can purchase. You write a solid, informative ebook and then give it away for free. This becomes a promotional opportunity, offering you a way to get people to visit your site and purchase items that you can sell for more (in some cases, much more) than a simple ebook. This is where it helps to have friends in the biz. If you can get people to blog about your free ebook and share the download link with their mailing list subscribers, then you can get a lot of exposure.

An example of an ebook that does a wonderful job of this is Yaro Starak’s Blog Profits Blueprint. He uses the free how-to text to subtly promote his membership site (which teaches you all about creating a profitable blog in a niche you’re passionate about). If you read the ebook, you’ll probably be surprised at how thorough and helpful it is, considering he gives it away for free. But, if you think about it, this is a wonderful way to establish a rapport with an audience, build trust, and entice readers to buy an online course (I’ve gone through the course myself, and thought it was a valuable experience, so I have no problem mentioning Yaro’s ebook here).

You never know: giving away a free ebook might just turn out to be the most profitable way to make money writing ebooks.

If you’d like to share ways you’ve made money with ebooks, please comment below. We’d love to hear about your success (or even plans for future success)!

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

3 Ways to Make Money Writing Ebooks

Believe it or not, out of all the online tools you can employ, a mailing list is probably going to sell more copies of your book than anything else.

The Power of Mailing Lists

Those in the internet marketing world know all about the power of newsletters, and you won’t catch a successful ebook author, software distributor, or even online candle company without a list.

Why a list?

A list…

• is the easiest way to build a personal relationship with your fan base.
• lets you send messages right to a person’s inbox (where they’re more likely to be read than blog posts competing for attention in a feedreader).
• reaches the folks who may be interested in your message but weren’t ready to buy the book the first time they visited your site.
• makes it easy for your fans to forward news of your books on to friends.
• reminds readers you exist! (Hey, people get busy and don’t necessarily remember authors they read a year ago, but if they’re getting messages from you every month, they’ll remember to check out your new books when they’re published.)

In short, a mailing list is the one tool that’s essential for anyone selling anything online.

How to Start up a Mailing List

The easiest way to start a list is to simply add a sign-up form to your existing website or blog.

That sign-up form should be prominent too. It’s easier to get people to sign up for a free newsletter than plunk down $20 for a book right away. And once you’ve got them on your mailing list, you’ll have a lot more chances to sell that book (and the next one, and the next one, and … you get the idea).

As for the technical details, you’ll need some software to automate subscriptions, unsubscriptions, and the mass sending of messages.

You can sign up with a company such as Aweber (I use these guys, and they’re something of a gold standard in the internet marketing business). It does cost money to sign up with them, so if you’re pinching pennies, you may want to look into some of the free options. Even a yahoo groups mailing list is better than nothing. (The downside with the free lists is that the company will add advertising into your messages.)

Through the use of a wizard, an outfit like Aweber makes it easy to set up an “opt-in” box (the form that goes on your site and tells people how to sign up).

Aweber also lets you set up messages ahead of time. For example, with the list I have on this site, I wrote the 7-part “Writing for Your Wealth 101″ e-course back in September, but if you sign up today, you’ll get the daily messages as if I were writing them each morning this week and sending them right out to you.

What to Write About in Your Mailing List

As you might guess, just sending emails to people that say “buy my book” isn’t going to be that well received. You’ll probably get a lot of unsubscribe requests that way.

The best thing to do is to send out helpful information related to your niche. Send the sort of stuff your fans would be thrilled to get in their email boxes once a week, twice a month, or however often you decide to communicate.

If you send valuable information (or, for my novelists out there, entertainment), nobody is going to begrudge you a “sales pitch” mixed in here and there. There’s nothing wrong with putting a “Oh, and if you want to buy my book…” P.S. in each newsletter.

The marketing gurus say a person may need to be exposed to a product up to 7 times before deciding to purchase–this is why getting people to sign up for a newsletter that you send out regularly has so much potential to increase your book sales.

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

Sell Twice as Many Books by Adding a Mailing List to Your Site

If you’ve published a book and you’re promoting it on your website (you are promoting your book, right?), then you should be signed up with a bookseller that offers an affiliate program. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble offer affiliate programs, and I’m sure other bookstores do too.

Once you sign up, you can make links that allow your site visitors to click through and buy the book from the merchant. You’ll get at least 6% of the purchase price (Amazon has a sliding scale where you get a higher % if you sell more items), and you’ll make even more if folks buy other items from the store while they’re browsing.

Considering typical paperback royalty rates aren’t much higher than this (disgusting, hunh?), you’ve got a chance to nearly double what you make per book if you promote your work–with an affiliate link–on your site.

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

How to Get Paid Twice for Your Book