Yes, it is certainly possible to write an ebook and make money, but only if you do it the right way.
This article tells you how.
Examples of results from selling information products:
While this article is about how to make money writing an ebook, I’m using the phrase “information products”, rather than ebooks in this article . . . I’ll make it clear why, in just a moment.
First some examples of results from people selling information products effectively . . .
Here’s an information book on Amazon, about Forex Trading. Assuming a typical 5% of buyers have left a review, that’s about $48,780 profit from that book, in about 4 years.
Or this one called “The $100 Startup“, which has made an estimated $146,900 on Amazon, and I have seen it in book shops too.
Or this one “The 1-Page Marketing Plan“, with an estimated $78,420 on Amazon.
Or this membership site, giving members just one new PLR eBook a month, selling via JVZoo, which makes an estimated $67,500 per MONTH !!
Or this product, which has made sales of almost a quarter of a million from JVZoo.
Another example of profiting from information . . . one $1,500 SEO course I purchased, has 2,084 members in the private FaceBook Group, so that’s over $3 million in sales, in about 3 years.
Another course I bought has 847 members in the FaceBook group in a year and a half, and that’s a $1,000 course.
So, you can see that a LOT of profit is being made in the information-selling business these days, from selling ebooks and information in other formats.
Worthwhile results are definitely possible. Keep reading to learn more (and you can also get my free guide, at the end of this article).
Why you shouldn’t start with a product idea.
One of the most common mistakes in building an information product empire, is starting with a product idea and then trying to persuade people to buy it.
It is very much better to start with a significant problem or desire that a well-defined group of passionate people really care about.
That makes it relatively easy to create an effective product and to market it well.
People are not really looking for random “information” . . . what they really want is a real solution to their problems, or a practical way to get what they most want.
If you give it to them, marketing will be a lot easier, and it’s marketing which really determines how much profit you’ll make (see below for more on that).
How are you going to sell your information product?
Another very common mistake with information products is to assume that all you have to do is to create the product, list it somewhere and you’ll make a fortune.
In reality, you’ll probably make little or nothing without an effective sales strategy and successful promotions.
So this is why I am talking about sales before I get to creating the product. And I recommend you think about things in this order too . . . you shouldn’t start making the product, or even decide what format(s) it should be in, until you know how you’re going to do the sales and marketing part of the process.
Note that I’ve often used the phrase “information products” rather than ebooks . . . the reason is that if you think in terms of information products there are many more options than if you think only in terms of ebooks.
I talked about different types of products in the “examples” section of this article, above. One of them was books being sold on Amazon (as ebooks, printed books, audio-books etc.). Another was a membership subscription, and online courses are yet another type of product.
Different formats have different perceived value. For example, an ebook can rarely sell for more than $67, but the exact same information could be made into an online course of video modules, and sold, by webinar, for $2,000 or more.
To sell at higher prices, the information must be high quality, and the methods must be well proven with lots of testimonials, but even with all that, an ebook is still unlikely to sell for more than $67. And by the way, the examples above which made the most profits were both high-quality online video courses, sold by webinar.
Some ebooks sell in different formats, such as Kindle, paperback, and audio-book (with hard-back being a lot less popular these days), each at a different price. And the same information can sometimes be sold as a PDF on CD-ROM for a higher price than any of the other options.
It makes sense to think through the whole system of the information product, the sales and marketing format(s), and promotion, before you start making it, so that the creation process is optimised for what you need to do with it.
It is sometimes possible to create different versions, such as a high-quality course, a much shorter ebook version, a 1-page cheat-sheet, and up-sells such as mentoring and coaching. Some people have grown a 6-figure coaching business by creating and promoting just one ebook, so up-sells can be very well worth considering as part of your plans.
Also keep in mind that bigger is not necessarily better with information products . . . for example a 1-page cheat-sheet might get better results for a lead-magnet (i.e. a free gift which people are willing to give their email address to download), than a long ebook. So think what you’re going to be doing with the information, before you start creating it.
There are a lot of places where information-products can be sold, including digital selling platforms such as Amazon, JVZoo, Clickbank and others, selling downloads or membership from your own website, and various other platforms for different formats.
I won’t go into all the details of all the different formats and sales and marketing info here . . . if you want the best chance of succeeding in making money from information products, download my free guide at the end of this article.
How to create information products
As well as creating information from scratch yourself (either from your own knowledge and experience, or by doing the necessary research), it is also possible to buy ready-made information products, or even get other people do to most of the product-creation for you.
For example, you can create a valuable information-product by interviewing several experts on a topic, or putting together existing expert content (with their permission, of course).
There is a lot of information, in various formats, which you can buy (or get for free) to sell.
One type of content is called “PLR” (Public Label Rights), which gives you the right to resell the information in various ways. Different PLR content will have different resell rights, so make sure you read the rights and use them honestly.
To find this type of content, just Google “PLR” and the subject you want to find the information on. You’ll also find some PLR content for sale on sites like JVZoo, ClickBank etc.
Another approach to obtaining information content to sell would be to pay someone to create it for you. This might cost a little more initially, but you can be much more specific about what you want, and be sure that your content is unique.
For example, there are a lot of experts on Fiverr (and other outsource sites) . . . you could pay them to create content on their subject of expertise. Or they might already have some content which they can easily adapt for your needs.
While it’s easy enough to make a copy of the best articles on any subject (just do a Google search) and re-write and re-organise them into original content, if you don’t want to do the research and writing yourself, pay someone on an outsource site to do the research and create new content for you.
Or get some free PLR articles on a topic, and pay someone to re-write and re-organise them and make a video course from the content (with topics that change a lot it’s usually best to also research current information on each subject, so that your content is up-to-date).
Pricing
Selling at a higher price than your competition can sometimes work better than selling at a lower price.
A higher price suggests more value, and a lot of people want the best value they can get rather than cheapness. This is particularly true for content that people want to learn something useful from (rather than just be entertained), because if they want to learn, it makes sense to learn from the best information available, rather than something where the low price suggests lower quality information.
One exception is that it can work to sell a book at a low price (or free) as a lead-generator, i.e. to get people to join your mailing-list. For example, you could sell a short version of part of an ebook or course cheaply, get lots of email addresses, to use to help you launch a full-priced version. Even giving people the book in exchange for a review can help a lot, as it boosts your author rating, and that will help with sales on a platform such as Amazon.
Another exception is a book launch . . . it can work well to set up the book at $9.99 on Amazon, then lower the price to 99 cents for a 7-day launch period, after which the price goes back up again.
An alternative strategy is to test both higher and lower prices, with different packages (or bonuses etc.) or even just re-title the same product and test see which works better.
It is usually good to test and optimise pricing, rather than just guessing.
Promotion for ebooks and information products
As I mentioned above, one of the biggest mistakes beginners make with information products, is to think that all that needs to be done is to create the product and list it somewhere for sale.
In reality, it usually takes a lot of marketing and promotion to get sales.
Often it requires a long-term view to succeed, with some initial money or hard work needed to get the first sales, and then things can get easier as reviews and testimonials build, and you optimise your methods.
For example, for books sold on Amazon in any format, getting the first positive reviews is essential, and once you’ve got enough of those, Amazon will promote your book themselves so you get more sales with no more effort (although it might well be worth you doing additional promotions for even better results).
Or for a webinar, it might take some initial investment to test and optimise your webinar with paid traffic (such as FaceBook or YouTube ads), but when you are getting good sales statistics, you can then talk to a webinar Joint-venture broker, who can get your webinar promoted by lots of owners of big email lists, for affiliate commissions.
The main methods of promoting your information products are:
- SEO.
- Social-media marketing.
- Paid ads.
And for any promotional method, it can be more cost-effective, especially in the long-term, to focus on building an email-list, rather than selling directly.
SEO
. . . means “Search Engine Optimization”. Which is doing things so that Google (and other search engines) give you more free visitors (known as “organic traffic”) to your content.
SEO has the advantages of often being free, and of producing increasing results over time from a constant amount of work.
The #1 most important factor for SEO in 2020 is consistently posting high quality, relevant content.
Although the number of words is not actually factor (despite many SEO “experts” claiming that it is), what matters is having a lot of relevant expert phrases and related context on your web-page, and a lot of words are likely to be necessary to achieve that. Most of your pages should have at least 500 words, and your in-depth articles should have typically over 2,000 words on a page.
You can find the relevant expert phrases for your topic by looking at relevant pages in Wikipedia. Relevance and focus are major factors for SEO effeciveness.
A great way of writing lots of content which is great for SEO, is to create a blog on the topic(s) which your information-products are about. For example, you could write an article about the biggest problem in that niche, and then explain how your information product solves that problem better than any other option.
The most important factor for off-page SEO (things you do outside your website) is to only build links from high Domain-authority sites to your site, and only from content on related topics. You need to make them look as natural as possible in terms of how quickly you build them, which pages they link to, anchor-text etc. To get full details on all of this . . .
For a comprehensive course on SEO, my free guide “Effective SEO Secrets for More Targeted Traffic in 2020” is available on this page.
Social-media marketing
. . . can be used effectively to promote your information-products (and your other related content such as blog posts).
Some channels might include areas where you can sell directly, but some specifically prohibit affiliate links or links direct to a sales-page, so it’s more common to use social-media to get interested visitors to content such as articles, free videos or a free gifts on your website, where you encourage people to subscribe to your mailing-list, and only after that to tell them about products they can buy.
Popular content channels include YouTube, Facebook (where you can create a Page and a Group on the topics of your information products), Pinterest, and Instagram. Ask your potential customers which channels they use, and put your content there.
Competitions can be a great tool to use on social-media, especially with info-products where it’s easy to put together a high-value package as the prize.
Make sure you follow the rules about competitions and contests for the platform(s) you are using. It’s usually possible to encourage people to Share your competition, and it can “go viral” if you do everything right. You should also try to get anyone who wants to participate to give their email address, such as by saying that the winner(s) will be announced by email only (so it can be a great list-building method).
Paid ads.
These include Google ads (which includes YouTube ads), FaceBook ads, Bing ads and banner ads. They can be used effectively with some of the different sales approaches, including selling on your own website or building a mailing-list.
One of the most important concepts to understand with paid ads (or any form of paid traffic), is the “rule of thumb” that you have to spend 3 times the payout before you know if your funnel is profitable or not. This is because random events in the real world are far more clustered than people imagine.
For example I’ve had businesses with a $10k product buy $50 of leads and say “this is not working” . . . they refuse to understand how these things really work, and so just lose money and go on to something else.
Re-targeting (getting more ads in front of people who show an interest in your content) can be applied to your own funnels (and will typically improve your results), and to other people’s websites using Repixel.
For LOTS more details on every aspect of making great money with ebooks and other information products . . .
Get my FREE guide (worth $27) . . .
. . . “How To Build An Information Product Empire You Can Be Proud Of” . . .