How to Write an E-Book for Fun and Profit (10 Easy Steps to Creating Automated Income)
In this post we will review how to create a fast and easy additional stream of income that is completely automated. To do this you must create an e-book, video or audio series, or something else of value that you can sell. For this article we will assume you are creating an e-book. Relax, it will not be as hard as it sounds.
To create an additional stream of income this way will require an investment of $130 and a monthly investment of about $15. If you don’t have the dough for this you can get back to daydreaming. The only thing else required for building an additional income stream is the ability to follow directions, a little creativity, and a little gumption.
The goal of this is to not create the greatest quality product the world has ever seen, the goal is to get you started making some additional dough. We want this to move fast, fast, fast not slow like a turtle. You should be able to have all of this DONE in 30 days.
Remember your goal is to follow the directions and get this done FAST. As much as it is a way for you to earn some extra income it is also a learning experience for those who have never done internet work and want to start.
Pay attention, because we’re going to do this fast and furious like the movie.
Note: If you are unfamiliar with terms like WordPress, google keyword, domains, and hosting then you may want to read The No Bullshit Guide To Making Money Online before you read the rest of this article.
Here are the 10 steps to creating an additional income stream online and fully automated.
Step 1 – Fix a problem.
To make some money online you’re going to have to write an e-book. This is the hard part. Everything else on this list is easy, peasy Japaneasy. Simply follow instructions.
Step 1 is the deal-maker or deal-breaker. You’ve got to fix a problem, and you’ve got to fix it via the written word. This is where you write an e-book or something similar. Think of all the problems you know how to fix, think of all the knowledge you have and get yourself a notebook and a pen and write all your ideas down. Think long and hard (but not too long) and pick the perfect one for you.
Check the google keyword tool to see how many people are searching for your keyword each month. Let’s assume you want to create a product about different types of cheese. We will use the google keyword tool to see how many people are searching for the different types of cheeses.
Here we see that over 12,000 local people have searched for types of cheese and over 2,000 local people have searched for different types of cheese this month. That’s a good amount of people and we can feel good about creating a product or website for it.
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Note: If you are a terrible writer then you can hire someone from e-lance.com to write the e-book for you. It will cost you more dough, but if you simply cannot write then you have no other options.
The very fast method to creating an ebook:
1) Develop a title and theme of the e-book
2) Create an outline of the e-book
3) Write the e-book following the outline
4) Review and re-write the e-book until perfect
5) Convert the e-book to a PDF file when finished (your word processor will be able to do this for you)
You can use Microsoft Word or a free word processor called Open Office (what I currently use) to create your e-book.
Once you have your idea you can continue to step 2.
Step 2 – Register a domain name.
You will need a domain, or website, name for your product. You will want a .com domain name if at all possible, the next solution is a .net or a .org.
Use BADNET to grab your domain name (and some other goodies).
How to pick your domain name:
Ideally you will want to get a domain name that is a perfect match for your product and a perfect match for what people are searching. For example if you were selling a book about the different types of cheeses you would want to look at the google keyword tool to see if people were searching for the different types of cheese. We did that in step 1 and already know people are searching for it.
Next, we want to see if we can get an exact, matching domain name. If we can get an exact domain we have a very excellent chance of showing up well in a google search for “different types of cheese”.
Boom, now we’re in business. The exact domain name with a .com is available for the taking.
Obviously, you probably will not want to write an e-book about the different types of cheeses but hopefully you get the idea.
Now we’re ready for step 3.
Step 3 – Set up a hosting plan.
Hosting is where your website is housed on the internet. Free website platforms like blogspot are for people who want to talk politics and religion, not for people who want to make dough.
Use BADNET to get your hosting.
After you get your hosting provider set up it’s time for step 4.
Step 4 – Install WordPress.
Note: If you’ve taken advantage of the BADNET offer you can skip this step, BADNET will install your WordPress site for you.
WordPress is the free, go-to platform to run a blog and to run a simple sales page. WordPress simply could not be easier to install, learn and use.
Follow the instructions and you’re set. It really doesn’t take more than a minute to install WordPress.
Let’s move on to step 5.
Step 5 – Set up your payment processor.
The best solution I know of for processing payment and sending your product to your customer is E-Junkie. For $5 a month E-junkie is a STEAL. E-Junkie will process your payments and send out your product to your customers, all for $5 a month. You can be on a beach or in Timbuktu and still make money letting E-junkie do all the work for you.
E-Junkie is stupidly easy to use, simply follow their instructions and read their getting started guide. You can even use it free for a week before you spend a dime (even though it’s only $5 a month and worth every penny).
To get started you can simply click on the link that says “Sign up for FREE 1 week trial now“. You won’t have to enter a credit card or anything. You will want to upload your PDF e-book to your products list. Very easy to do.
On to step 6.
Step 6 – Set up a Sales page.
To make money off of your product you will have to sell it. To sell your product you must create a sales page.
A sales page will have several sections:
- Testimonials
- ‘About’ your product
- Guarantees
- and most importantly a sales page will have “BUY NOW” or “DOWNLOAD NOW” or “ADD TO CART” call to action buttons.
You have two options when it comes to creating a sales page. You can develop, code and design it yourself or you can use a ready-to-go program that will do the work for you.
To create fast, simple and effective sales pages without doing endless programming I use a ready-to-go program called OptimizePress. OptimizePress is phenomenal. It makes creating sales pages so painfully easy I feel like an idiot for waiting so long to purchase it. Currently OptimizePress runs for $97 and it’s worth every red cent. You can purchase once and create as many sales pages for as many products as you want. I wish I would have started using it forever ago. It would have saved me a lot of anguish.
If you want to make money on the internet but you aren’t a computer whiz, or even if you are, you should use OptimizePress. It just makes things so damn easy and fast. They have “How-To” Videos for everything, so when you don’t know or don’t understand something you just watch the video and fix the problem. Even computer illiterates can follow the extremely simple and easy instructions.
You can take a look at the 30 Days of Discipline page to see a very simple, and very quickly made, OptimizePress Sales page. (Note: This is not a great sales page to mimic.) Your sales page will need to have a lot of quality information about your product to make your customers comfortable with purchasing.
Note: Don’t forget to link your E-Junkie “Buy Now” link in the sales page. There is a video showing you how to do this in the OptimizePress members section. In fact, there is video showing you how to do everything in OptimizePress.
You will want to take a little while to learn and play around with OptimizePress. You may even want to take a whole weekend (or more) to perfect it. Or you can get it done fast just to get your product out there.
After you have set up your sales page it’s time to move on to step 7.
Step 7 – Finish and finalize your product.
Make sure your product is polished, shiny and free of typos. After you type it and finish it up you will want to save it as a PDF and upload it to your E-Junkie account. Easy, peasy Japaneasy.
It’s probably best if you create a cover for your e-book. If you’re a PhotoShop whiz you can do it in a few minutes. If not, you may have to outsource and hire someone to do it. Never fear, there is a website called fiverr.com where people will do work for you for $5. You can get someone there to design your e-book cover for you and good quality too.
You can also get someone from Fiverr to create a website header for your sales page, if you so desire. A website header, and even an e-book cover, is not imperative but it helps.
On to step 8.
Step 8 – Publish your website.
- You have created your product.
- You have purchased a domain name.
- You have hosting.
- You have installed WordPress.
- You have set up your E-Junkie account and linked your e-book PDF file to your e-junkie account.
- You have created your sales page and linked your e-junkie “Buy Now” button to it.
- You have looked over your product and your sales page and you are ready to finalize everything.
- Hit the publish button and now you have a live, money making site on the internet.
Note: The big dogs will do a pre-launch of their product before their site is live. They will do a pre-launch to build up anticipation and advertising for the product. Since this is your first, I’m assuming, internet product we will skip that step and just get the site live and ready for action.
Let’s go to step 9.
Step 9 – Drive traffic to your website.
This is another hard part.
The absolute best way to get traffic is to create an insanely valuable product that remedies a need your customers have and are currently and actively searching for a solution for.
Another way to get traffic is to leave comments on similar blogs and articles that discuss the same issue.
Another way to get traffic is to create a blog, which you can easily do with OptimizePress, and write targeted articles towards your audience. When they search the google machine for an answer to their problem your website will come up with a solution. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Another way to drive traffic to your website is to write articles for free article websites and leave a link back to your website.
Another way to get traffic is to pay someone, or a company (or someone from Fiverr), to generate traffic for you.
On to step 10.
Step 10 – Count your money, celebrate, and then re-invest.
Do it all over again with another website and another product. Keep doing it until you have MULTIPLE streams of automated income generated for while you are doing other things. Keep learning, keep improving, and keep taking action.
Fin.
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Boom. That’s the gist of it. You are ready to create an e-book (or any product, really), get that sucker online and start making some good old cash money.
If this is your first online money making venture then it hardly matters if it succeeds wildly or fails miserably. What matters is that you LEARN. After you do it once, and learn from your mistakes, you can do it over and over and over and over. Except for writing your e-book, or creating your product, all of this can be finished in a single weekend. The e-book first draft could even be finished in a weekend if you buckle down and get to work. Sylvester Stallone wrote the first draft of Rocky in a single weekend.
There are tons of little tips, tricks and hacks that you will learn as you go along. The only goal of this post is to get you started making some of that sweet, green money and to light a fire under you to get started and to take action. Yesterday was the best day to get started, today is the second best day.
Get to killing.
Additional Resources:
Google Analytics is a way to track all your traffic (visitors). You will want to use google analytics on your website to view how much traffic you receive, where the traffic is coming from, and how much traffic converts. Google Analytics is free and easy to use. OptimizePress makes it stupid easy to install analytics on your website, just watch the video on the OptimizePress members page.
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Note: Some of the above links are affiliate links and some are not. I vouch for all links 150%, affiliate or not.