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Write Your Own Ebook for Profit or Traffic

ebookEbooks have slowly developed into an important and valuable asset for any online business. They are written on any topic under the sun, and can range from between 20-200 pages, depending on their purpose. We did a post on the Top Ten Free Ebooks for Entrepreneurs earlier this year (check it out here). If you have some special information that you think your readers would benefit from, consider writing your own ebook to sell or to boost the traffic on your site.

Writing an ebook is not as daunting a task as you might think. If you can write a blog, you can write an ebook. You don’t require some special set of skills, although if you do feel your grammar and spelling are weak, you should have someone edit it for you before you put it out there to represent your business.

Obviously, the best place to start is to create an outline that will help you build comprehensive and useful content. Once you’ve got that, you should just sit down and start writing without worrying about format. Get as much information as you can down on your document and then take a couple days off. When you come back to review it with a fresh pair of eyes, you can start the editing process by making sure it reads coherently and flows from section to section.

Read through it a couple times, refining the content as you do. When you feel confident that the majority of the book is the way you want it, you can start tweaking the small stuff like spelling and grammar. Remember, there will never be a time when you can walk away from the book and say “It’s perfect!” No author, regardless of how experienced they are, has ever truly “finished” a book. Try not to get overwhelmed with the idea of creating a perfect manuscript.

You’ll also want to enlist the aid of a close friend, spouse, or your business partner to read it and give you their perspective on it. Be sure to take their comments to heart and try not to be overly sensitive. All great writing is a collaborative process.

Finally, you can choose a title and begin formatting the book. There are some ebook creation programs out there, but all you really need is Microsoft Office and a PDF plugin that will let you turn your ebook into a PDF file with different security controls. Make sure when you are formatting your ebook that you don’t go overboard with color or patterns. Choose a reasonably sized font, use attractive photos and insert charts/graphs sporadically to break up the text and make it easier to read.

Once you have a final product you can market your ebook in one of two ways. First, you can sell it outright from your website. That means, of course, you’ll have to set up a shopping cart system for people to select the book and process a payment. Most ebooks sold this way are immediately available for download from the website once the payment is accepted. You don’t have to charge a lot for your ebook to make money. Luckily the process of writing an ebook is very inexpensive, so even selling it for $4-5 will add up once you sell a couple hundred copies.

Another possible way to market the ebook is to offer it for free to individuals who sign up for your website’s newsletter. The purpose of this is to create a database of emails that you can use for future marketing campaigns. Many people are happy to exchange their email for a free ebook with some valuable information in it. It’s a win/win! We just released our ebook, FREE and it has already been getting a lot of buzz and attention. You can download it free by joining our newsletter to the right———->

Whether you write you ebook completely alone, or you employ a freelancer to help get it into a final format, the whole process can be inexpensive, fast, and rewarding.

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