Make Money From Ebooks - Make Money By Blogging

 Make Money From Ebooks

 How To Make Money In Online

The much loved model for bloggers and content creators everywhere and for a good reason…it’s pretty easy to write a 60-80 page ebook, not hard to sell say $500 worth a month through online networking,

guest posting and your own SEO optimized blog, and well you get to keep a large whack of the pie after paying affiliates. Hells yeah!

The thing to be careful of is pricing.

Watch out for niches where the target audience is barely willing to pay $5 for an ebook; hello Minimalism niche!

It’s always a good idea to repackage your ebook so you can sell it on Amazon (as a Kindle-only version) and iBooks, since a lot of people will be searching there too.

If you do add this sales point to the mix, make sure you price under $10 on these sites, as this seems to be the maximum pricing point for these audiences and allows you to get a higher percentage cut of the pie per Amazon and Apples rules.

Oh and don’t worry, people that buy your ebook through these avenues 9 times out of 10 wouldn’t have bought it otherwise so you’re not losing any money by cheapening the price…maybe consider marketing the book under a different name though!).

But if you really want to make money from an ebook then it’s all about selling it to your following and getting other bloggers and email marketers to affiliate sale for you like crazy.

Whether you hit up affiliates one by one, and/or start listing your products on affiliate marketplaces like Clickbank, the secret is simply connecting with as many people as possible, giving them all the tools they need to sell and hustling like a mad man!

Make Money By Blogging With Affiliate Links

Who doesn’t like some down and dirty affiliate fees?!

It’s even easier to make money this way than with an ebook, because all you need to concentrate on is pumping out the content for your own site and getting the traffic in – most people can get an affiliate sale within 30 days of starting a blog.

And hey, no need to mess around with a product.

But most of all, now you can make money from selling all kinds of products; other people’s info products, online tools and resources, physical products, books, etc! Very cool.

Depending on the niche you choose, affiliate fees can vary widely.

It’s best to promote products in niches where most of the players already have affiliate programs setup; eg players in the small business support niche all have affiliate programs setup, from the hosting providers, to the WordPress themes makers, to the teachers of online courses.

By contrast, promoting say fitness equipment can be much harder since most providers won’t have affiliate programs set up and ready for you to sign up to – or at least not setup in a very user friendly way.

To really succeed with affiliate marketing, it’s super important that your blog/website focus on a specific niche (eg juicing) and that you only affiliate for products in that area of focus (eg juicing machines, supplies, recipe ebooks etc),

because your readers will trust your opinion and thus be convinced enough to be ready to buy – ie they will actually click through.

If by contrast you just did a general blog that covered technology, marketing and writing, you’re never going to get the thing moving traffic wise or conversion wise to do any damage. With all this said, do make sure your niche has enough products to promote (ie 50 or more).

The best products to affiliate include digital products like ebooks or online courses (you get super higher % splits, often 50% and more) and recurring online services (if they offer ongoing referral fees, eg hosting, gambling etc).

One more little tip I like on making money with affiliate marketing, is to move a lot of your affiliate links off your website and into things like free ebooks, email autoresponder etc.

This not only helps your site appear less spammy in Google’s eyes, but visitors are far more likely to click on links in free helpful resources that they’re enjoying / trusting (and they’re not feeling like they being sold).

April Fools Day is coming. Prank your friends opening a never ending fake update screen on their computer. Sit back and watch their reaction.

Make Money Selling Online Courses & Membership Sites

We’re talking a members-only multimedia-driven website here. Straight up I have to say, this is a looooot of work. I’ve done it and it nearly killed me.

For the course I pumped out 200,000+ words (waaaaaay more than was necessary in hindsight), countless hours of video and audio, and 15+ resources to go with it (think checklists, templates etc).

But the result is insane…charge $200+, enjoy a money back rate of about 1% (people just freaking love videos and practical resources!) and ¼ of the content created is used for SEO,

which means the marketing side of things was done whilst creating the product. Perfect.

If you have a niche you know back to front, building a comprehensive course on it is THE way to go.

It may take 5 times longer than an ebook to create, but you can also charge about 10 times more.

Oh and if you’re really smart you’ll structure it such that you can charge a monthly fee of say $20-$50, for things like updates, new resources, member’s only forums, exclusive Q&A / mentoring etc. Automated recurring income is the high we’re all chasing online!

I created the entire members-only website for my niche using WordPress + Wishlist member – it took about 2 weeks, and that includes the time it took to learn the technicalities of it all. Too easy!

A big lesson I learned from the success of my membership site for career hunters is that you can make really good money (ie $2000+ a month) with a super niche that only gets okay traffic (ie 500-1000 visitors a week).

So unlike other passive income ideas, eg blog + adsense, here you can really open yourself up to the idea of making money teaching people something super specific and niched, eg how to breed freaking daschunds! Love it.

P.S. one of the most important decisions is of course, what do you create an online course or membership site on? This is where picking a market with enough demand is crucial.

The only objective way to measure demand is 1) to make sure enough people are searching for your course topic / ideas AND 2) make sure they’re willing to pay for it.

When I’m looking for new course topics I use Long Tail Pro to find niches that very few others are in, but are getting a lot of searches – and this is so important given how saturated most course topics are!

And to see if people are willing to buy the course I setup fake sales pages with LeadPages. I explain that idea more in my email series, which you can sign up for below.

Another thing I do with LeadPages is A/B split testing to determine the optimal price to charge for my course. For example…

I might decide to A/B split test the pricing of a new course on management consulting interviews (using LeadPages inbuilt A/B split testing feature of course).

Testing $47 v $197.

Extreme split testing to decide maximum profitability for pricing.

Couple days later I check in and see $197 is converting at 5% and $47 staying strong around 10%.

Boom, I’ve just realized we could premium price this puppy, the market would buy and our profit is double what it would have been if we opted for the higher converting, but lower priced $47 offer.

LeadPages. I really do heart you.

Make Money Comparing Products

I really like this idea, but must confess I’ve never earned passive income from a setup like this before.

I’ll be putting something together soon though and really wanted to share this one with you.

So here’s the deal; find a niche where there are a ton of products, all with semi-complex feature mixes – or basically any type of niche where customers are going “I don’t have a clue what to buy”.

Now create a site that firstly shares a bunch of useful content (think tutorials, how-tos etc) on the niche and secondly review every product/service in that niche (the pros, cons, verdict etc) – bonus points if you communicate this info through a mix of text, photos and video.

Plus create a comparison table page where you have every product listed and rated on a number of features, all side by side. Customer can finally decide what product is right for them via this birds eye view table,

plus the in-depth individual review articles/videos. Next to every product there is a link to the purchase page of the seller (eg Amazon), and well you guessed it, those links are affiliate links.

PS this idea is just a more finessed version of the well-known “Reviews Site” idea, hooked up with Amazon affiliate. Something which Chris Guthrie covers in-depth here.

Make Money With Ecommerce & Drop Shipping Products

This idea is for those of you hell-bent on making some serious passive income online.

There’s a lot of work upfront and by comparison to other ideas, there can be a fair bit of work on an ongoing basis. But if you automate as much as possible and/or hire a VA in the Philippines for example, you can get it down to just a few hours a week.

Anyways, so here’s the idea…

Find a product or group of products that are hard to buy locally for people (anything nichey works, from magic trick supplies to specialized bedding), aren’t that easy to buy online (or you can otherwise rank high in Google), and then setup your online store.

Sort out a drop shipping arrangement directly with a trustworthy provider and voila!

There’s a lot more to say on this and it ain’t a case of one two three voila, so I’ve spent a fair whack of time going through the process in a separate article.

But getting back to the main thing here; look for products to drop ship that are in the $50-$200 range, are cheapish to ship,

are pretty stable over time (ie not always being updated / changed / running out of demand) and cannot easily be price-shopped online (eg branded cameras are easy to price-shop,

whereas something like aqua blue bedding with it’s different mix of thread count, material type etc, is much harder).

UPDATE: I much prefer Chris Guthrie’s white label products and sell via Amazon strategy. He’s create a whole course and software program to do this smarter strategy. I bought it as we do a lot of ecom like this. It’s pretty much spot on with our strategy.

Here’s a link to the course/software.

Not cheap, but it took us years to learn how to pull off this strategy perfectly – and the software alone will save you weeks of research!