How I Wrote a $30,000 eBook (And You Can Too)

Everywhere I look it seems people are releasing eBooks and trying to cash in on their audience. There are quite a few success stories out there, but for the most part, people just aren’t making the sales they want. As I have had a lot of success with my own eBook, Cloud Living, I thought it would be helpful to a lot of people if I wrote a guide about the whole process. For those of you who don’t know, Cloud Living is my eBook which teaches people how I make a living online. That being said, I want to make it clear that I don’t make a living by teaching people how to make a living online. My biggest successes are in personal services which offer an affiliate program and various sites I run in the health niche.

My Own Example

When I had the idea to create Cloud Living, I had just finished giving away a free eBook on blogging. It was 90 pages long and included most of what I know when it comes to growing a blog. As I don’t just make money through blogging, I wanted to make an expanded guide which offered tips on affiliate marketing.
In addition to that, I wanted to make the guide a resource for people who want to make cloud living (making money from the internet) a reality. Therefore, I included a number of interviews with people succeeding online and my own tips for getting things done, even if you have a full-time job.
The product ended up being around 176 pages and I couldn’t be happier with the end result. Something you may find interesting is that I genuinely just wanted to make $1,000 from releasing the guide. That way I knew I would have helped a lot of people and the months of work it took to put the guide together will have been somewhat worth it.
The result?

• On launch day, the eBook brought in over $4,000.
• Almost 700 copies of the guide have been purchased
• Approximately 80% of the $30,000 is purely from sales. The rest is through affiliate links inside the book
• January, 6 months after launch, is on track to be the second best month ever in terms of sales

Before I share how I made all of this possible, let’s look at some of the reasons for writing an eBook in the first place, apart from the obvious financial benefits.

Why Write an eBook?

The obvious answer to most people, is money. If that is your sole motivation though, then you’re missing out. There are actually quite a few reasons to write an eBook that you may not have initially thought of:

• Position Yourself as An Expert – Since launching Cloud Living, I have been absolutely overloaded with interview requests. The guide makes it clear that I know what I’m doing online, so people come to me for advice. If you write a rubbish guide, then nobody is going to think very highly of you. Yet, if you make the product the best you can make it, people will start to notice you. I now regularly see people refer to making money online as “Cloud Living’ and a number of “make money” blogs now exist with Cloud in the title. This alone shows me the big influence that some people can have.
• Having Your Own Product is Massive - Have you ever tried to promote a product someone else created on your own blog? I have in the personal development space and the conversions are, quite frankly, awful. Once, with 5,000 subscribers, I only pushed about 15 sales after writing a whole post on a product. Yet, when I release my own work, it sells really well. Remember that people read your site for you, so they’re more likely to buy a product if it has your name on.
• Help People – The eBooks that sell the best are the ones that fill a genuine need. Therefore, one good reason to write an eBook is to share knowledge on a topic you know a lot about, and truly help your buyers. A few days ago I received an email from someone telling me that they were now making over $10,000 a month thanks to my guide. There is no way I can describe in words how good reading that email made me feel — and it’s one of many.
• Constant Income – Having a $4,000 day was awesome, but it’s the constant income from selling eBook’s that I enjoy. I now have two products (1, 2) that I actively promote and earn a good passive income. Through nothing but a sidebar ad and regular website traffic, Cloud Living is on track to make around $3,000 this month. I think that’s pretty amazing considering the product was launched 6 months ago.

And, of course: to make money.

Photo Credit

Picking Your Topic

Many of you might be tempted to write an eBook now, but have absolutely no idea what you’re going to write it on. If that’s you, this section will help. For those of you who think you have an idea and are ready to roll with it, I still think you should continue reading. There are a lot of eBooks that sell well, and a lot more that sell poorly. Often, the topic of the eBook makes a massive difference to whether or not it will succeed in making money.
As a way to help you narrow down the ideas buzzing around your head right now, here are some of my suggestions to help you think of what topic you could write an eBook on:

• What You Know About – The easiest way to create a great product, of course, is to write on a topic you know inside out. I have been building websites for four years and making a living with them for almost two, so I knew my subject well. If you know about something, there’s also a good chance you’ll be passionate about it. This will make it far easier to keep working on the guide and also allows you to give the best advice possible.
• What Your Readers Want – As I have mentioned, it’s far easier to promote your own products (especially on a blog) than it is to promote things as an affiliate. If you have an audience already, why not find out what they want? You could do this by creating a poll and asking people specifically, or you could look at your most popular site pages / blog posts and see what your audience reacts to most.
• How Can You Offer the Most Value – Believe it or not, we don’t always know what we want. Therefore, asking your readers what they want in a guide may not really be what they want to purchase. As an extra ‘test’ to ensure you are going to write an eBook on the right topic, ask yourself what you could write about that would help people the most. It may not be something you have the most knowledge on, but you might know enough to honestly help people.
• Look Around Your Niche – Sites like StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter can be an absolute goldmine for product ideas. If you see what topics your industry really cares about, you can create a product that gives them exactly that. Additionally, you could check out the top blogs in your industry and see what they are promoting. It never hurts to ask someone if their product is selling well. While I don’t recommend you copy what other people are putting out there, this can give you some good ideas.

Hopefully these tips have given you topic ideas for your eBook. If you’re still looking for suggestions, leave a comment at the bottom of the post and I’m sure other readers here can help you brainstorm.

The Creation Process

Once you’ve decided you want to write an eBook and know what topic it’s going to be about, it’s time to get started. There are a number of eBook creation tools and software packages out there, but I keep the process fairly simple. First of all, I write everything in Open Office. This is a free office suite that works on all popular operating systems.
A lot of tools that can turn documents into PDF format do not allow custom security settings and most of them cannot export hyperlinks properly. Thankfully, Open Office does not have this problem. In terms of structure, I like to map out exactly what I’m going to talk about in the guide and get all of my content sections down first. From there, I can slowly work towards completing the guide by filling out a few each day.
After writing your guide, you probably want to work on the design. I use some nice covers (example) on my eBooks so that they look like real physical products. Of course, I do not pretend they are more than eBooks; it simply looks better. As well as giving the design an external look, you can also work on the internals. I like to start the first page of an eBook with another picture of the cover and copyright information.
From there, I design a nice footer that will display on every page so keep a general ‘theme’ running throughout the guide. And, finally, I replace all headings with an actual image file so that they look much better. A lot of people design their eBooks differently so you should look around before just following my own outline. To create the graphics I personally learned how to use Photoshop but you could also hire someone for cheap from Digitalpoint.
Once you have your eBook written and it’s looking pretty, you should then set-up a payment processor. This will allow you to receive money for your guide and have it automatically delivered to a buyer, instantly. I personally use e-Junkie to handle this process as it works perfectly and handles everything behind the scenes for just $5 per month. I noticed many other sites like Problogger and Copyblogger also use them.
Getting started with e-junkie is quick and totally free (7 day trial). You can upload your eBook PDF file into their admin area, set your price, and then you will receive a ‘Buy now’ link code. This allows you to send people straight to PayPal to buy your guide. Once the payment is approved, e-junkie will automatically send the buyer the eBook, without you having to do anything.
Now that everything is in order and the payment processor is sorted, you’re going to want to look at promoting your eBook.

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Marketing Your eBook

The sole task of writing an eBook is sadly not enough to bring you the benefits that we discussed earlier — you actually have to promote your work. The tactics involved in marketing an eBook are very similar to the tactics involved in marketing anything online, but I’ll still share my tips here:

• Your Audience – My aim is to always be totally honest with you guys so the first thing I must say is that it is much easier to sell and promote an eBook if you already have an established audience. Ask yourself whether it would be wise to build up your audience a bit first before launching your first product. Darren Rowse at Problogger didn’t launch an eBook until his 5th year of writing for the site, but managed to pull in an estimated $450,000 (based on my calculations using his public sales figures) from a $19 product. It’s never too late to launch a product, but it might be too early. If you have an established audience, that’s a great place to start to get your guide out there.
• Networking – A few months ago I attended a workshop in London which taught people how to quit their day jobs. I didn’t go to learn about that though (I already have quit my job), but to learn about how to teach people how to quit their job. This is because I write about personal development and find it fascinating. Although I didn’t go to this workshop to make money, I certainly met a few people who have since purchased eBooks from me.
• Affiliates – Out of the $4,500 or so that the eBook made on the day of launch, around $500 of this money was in affiliate commissions. I allow people to promote the product and if they refer a sale, I will give them 51% of $37, which is $18.87. I can do this because it is free for me to duplicate my PDF file, and I get my products in front of people who would not have otherwise known about them. To get affiliates, I like to focus on bloggers and gain their attention by regularly commenting or their site or maybe writing a few articles before pitching anything. Give and you will receive. You could also use a service like Clickbank, which I’m going to be testing shortly.
• Offline Press – The reason this month is going to be the second best month ever for Cloud Living is because I received some great offline press recently. I was featured in an article (pic) in the UK’s second biggest newspaper about people making a living online. This brought thousands of people to my website and resulted in a lot more sales than usual. If you can get featured in relevant, offline press, then that can do wonders for your online sales.
• Search Engine Traffic – I know some people who create eBooks solely for the sake of making money from the search engine traffic they are currently receiving. I also know people who purposefully build eBooks and websites in a niche because they can make money, not because they know about the subject. If you can find what problems people are searching for online, and rank in the top results of Google with a solution to that problem (your guide), then there’s a lot of money to be made. I have personally spoken to people making over $300,000 per year with this method.

If I had to estimate how many Cloud Living sales were based on these as a percentage, I would say:

• Original Audience: 75%
• Affiliates: 15%
• Offline Press: 5%
• Search Engines: 4%
• Networking: 1%

If you can pull off any of these methods well, you’re going to have a good chance at making sales and enjoying the other benefits that owning your own product has to offer. If you’re going to focus on just one or two, then definitely work to build up your own audience and gain a list of affiliates who would like to promote your product.

The Final Details That I Couldn’t Miss

I know this has been an absolutely monster post (although I’m sure you are used to them by now), but there are a few more points I want to talk about in order to make this guide as useful as possible. There a few things that didn’t really fit into the other sections here but definitely deserve to be discussed.
Handling Refunds
When I launched Cloud Living, I never mentioned any form of money-back guarantee. Maybe it would have increased sales, but there have literally only been 3 refunds in over 600 purchases. I actually meant to launch the product with a 30-day money-back guarantee but since it was selling well with that, I never made the change. If someone is clearly being scammy by purchasing the book and requesting a refund in the same day or something of that nature, then I will try not to give a refund as that only encourages scammers to con more people.
If someone seems even slightly legitimate though then I will happily give a refund as quickly as possible. It’s not worth the possible reputation management nightmare for the price of one guide.
Pricing
I personally like to price my products around the $27 – $37 range when working with eBooks. I know in the future, when I create bigger products with more features, that price will rise quite a lot. The price of your eBook should really be whatever you think it is worth. After all, you made it and if it doesn’t sell, you’re the one who has to deal with that.
Of course, ideally you will want to pick a price point that is going to get you sales from the start. Price too low and you run the risk of your product looking low-value and miss-worthy. Price it too high and you may alienate your audience with an out-of-reach price point. My advice for pricing is simple: see how other people in the niche are pricing their guides, for what, and start with something similar.
I personally think it’s better to price a product too low than too high. If you price it too low then at least you will get sales and can know to increase that. If you price your product too high and then have to bring that down, it will be clear to your audience that sales are low and you lose any social proof you may have had.
My Own Success
This guide is just my thoughts on creating a profitable eBook online. There may be better ways to do everything I have suggested, but these are the steps I take. $30,000 is nothing compared to some of the launches out there, but the result is something I’m proud of and also something I think many of you here would like to reach.
If you’ve made it this far, I have to try and tempt you to subscribe to the RSS feed (or get free email updates). Articles like this one are posted at least once per week. And yes, they really are this long.