Guide: Write an Ebook to Supplement Your COVID-19 Income
Start earning passive income while in quarantine
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problem
Do you know everything there is to know? Of course not.
But don’t sell yourself short… you know a lot of things about topics that many people don’t (and spoiler: there’s a way to make money off your 🧠).
During COVID-19, there’s been a huge spike in demand for online education.
In a past week, we covered how to start an online courses to fulfil this demand. But not everyone has the equipment needed to film and produce an online course.
So you might be wondering, is there another way to make money on your knowledge. ABSOLUTELY.
solution
Today I’m going to walk you through step-by-step how you can produce a simple ebook on a topic of your choice and start earning revenue in less than one week.
Why is it a good time to start an ebook business? Because millions of people are at home looking for things to do. And a good chunk of them are thinking, ‘I should use this time to learn a knew skill or subject’.
This doesn’t just apply to business. People want to learn how to bake banana bread, train for a half-marathon, become better at CoD… The options of subjects that you can teach through an ebook are endless. Sound interesting? I sure hope so.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through every step of the process from content development to marketing. By the end of this post, I promise you’ll feel confident enough to create and sell your own ebook.
why I like this business
By now, you might have noticed a pattern to the types of businesses I like. What is it?
I love businesses with simple and scalable products. Believe it or not, I’m fairly risk averse. I hate spending lots of time and money on business ideas that I’m not even sure will work.
So instead, I start businesses that are quick to get off the ground and that you can test in one week or less. That’s the whole point of this newsletter.
And selling ebooks checks all of those boxes. Why?
anyone can start them: Doesn’t matter if it’s bocce ball or banana bread, you definitely have expertise in at least one topic. And I bet more often than not, people would be willing to pay you for that knowledge. You just have to find where they are.
quick to get started: Want to write an ebook? It’s easy if you already know what you’re talking about. I wrote my ebook in a day and yours shouldn’t take you much longer.
S-C-A-L-E: I can’t say it enough. The best types of businesses are scalable. Why are ebooks a scalable business? It’s simple, because you make one ebook and can sell to as many people as you want without putting in any additional work on the product. Imagine if Ford was able to make physical one car and sell it to millions 💸 💸 💸 .
Sounds like a great business right? But where do you begin…
what you need
Project Management Sheet
– copy to use yourself
Carrd
Gumroad
Facebook
time for action
What follows is a detailed guide to:
🤔Come up with a subject for your ebook
📕Plan, design and author your ebook
💻Set-up an e-commerce stack to sell your ebook product on
📈How to continue to grow your ebook business
day 1: content development
step 1: come up with a subject
Most people struggle to start businesses for one reason: they overthink them.
And they come up with ideas out of their comfort zone that they think will work. I think I could come up with an ebook on a topic I know nothing about…
Don’t get me wrong, that approach does sometimes work… but for most of us, why spend time and money on a bet that you can figure something out?
What should you do instead?
Don’t come up with a topic outside your comfort zone. But focus on what you already know.
Here’s a riddle: How do you know what you know? Great question.
How did I do it? I put together a list of things that I can do really well:
● Cooking pasta (from the box)
● Playing ping pong
● Mario Kart
● Starting newsletters
After creating the list, I went through it and made a shortlist of topics that could be good ebooks. I landed on ‘How to Start a Newsletter’.
That’s how you figure out what you’re going to write your ebook on.
step 2: plan your content
You’ve got that killer ebook idea. But what next? How do you even start writing an ebook…
First, you need to figure out which format you’re going to use. If you’re a gifted writer, you should stick to a text heavy ebook.
But if you’re lazy like me, try a PowerPoint presentation. The beauty of presentations is they are text light and, for the most party, quicker to put together.
Either way, your next move is to open a Google Doc and write down headers for each piece of information you need to know to be proficient in your subject. Here are mine:
● What are newsletters?
● How can you make money on newsletters?
● What should you write a newsletter on?
● What should my newsletter be about?
● How do I start a newsletter?
What platform should I use?
How do I write them?
How do I build a subscription page?
● How do I get my first subscriber?
● How do I grow my audience?
● How do I eventually monetize it?
Do you see what I see? If you read through an ebook with each of those sections filled, you’d 100% be ready to start your first newsletter.
The last part of planning that you need to do is come up with a title for your future New York Times bestselling ebook. I chose, “How to Build a Killer Email Newsletter Business”. Wow, perfect.
With your content plan and title in hand, you’re almost ready to start writing.
step 3: design your book
If you’re going the PowerPoint route, the first thing you’re going to want to do is develop a template. HubSpot compiled this great resource of ebook templates to help you on this journey.
Call me old fashioned but I like to build my templates from scratch. I kept it as simple as possible. Used a Serif font and black and white colours.
Unlike past businesses we’ve covered, there’s really not a huge need to develop fancy branding.
Once I had an idea of what my slides will look like, I could start adding content.
step 4: write!
At this point, you should know what your topic is, how you want to present it and have a template for your layout. Now it’s time to start the hardest part… wait for it… writing.
Writing great content is really hard. So hard that I struggle with it on a weekly basis while writing this newsletter.
A question I’m always asking myself is: How do you write strong content?
I’m still learning how to do this! But I can share with you some resources that have helped me:
Writing your ebook can take between 5-20 hours. It all depends on how comfortable you are with writing, the length of content and your knowledge of a topic.
The one piece of advice I’d give is don’t let perfect get in the way of progress. You’ll do a deep scrub of whatever content you produce anyway. Just get it on the page and worry about the formatting, spelling, grammar later.
step 5: edit and export
If you took my advice, you’ve written down everything you know about a subject without much consideration for spelling, grammar or formatting.
Next, you’re going to want to pay attention to those details. Go through your content line by line and check for structure, grammar and spelling. Once you do that, you can begin to format it so that it fits within the template you’ve created.
When you’re done formatting, export it to PDF. That’s your product. Nice work.
day 2: setting up your infrastructure
After a day of hard work, you have your first big win.
You wrote an ebook.
Incredible job. But now is the most important part. Selling it…
To do that, you’re going to need a website. My recommendation? Carrd.
Building a website can seem like a daunting task. And it usually is. But Carrd makes it easy.
The tool comes pre-loaded with over 40 fully customizable templates. It’s the quickest and easiest website builder that I’ve ever used.
Here’s how I use it:
I picked this template.
Made some simple modifications to align it with my brand. Delete the form and move to the next step to integrate e-commerce.
When you publish, Carrd will automatically generate a .carrd domain based off your website title. I use this as my domain when testing sites. But if you want to, you can always go to Namecheap and buy a custom domain of your choosing.
Integrating e-commerce
Your site is a great landing page for your customers, but you have to make it so they can buy your product off it. To do this, we’re going to use a tool called Gumroad.
Gumroad is an online marketplace that makes it easy to sell digital products. And good news… it seamlessly integrates into Carrd.
Head to Gumroad and make an account. Once you create a store, you’ll be able to upload a PDF of your ebook. You will enter the title, upload a photo and add a description. You can also set a price. In ‘Payout’ on settings, you can add your bank information for any sales revenue to be deposited into.
If you’re on a Carrd Pro account, you can add widgets to your site. Click the Plus button in your Carrd toolbar and select a widget. The widget will become a button that you can edit and place anywhere on your site.
In the toolbar, you can link the widget with your Gumroad account. There are more instructions on it here.
If you do not have a Carrd Pro account, you can always create a simple button and link to your Gumroad store landing page. Both work.
Setting up Google Analytics
Another crucial step to take is installing Google Analytics onto your site. This will enable you to track where your visitors are coming from and, importantly, see the marketing channels that are performing the best for you. With this data, you’ll be able to better focus your energy on the tactics and channels that make you the most money.
Here are step-by-step instructions on how to integrate Google analytics on your Carrd site.
day 3: start selling!
Be methodical with your marketing. I start by creating a spreadsheet and dumping a list of marketing channels I can use.
From there, you want to start tackling those channels and update the spreadsheet in realtime so you can see what’s working and what’s not.
Here are a few that I think are good places to start:
communities
First things first, figure out who your ideal customer is. Once you do this, you’ll be able to intuitively find where your customers are on the internet based on their hobbies/interests.
My product is on how to create a newsletter to start earning passive revenue. So I assume that my customers are:
● Entrepreneur-types
● Remote workers
● Freelance writers
What communities do I think they’re in?
● Facebook groups on remote work, newsletters, passive income, digital nomads
● Subreddits on newsletters, freelancers, and passive income
● Quora questions on newsletters
Those are three EASY channels to get the word out about your product. All you have to do is… find them.
Block off a few hours and make a list of all the groups/subreddits/quora questions you can. Add them to your spreadsheet. As you post, mark them as done.
Using Google Analytics, you’ll see very quickly where your traffic is coming from and whether it’s converting. This should tell you where you should spending the most time.
If you got traffic from tons of Facebook traffic, focus on finding more groups like the ones you posted in and KEEP POSTING!
personal social
Another quick channel is posting on your personal social. Depending on the product, you might be surprise by the response you get. Anyone who interacts with your post –comments or likes – message immediately to see if they’re interested in purchasing.
If you have someone in your network who’s a prospective customer, send them a short message. Here’s some sample copy:
Hey [NAME], wanted to let you know that I’ve written an ebook on [topic] and thought you might be interested. Check it out here: [link].
Yeah, you should be tired by now. You grinded like a BEAST for three days straight to get this business to market. And now, you should have a better idea of if your product can sell or not.
Strong indicators that you have a good product would be: 1. Obviously sales, but 2. Great feedback from random visitors to your page.
growth
If you gained some traction with your product, here are a few ways you can continue to grow this business:
Double on what works and focus your efforts on the channels that produced the most traffic/sales
Reach out to influencers in your field and send them a free copy of the ebook (they might share if they find it valuable)
Consider using the email list of your customers as a launchpad for a newsletter on the subject
If you can write another ebook related to the one that just sold, you can start to generate two different lines of revenue
I love this issue - I'm planning on building something like this soon.
Would love to see some discussion around pricing, if possible! A lot of starters run into roadblocks there.