How to make an ebook or get one made

[MAllie]

Does anyone know someone who makes ebooks at a reasonable price or a good, simple program for this?

(I hope this is the right place to put this - if not maybe someone would kindly move it.)

[David G]

Good question but I am even more interested in who makes the amazingly well done marketing sites with the powerful sales copy, for example the many excellent Clickbank ebook stes.

[Melly]

Well you can have someone write the ebook for you if you know the topic and have the data you want written up as well as creating the ebook cover for you. I am sure there are professional companies out there that can do it for you as well.

Or if you don't have the data you can hire someone to do the research for you to write it.

[AbsoluteKC]

I normally just use open office writer to create content then convert them to PDF straight.

The only part where I need to outsource is the cover design. But sometimes I don't even think a cover.. just a sales page will do.

You can get a fairly good sales page design for free at:
http://www.minisitegallery.com/

I use the templates there and created my sales page (which I am proud of =) ) at:
http://www.thesecretsofadsense.com/

Al the best!

[MAllie]

Thanks, AbsoluteKC, that's very helpful information. And that does look a good sales page - best of luck with it.

[beyond.domaining]

My Domain Development ebook, which can be found at http://Beyond-Domaining.com is currently the #1 most popular domain development eBook on ClickBank and is the #2 most popular eBook in the entire 'Domains' category on ClickBank.

Based on what I know, I will offer a few high level points on what has made my Beyond Domaining series of eBooks successful and hopefully it will help you on your eBook project. I'm hesitant to 'leak' these 'secrets', but oh well...

1) I use WordPress as the CMS behind the eBook sales page (WordPress is also what we show you how to use and get the most mileage out of in our 'flagship' Beyond Domaining Domain Development eBook) . This is critically important because WordPress sites get much better SEO AND SEM 'play' in search engines than any other sales page CMS. xSitePro, for example, doesn't get the best SEO play in search engines. And neither do most of the other 'flimsy' / 'wirery' / 'instant' sales page CMS's out there.

I have a good friend who is on the core Google AdWords engineering team (very smart Stanford University Computer Science grad guy) and he has specifically told me that they penalize the flimsy 'instant sales page' types of sites (i'm not kidding here either), and that he has recently been in meetings with ClickBank because ClickBank is upset because many of their sales pages that are built with xSitePro types of 'flimsy' CMS's have gotten completely obliterated in both SEM and SEO over the last several months. He specifically said to me, 'if you're using wordpress that's definitely smart!?@!

For you newbies out there - when you're selling a product, when you first start out, you'll most likely be buying keywords on Google / Yahoo / Bing - in this case, SEM optimization is just as important as SEO optimization. Being SEM optimized means you can buy keywords on Google cheaper than your competition can because Google determines you to be more 'relevant' and 'professional' than your competitors and you have a higher 'quality score'. So if you use the SEO tactics we employ with our Beyond Domaining system, and you use keywords to drive traffic to your site (i.e. you're selling an eBook, at least at first, you will likely need to be driving traffic with keywords), using a good SEM friendly CMS is going to allow you to bring traffic in at approximately 20 - 40% cheaper than your competitors who might be using one of the other real 'wirey' looking PPC (wannabe CMS) pages. You need something more 'thick' and robust like WordPress (with XML SiteMaps, robots.txt, SEO friendly organic links, header / title / meta tags, Commenting capabilities, Twitter / Facebook Integration, etc, etc) to get good play in both SEO and SEM / search engines.


2) There's a delicate balance between filling your site with content (which the search engines love), and not distracting your visitors with too much information to where it detracts from the sale. The way we have tackled this at Beyond Domaining, is putting all the emphasis on our main sale page, but then burying lots of information two or three layers deep. This gives the search engines the perception that the site has depth and so it gets great play in SEM and SEO. For example, we have a series of excellent case studies buried in the site that (unfortunately) hardly anyone ever even looks at located here:

http://beyond-domaining.com/case-studies/

Seriously, these case studies are excellent - but maybe only 0.5% of visitors to our site ever even visit these pages (much less read them) but the search engines love this kind of site depth and so it gives us great SEO and SEM 'cred'. From out of nowhere, right now we are the #19 result in Google for one of our key search terms "domaining" and we have been as high as #8 for this "domaining" search term a few weeks ago. That's in competition with nearly 7.7 million other pages indexed in Google... not bad for a sales page. Most other eBook vendors go wrong here. They keep people focused on their sales page, which is great. But they use a flimsy CMS or they don't have any depth of content, and so they get nowhere with the search engines.

You need to keep people focused on your sales page, or else you'll lose sales. But if you can bury some good high quality content two or three layers deep in the site, this will give you good 'cred' and SEO and SEM play with the search engines.


3) I couldn't tell exactly what you were looking for from your message. It sounds like you might want someone to write a book for you? If that is the case, it really depends on what the topic is - some ebooks are free to re-publish - and some need to be chartered with lots of guidance from the publisher (i.e. YOU). I can tell you that people don't easily part with their money these days, so the substance of your eBook must be good - and you, or the person writing it, must be an expert on the subject matter - or else it probably wont' sell well.

If you have already written your own eBook and are now looking to roll that out into a sale-able product, then I recommend the NitroPDF product. I write my books in Microsoft Word, and then use NitroPDF to 'spiff' them up and put them in a 'secure' PDF format with table of contents, internal and external links, etc, etc. NitroPDF is great. I have never bought / used one of the 'ebook' covers yet. That's something I've been meaning to do, but just haven't gotten around to. Let us know if you find any good vendors for this.


4) Once you have your sales page up, and your PDF is secured, I definitely recommend putting the book up on ClickBank. ClickBank has a built in sales force of affiliates looking to promote good products. Also, there are lots of strategies you can use to maximize your results at ClickBank. I had decent success with ClickBank last year providing a 40% rev share with affiliates, but then this year I upped it to a 70% rev share and provided a bunch of banner and tile image ads and sales have really taken off. You have to take good care of your affiliates and they will take good care of you. Although the affiliates are now making more than twice as much as I am per sale, they are much happier because they make $35 per sale and happy affiliates are crucial to the success of an eBook.

In fact, I highly recommend you visit the DNForum.com Domain eBooks page above and then click through their link to investigate more about how we market our eBook products.

http://www.dnforum.com/domainebooks.php


5) launching a successful ebook is not easy. you have to get a lot of things right before people are going to fork over their hard earned cash for your product. Your mind-set should be that it is a privilege to make a sale and that people are putting their trust and faith in you. You have to make sure that the product is excellent and that it EXCEEDS the expectations of the customer. Or else they'll just return it and ask for a refund! ClickBank offers a 60 day refund policy and so if the product is not good, you can definitely expect to get a lot of refund requests. That's another area where we have done well and seen other eBook sellers fail. There are something like 50 products in the 'Domains' category on ClickBank. Many of the lower ranked products are so bad that people just always ask for their money back. This is why its so important to produce a high quality product that EXCEEDS customer expectations.

Hope this helps, and feel free to drop me a line if you have any more questions about selling eBooks.

Cheers,

Scott

http://Beyond-Domaining.com