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06. November 2008:

Creating Your Own Ebooks | Tips and Tools For Digital Info Product Creation

Many marketers they will tell you that one of your key online strategies for making money should be product creation. In this post I thought I would take a look at just what you need to start creating your own digital information products, ebooks and reports. Before we begin however, there are a couple of points to consider, after which we'll move on to the slightly technical stuff which is the part that often scares people away.

 The first important thing is to know your subject and to research just how much demand and how much competition there might be for your intended target audience/niche. If you really can't be bothered, you can always outsource the whole process, including the writing and then just sell the resultant product. All joking aside, many info products have been born this way and if your pockets are deep enough maybe it's something to consider.

Secondly, you have to have a clear idea of the purpose of your book - from your perspective. Are you going to make a saleable product, or do you want to use the report or ebook as a viral marketing/promotion vehicle? This will have significant impact on how you proceed.

In the first scenario, let's assume that you decide to write a free report. You either want to

a) use it as a means of gaining subscribers for your list or

b) to promote and spread site(s) or services in which you have an interest, perhaps as an affiliate or perhaps as the owner of said product or service.

For option a. all you need to do is create a product that you think your target audience will find useful. You can add in some affiliate links to relevant sites and services and create opportunities for sales or to send people to sites where you are running Adsense or similar PPC ads. The concept is simple - give good free information and point people to places where they can find out more and where you may be able to make sales or commissions.

For option b. you may want to consider making your report rebrandable, therefore making it more attractive for people to pass along to others. If they can populate your ebook with some of their own links, they will be more likely to do so. You can still ask people to opt-in of course, it is just a question of whether you think that might stunt the viral effect. Many people are reluctant to offer up their email addresses, no matter what reassurances you offer, so you viral ebook may well do better if you just let visitors download it.

Having decided the direction in which you are going to go, you do not need many tools to do the job. Creating a PDF ebook is the obvious choice because practically all computer users can read PDF's on their machines. Creating PDF's is a lot more straightforward than it used to be. I prefer to use eWriterPro because you can write and edit the book, insert all your hyperlinks and convert the finished product to PDF all with one program.

Alternatively, you can use Open Office, which won't cost you anything at all and will do a good job. For those needing instruction take a look at this post on PDF creation with Open Office.

To make a rebrandable ebook you are going to need some rebranding software. By far the best known is ViralPDF which is very easy to use and represents excellent value. It uses a simple system of tags, enabling you to create special links in your ebook that will convert into rebrandable fields in the finished product. People who download the book can also download a small rebrander software. Whether you give this away or ask people to opt-in to a list or even charge a fee for it is entirely up to you. However, if the viral effect is your biggest priority, you will probably want to make it all as quick and painless as possible for your customers. 

The biggest drawback with rebrandable PDF's is this - many affiliates will not have a website of their own, and this method will exclude them from promoting and giving away the book, even if they want to. If your product is non internet or techie related, a great number of people may therefore be unable or unwilling to promote your viral book. Until recently this has been a problem you just have to live with, but, if it concerns you, read on.....

There is now an ingenious way around this, and no, it's not using .exe format ebooks (which are not a very great idea in my opinion). It basically enables your visitors and customers to rebrand something without having to download any software, without having to host any files or build any landing page or do any of that tedious technical stuff that so often prevents people from taking action. You can find out more by visiting my page at the Ultimate Rebrander where it is explained in detail. To my mind this could well be the way of the future when it comes to rebranding electronic products. 

Moving on to the second scenario - you decide to create and sell a PDF ebook.

Having decided that there is a market for your product, the process of PDF creation follows the same format as the first example. You probably won't want to create rebrandable links, but if you do, the options are also the same.

Once you have written the ebook you will need a few other things in order to bring it to market. These are all vitally important for a commercial product and can signify your success or failure.

Professional graphics are a must, unless you are a Photoshop wizard yourself. You could conceivably use a graphics authoring program like The Web Graphics Creator, but sometimes it's best to stump up for a design professional. The cost should be easily recoverable if your product is a good one. (My last free report recovered the cost of graphics within a couple of days.)

You also need to decide how you are going to sell your product and the obvious choice would be Clickbank or PayDotCom. The cost to list a product in Clickbank's marketplace is a one off $49.95 but again, you should soon make that back if you are selling at $27 to $47 for example. The benefits of using either service is that you will access the huge number of affiliates. Bear in mind that you will need to pay decent commissions if you want affiliates to promote for you - the norm for Clickbank is anything from 30-75%.

You could go it alone of course and stick to selling through PayPal or Alertpay for example, but you lose out significantly by not leveraging the large number of affiliates working with the aforementioned services. Then again, you could use your own affiliate program and if you are launching a low cost or even free product you might want to take a close look at something like the $7 Secrets Script by Jonathon Leger.

Alternatively, for serious product launch power you could also consider using the extremely comprehensive Rapid Action Profits. You can see exactly what this script can do for you over at the sales page, (a long but impressive read) and although it's not cheap, you can see the potential for selling a lot more product is entirely genuine and therefore makes the software a very good investment. I haven't used it myself yet, but when I finally put together a commercially viable ebook it's going to be right up there on my list of marketing must haves. It really does do everything that would normally require a host of various scripts that may or may not all work together to achieve the same end result. I've not mentioned a high end item like RAP on my blog before but for those launching a new ebook, it really is a great solution to a host of problems.  

The other thing you will need is a way to ensure that you don't suffer from theft of your product. (if you're not using something like RAP). Using a static download page is a no no nowadays, especially with social bookmarking sites being so prominent. The last thing you want is your download page plastered all over any one of them. There are several options, but I would recommend SmartDD which I have posted about here in the past - for the full details you can read about SmartDD here. The best thing about it is that it is free for up to five products and can be integrated with Clickbank, taking care of your thankyou page which is a requirement for selling anything through their marketplace as well as protecting you from theft and automating all your sales.

When it comes to launching your product there are plenty of options. If you can persuade anyone to JV with you and plug your book, all well and good, but you will need to offer something in return. Sometimes handing out a copy to potential partners for free is a good starting point and enables them to make a decision about promoting your work from a position of knowledge. If you don't know anyone well enough to offer that kind of trust you could always offer some copies for sale at a heavily discounted price to help things get moving. You may want to post about your book on a few forums and spread it around your social networks too. When it comes to promotion there is much you can do to get the word out. Hopefully you can achieve a snowball effect once you start things off.

If a free viral book mentions certain products, get in touch with the owner, they may well agree to promote to their own lists and members if they think it will help them make more sales. When approaching potential JV partners don't be shy - fire off an email - the worst they can do is say no, and plenty probably will, but don't let that dishearten you, you might be surprised at some of the support you can get. 

So, there is some advice and things to consider. For many people the thought of creating an ebook is intimidating and yet it shouldn't be. If you can write and have a subject on which you have a decent amount of knowledge, you are already good to go. With the technical aspects covered in this post you should now be able to get your product up and running and hopefully selling like the proverbial hot cakes.

I'm sure there are plenty of things I've not covered, but if you have anything to add please leave your comments and share your knowledge with other readers.

Photo By Athena



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17. October 2008:

New Interstitial Links Manager | Clickbank Report News | Marketing Graphics

Frustration abounds at the moment as I am still unable to launch the rebrandable Clickbank report due to the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of one of the featured services. This is doubly annoying as I had done a fair bit of promotion for the program already and had upgraded my membership to pro. Despite a couple of emails to the site admin I have heard zip so far and am only hoping that the site will resurface after what has presumably been a bad server crash or similar......ah well, the best laid plans of mice and men. If the service in question really has done a moonlight flit, I will have to seriously rework the report, so when it will be available is anybody's guess.

On other matters, I have recently acquired the rights to a great script called Interstitial Link Manager and despite the unusual name, have to say that it is a cool script for marketers. It basically allows you to both cloak and track affiliate links, or any link for that matter, and to present any number of offers to your visitors when sending them to a web page. You can control how many and for how long the offers are presented and in what order they appear.

The real beauty of it is though is that the visitor still has full control over what they see - they can pause or skip offers and go straight to their download or desired page, so they are never forced to look at any offer that does not interest them. 

I've put up an example of an offer with one link so you can see Interstitial Links Manager in action. 

If you would like to learn more (and it does do some other clever things too) you can visit and grab your own copy of Interstitial Links Manager here.

I also wanted to give a plug to the guy who eventually produced the graphics for me for Viral Clickbank Footprints. The standard of the work was excellent and the turnaround time very impressive. This is one talented graphics guy, and I would certainly recommend him very highly. I was amazed what he managed to come up with from my very limited job specs. So who is he? His name is....fanfare......Farihan Bahron and you can find him at PixelOfGenius.com where you can see samples of his excellent work and his very reasonable prices. I think you will be very impressed and surprised at both. I will certainly use Farihan's services again in the future after such a smooth process this first time around. Highly recommended.

OK, bit of a mish mash today, but wanted to get a post in before the weekend when I will be confined to the hospital as our son is due to be released on Monday of next week and I'm not sure when I'll get back to pounding the keys as it looks as though we will have our hands full judging by the amount of equipment we have just taken delivery of :-) It's a great day to be looking forward to though, so I'll let you know how it goes.



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03. October 2008:

Internet Marketing & Promoting "Free"

Us humans are strange creatures when it comes to our spending habits. It is generally acknowledged that nobody gives you anything for free and yet we still clamour after free offers, often reluctant to avoid spending our money if we possibly can.

You would think that this would make giving things away a great strategy in business. Indeed it is claimed time and time again that tempting customers with free products or services is a great tactic for growing your audience and customer base.

There is however a problem with this, and it's quite a significant one. The internet is full of people promising us free things - things that will make our lives better in some small or large way and sure enough people snatch them up every single day. It is fair to assume that if you start giving things away, things that people want, you will make some sort of an impact, see some results as a consequence.

This is not neccessarily so however, so let's take a look at why. If, for example, someone gives you a second hand television, you might be very grateful, you might even feel a rush of initial excitement that you got something for no financial outlay, and yet each time you wander into Walmart or Target, you find yourself ogling the latest flat wide screen hi definition offerings costing upwards of a thousand dollars. You have a television, but it cost you nothing and its perceived value is significantly lower than all those shiny new toys on the shelves in the store.

If you had just spent your own money to acquire your heart's desire, its value, in your mind, is equivalent to what you had to give to gain it. Your second hand television, that works perfectly well, seems diminished by comparison - you wanted it because it was free, but you don't value it, don't really care if it lasts a week or a year, or ten years. Hey, it was free, you are conditioned not to expect too much from it. You have nothing to lose, ergo you don't much care if it blows up tomorrow and you don't look after it particularly well, or get upset when it gets knocked off the stand or your visitors spill coffee all over it.

This facet of our nature becomes very apparent when working online. There are some truly valuable and useful things available on the internet that you can get without spending money, and yet you will often find that promoting them does not deliver the results you think are almost certain.

A good example would be web hosting. Normally this is going to cost something, but when someone offers the service for free and then offers to pay you to give it away, you're onto a sure fire winner right? I mean, who can't give away free web hosting? The problem however, is the perceived value...many people will dismiss such an offer because they believe it's too good to be true. Sometimes they are right and it is fair to say that when it comes to hosting most free services will fall far short of what you can expect from a paid one.

There will always be those who will snap up free offers though, and as an affiliate this should ensure that you make some money. Again however, we run up against the perceived value problem....the customer for the free service stands to lose nothing by signing up, but, because they were given the service they do not feel any real pressure to use it. If they were paying $10 a month it would be a different story - they would certainly use it or cancel to avoid paying any more. For the affiliate who gives away the hosting, the flurry of signups and promised payments results in many dormant/cancelled accounts and commissions that disappear. Not so good.

Unfortunately there are plenty of free services and products that show the same end result for those who promote them, so is it worth your time as an internet marketer to push anything that's free? Well, there are always exceptions to the rule, but sometimes you have to expect to be disappointed with the results. It's no reason not to try if you think the idea is a good one.

Giving away free reports and ebooks/software can be a great strategy but sometimes they will fall flat because of the apathy of the majority of people.

Sometimes when launching a product of your own, it is a tough decision to make - paid or free? Think about your aim when deciding which way to jump. If you are trying to get something to go viral for example, charging for it could hamper the spread of your effort but by the same token, giving it away could result in it being downloaded and ignored. Half a million downloads mean little if all the majority of them end up doing is gathering dust on hard drives around the world. A better bet is software that has a viral component - unlike ebooks, and if the software is useful, people will give it away for you and each time someone downloads it or uses it, you have a chance to make money from the ads or links within the program. 

If you are going to give something away, I would recommend at least getting people to opt-in to a list in order to secure whatever it is. At least that way you have given yourself a chance to build up a relationship with a person and perhaps convert them to a customer on other things in the future. Remember though that a lot of contacts gathered in this way will never become buyers, that's a cold hard fact and one of the few guarantees you will get.

Often, free is used as bait, a way of enticing someone in and showing them just how good a product can be, leading them towards a purchase. This is a good tactic, it does work but whether it works on the majority of those who take the initial free offer is debatable. I can think of one great product in particular that uses this strategy but the downloads to conversion ratio are not as high as I feel they should be. It's just too easy for a lot of us to disregard something that was free and not take the required action, even when we can clearly see that the information we got for free could lead us to really good things. That's fine, but it leaves a lot of people sometimes feeling unjustifiably (to my mind) peeved or let down. 

In my own experience of giving away free things I would say that probably more have bombed than gone on to achieve worthwhile results. However, always on the look out for new ideas, promoting "free" isn't something I'd abandon altogether because now and then you can find some gems. All you have to do is convince others that that is exactly what they are, and that, is often the hardest aspect of marketing "free".

If you have your own views or experiences to share I'd love to hear them so leave me a comment below and get some link love in the process.



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