Ebooks are HOT…topics from recipe ebooks to health ebooks through general self-improvement and hobby-related ebooks hold incredible opportunity for ANYONE to package what they know or some basic research into a top selling ebook. 

Several of those who have taken our 6 Week InfoProfits Fast-Start Program inside InfoMarketer'sZone are amazed at how simple and quick the entire process from idea through profit can be.

A common question though is around alternative methods of writing or getting content for your ebook…do you have to write the whole thing yourself or can you outsource part of your ebook writing to a freelanceer, expert or author?

OUTSOURCE EBOOK WRITING

We have indeed outsourced writing in the past, but have never outsourced an entire ebook.  In today's market your ebook is not only the key to generating ongoing profits for you, it is your signature, your stamp on a particular market which means you want to keep some of "YOU" in your ebook.

However, there is no reason that you can't outsource 50% or more of your ebook writing to others, enhancing it with your own information, examples, personality and style throughout.

In fact, the combination of outsourced content can work extremely well to…

• make writing your ebook much faster
• providing additional points of view and information sources
• fill in research gaps with real experience
• mix up the flow to keep your ebook fresh and interesting for your reader

So, what are some of the techniques we have used to outsource content for our ebooks?

1. Hired Help – Outsource a chapter or two – I've done this as outsourced articles with very precise questions to be answered. If you outsource sections of your ebook as "article" projects you can reduce the cost significantly. The key is to make sure your outsource freelancer knows you want specific content (send them a question by question outline) as they are often used to doing SEO (keyword focused) general articles which don't make for good content.
I typically look for people that have experience AND writing ability with the topic so they can add their personal touch to the ebook as well

2. Expert Interviews - I have also created entire ebooks as well as enhanced with chapters that were the transcription of a telephone interview with an expert. That way they don't have to write, they talk and you get dozens of pages of great content

3. Public domain material. On occasion I have found historical works in the public domain that enhance my ebooks., For example, one ebook I wrote was on a specific benefit of Yoga (applied to a common societal problem) and I wanted a short chapter on the history of Yoga…I found that quickly in the public domain, cleaned it up and used it for that chapter.

In-depth examples of how we planned, outlined, researched and outsourced using these techniques are given inside InfoMarketer'sZone – there are some techniques that can save you money, trouble and time…well worth checking out. 

Have a question about your ebook project?  Leave us a comment and we will respond within 24-hours.

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Or maybe you have figured out how do something really cool with your new digital camera, so you share that with a fellow digital camera enthusiast.

It could have also been a client or customer of yours that you helped through a financial, legal, or personal problem…that happens often doesn't it? 

When it comes to non-fiction writing, authors and experts know that there is some nice income associated with writing this sort of information down…often known as freelance or project writing.

BUT…what if you simply wrote the answer down to some of these pressing challenges and then sold them as an ebook, book or information product yourself? 

Now you have REALLY changed the tables…for a day or two worth of work, you now have the potential to make sales to hundreds, thousands and even hundreds of thousands of others who have the same question. 

That's where the e-book and book self-publishing business becomes REALLY interesting…and that's where writing gets amazingly fun!

Check out Information Marketing Zone - watch those making FUN happen right now…oh and let me ask…isn't this something that YOU could be doing?

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It only seemed funny to me because I had learned to turn basic questions and requests for information into top selling information products being sold online over a decade a go and never once gave it a thought that I couldn't do it, even though I had little to know writing or product development experience. 

In fact, the entire exercise of writing my ebooks often starts out with a single question from the market…

How do I…

Why isn't there a way to…

I wish there was a way to…

What is the best way ot get from…to….

Think these sound like titles of ebook that sell well on the internet today?

There is no accident, the reality of writing a hot selling ebook or information product is to simply package useful answers to questions that often asked and where the desire to have those questions answered is high. 

So yes, absolutely writing an ebook that sells online can be taught, or more correct, the steps involved in creating your own self-publishing internet-based business…

• Finding hot topics and desire for information
• Tapping into markets where the demand for information is already huge
• Quickly turning questions into high-impact products
• Combining your own content with publicly available content and outsourced content to speed the writing process
• Creating high value products at high price points such as videos, membership sites, home study courses, tangible books and printed manuals, webinars, coaching programs and seminars — where the money starts to look REALLY nice!
• Operationalizing your business on the internet to make maximum profit…generating and taking orders through advance marketing and upsell techniques

All of this can be learned, starting with the basic techniques that will begin earning you money the fastest so you can dedicate more time and really build a massive profit center. 

Don't be afraid…nobody is born and very few have any experience writing ebooks or making money online…and therein lies the opportunity!

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1. Don't make the mistake that your ebook is about information, education, training or anything OTHER than delivering a result to your end prospect.  Readers buy non-fiction books and ebooks because they badly want to achieve an outcome in their life and they believe your ebook will give it to them – keep that fundamental principle in mind at all times

2. Spending too little time on the title.  I've worked with ebook writers who have spent months on writing their ebook, then decide on a title in 30-minutes and never give it another thought.  The reality is that your title is what everyone sees first and most online – in fact the title is perhaps the most important marketing function you can use to directly impact sales on the internet, so treat it accordingly, try multiple versions and test, test, test

3. Forget being a perfectionist, focus on a set of steps, tips,  or system for helping your reader get what you are promising and then release the ebook.  Following the instructions over at InfoMarketer'sZone, you can build a follow up campaign so that your customers will help you improve your ebook and propose new products that you can use to build profits, sales and loyalty over time. 

4. Set aside common doubts like "I don't know enough to write an ebook" or "I don't have the time to get my ebook written" — these are just cop-outs and will do nothing to help you achieve your goals.  Believe me, I have seen enough non-writers and non-experts who have busy lives turn out top selling ebooks they sell online to know it is very possible

5. Don't ask for advice from anyone else other than your target market.  Your ebook should target a highly emotional desire within your target audience, it is this passionate emotion that leads to the decision to buy your ebook.  It stands to reason that friends, family or other acquaintances who DO NOT share that passion will not be as jazzed about your ebook…but it doesn't really matter does it — they are not your target customer after all.  You can test your ebook on your market by putting it up for sale and selling a few dozen copies to help guage interest and response to your ebook

If your desire is to write your own ebook, course or info product then don't let obstacles get in your way.  If you have doubts, leave them as a comment here and we will help you overcome those doubts.

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Have you ever thought that you would like to write a book about a topic, but your concern is…"what else can I offer given that there are arleady dozens of books that have been written on the topic?" 

I urge you to get past this type of thinking because busy markets are where you want to be if your goal is to write your own ebook, home study course, book or training program that will sell. 

So, here are a few reasons that you SHOULD go ahead and write that book that seems to have been already written:

1. We've mentioned this before, but it is worth mentioning again…when you get a hungry market who want information on a given market, they want as much information as they can get their hands on.  That means they won't buy just one book or resource, they will buy 10's or even hundreds over time.  When you are interested in overcoming a health challenge, helping your kids to grow up, improve your competitiveness in the workforce, or improve your finances you will devour as much information as you can to solve your problem or achieve your goals won't you?

2. There is always a way to stand out…which means they WANT what you have to offer.  Here are just a few ways we teach in the Ultimate InfoProduct Success Package To Position Your Non-Fiction InfoProduct in busy markets:

• Focus more on one part of the solution.  I have demonstrated to people before that you could take any non-fiction, top-selling book and pull out one chapter and create a more focused ebook and turn that into a top seller…by drilling into one specific aspect of a topic is a common way to set yourself aside from the existing competition
• Organize the information differently – that may mean taking general information and re-packaging it into a step-by-step guidebook or re-order the solution steps, add a step (from your experience or research) that forms a new set of steps. 
• Make general information more applied.  I am a huge fan of this approach where you take general information about a topic and turn it into an actionable system that you can use to test on a subset of your population.  This approach can be incredibly powerful because as you improve your system and start to see some results from your test customers you immediately gain social proof that can mean massive publicity and success for your infoproduct.  Another benefit of this approach is that you can easily move from ebook into full-scale, higher-priced training programs, courses, seminars, coaching programs, etc…where you can earn thousands for your information
• Trust your title and marketing…what we teach our friends over at InfoMarketersZone is how to dominate your information market — get your products in front of your prospects more effectively than your competition and out-persuade your competition.   90% of how well your product sells, no matter how much competition you have comes down to your ability to market on the internet…we can help you with the latest and greatest tricks, techniques and strategies if you are at that stage. 

So next time you find your internal voice saying "I want to write a book, but it has already been written" – go back and review these 4-steps, but above all, know that you likely have found the candidate for a book that will sell extremely well, so go ahead and get started now.

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No matter how much (or how little) we enjoy writing, the fact is that having your own book that sells and makes money improves your life immensely…

• You become recognized, your market value goes way up
• You have ongoing income deposited automatically into your bank account each week
• You gain leverage for getting new career advancements, establishing new businesses and business partners, attracting publicity — you become a player!
• Your book can launch any one of a number of new businesses for you including speaking, training, consulting, a larger publishing company, a marketing career and so on…
• There is no faster way to create your own product and launch your own business – often within weeks with systems like the 6-Week Information Product Profits System covers

Ok, so we want to get rolling writing our own book that sells – let's start by asking 3 important questions:

1.  Is there a customer?  Who is that customer? Writing books that sell like wildfire rarely happens by accident.  Instead, you need to target – have a specific customer in mind, know who they are, what their frustrations, dreams and aspirations are.  What passions and desires do they have and what is stopping them from realizing those passions.  By creating a profile of your market you have improved your chances of writing a hot selling ebook or book by a factor of 100X right out of the gate!

2. What is the BIG challenge I am going to tackle? You have a picture of your customer, what they want and what has been holding them back – so now you want to pull out the single biggest frustration and desire and make that the ultimate target of your non-fiction, informational book or ebook.  Books that target too many things (or even worse nothing at all…) will be poor sellers.  You must have identified a strong, irrational passion to be, have, do or become something that your customer currently has not achieved.  When I create information products, it always starts with the big WHY and works backward from there.  For instance, if the objective is to become a word-class salesman,  then that is the goal of my book, every chapter is outlined to support that ultimate goal.  Use this approach and you will find focus, motivation and productivity so simple to achieve.

3. What makes my book stand-out or different? Yes, being different is important, but that doesn't mean that the information itself must be unique.  It could mean that you do a better job of organizing your chapters into a system that is better perceived by your customer.  It could be that you focus on one part of the solution more and fill a gap that other books do not fill.  It could be that you include some audio interviews or training videos with your book and stand out from the crowd that way.  Do not let being unique scare you off,  it is often much simpler than you may first think.

No matter what your dream is about writing books, one thing is true…the better they sell, the more satisfying the ultimate process.

Millions of books have been written, but 90% of them never sell…that means you must pay attention to knowing why books sell and how to make sure your is one of them.  Writing books that end up in the hands of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of other people is not only exciting, it is highly profitable and incredibly fulfilling.

Use the 3 questions above to create a clear picture of your audience, design and outline your ebook or book and become a top seller in your marketplace.

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In my case, it took me 30-years before I acted on my dream, and since that first book the amazing feelings of satisfaction and financial rewards have been so strong I can't stop. 

The system we have used to write 12-ebooks and books (and counting) is layed out in The Ultimate Information Entrepreneur's Success System, which covers everything from picking a market, positioning your topic, your book layout, content development, packaging, pricing your book and marketing. 

Each day I hear from people I have helped or entertained with one of my ebooks, books or training systems. 

The financial reward of selling our ebooks on the internet are so high that there is pretty much NO other activity I could justify spending time on – nothing pays as well, for as long than spending time planning, writing and marketing a book. 

I used to coach and consult, even at rates as high as $500/hour, I am practically giving my time away now…if I spent that time writing or marketing my information products I would have a product that would continue to sell for $27, $47 or even $197 year after year – even though I spent a few hours creating it once. 

BUT IF THIS 11 YEAR-OLD CAN WRITE A BOOK, CAN'T YOU?

So, just to add insult to injury, we bring out one of many examples where non-writers have lived their dream and actually spent the hours it requires to put together their own book.

Karley Pillsbury is an 11-year old that wrote her first 25-pages in just a couple of hours and has since put togther her very own 250-page historical novel – having sold 2000 to start with.  Given the publicity she is now garnering with her marketing, you know that nnmber will quickly become much higher. 

Another interesting thing you will notice over at her website, seems she is now also attracting enough attention to get speaking requests – schools and media bring her additional publicity and income opportunities. 

It all starts with believing you can write a book and then getting down to actually doing it.  After that, your success depends heavily on telling the world about it in a unique and exciting way…so are you ready to take the first step?

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PDF Still Winning Ebook Formatting War

Wonder what format you should be using to offer your ebooks?  It's funny – I hear all of this chatter constantly on publishing discussion forums and blogs about different ebook formats like Epub, LRF or RTF when Adobe PDF has always been the leader for distributing and reading ebooks online.

Why?

1. Universal access across many different operating systems

2. Adobe reader maintains compatibility – even though Adobe frequently updates their readers, they do a very good job of getting their customers to update and even when they don't, files typically work many releases back.

3. Formatting – if you have ever packaged an ebook you have written using MS Word or Open Office, you will notice how quick and easy it is to turn your fully formatted document into a beautiful looking PDF

The graphic showing the lead PDF's still have in terms of ebook format comes from a recent survey done by Smashwords.

Of specific note is how popular Mobi format which allows for reading of ebooks on smart mobile devices – this is certainly something to watch in coming months and depending on your ebook market, maybe a format you want to support.

All of this means that converting your ebooks into the most popular format for ebooks is easy, consistently effective and operates with very little post customer support – something to consider when you have tens of thousands of ebooks on various customer's computers.

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So is it true?  Do you need to be an expert to write your own ebook?

The answer is – NO!

Why not?

I know more than 100 different ebook publishers and have 12 different ebooks of my own on the market that all sell extremely well, so when I talk about expertise and ebook writing I am talking based on experience.

NON-EXPERTS HAVE A BETTER CHANCE OF WRITNIG AN EBOOK THAT SELLS THAN AN EXPERT DOES – REALLY!

Of the 100 or so people I know and have coached to produce and market their own top selling ebooks and information products, very few (less than 10%) were what I would have called "experts".

In fact, I have worked with experts, or at least highly knowledgeable people in certain fields and the ironic thing is…they mostly don't succeed at information marketing.

While I'm still somewhat mystified by this myself, what I have figured out is that there are at least two factors that keep so-called experts from doing well with their own ebooks:

1. They are TOO close to their topic and have lost touch with the average beginner to teach what their reader really wants to know.  More often than not they completely miss the mark and produce products that don't sell
2. They are too much of a perfectionist and don't ever complete their first product.  Believe me, I have had "experts" pay me thousands and thousands of dollars to help them produce their own products and months or years later, they are still working on them – afraid of releasing them

All of that to say that I have found non-experts actually have a better chance of succeeding with infoproducts that do experts.

WHAT IF YOU ARE NOT AN EXPERT AND WANT TO WRITE AN EBOOK?

1. Bring other expert and authority advice to the market via your collection and organization of data – lots of "experts" are terrible teachers, so helping them bring their message to the market is a key "man-in-the-middle" role for information product publishers – lots of successful ebooks have been based on this method. Think interviews, think collecting stories (like Chicken Soup Series), think a "Beginner's Guide", etc…

2. You have found a market that holds great potential and you DO want to work toward becoming an expert. That means you will be researching, learning, trying out things and reporting back your knowledge. Again, many successful information publishers have taken this approach where they learn and share as they build their business.

One of the best pieces of advice I can give to new ebook writers who want to product non-fiction, how-to information-based ebooks is to package "applied" knowledge into your ebook or infoproduct.

Think of your ebook first outlining a system or set of steps to achieve a certain outcome Y, and the remainder of your ebook sharing experiences, pitfalls and successes on your road to using the exact system you teach.

Not only will you have one of the top selling ebooks, you will have setup your information publishing business in such a way as to expand into additional coaching, high-end courses, training, consulting and other business opportunities – all from your decision to write an ebook.

Ready to go – head over and get your copy of the Information Entrepreneur's Success Package where you will find the exact blueprint, tips and techniques used by the most successful information marketers on the internet today.

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In 99% of the cases, the people we help become successful have had little if no previous writing experience, have no special contacts and often do not have a platform to begin with…in other words, they never had believed they could write a book that would sell.

Some people hadn't any idea they possessed information that would be helpful or in-demand in the form of an ebook or book.

Others doubted their ability to actually package information that people would want to buy.

And still others, concerned they couldn't master the art of setting up their own online self-publishing company and master marketing on the internet.

Many times we get to work with these people as part of the Information Publishing Blueprint program inside InfoMarketer'sZone.

Yet, over and over again I've seen people package information they already know (or can quickly collect via research or interviews), package that information into a first edition book, ebook or course and actually begin to make money on the internet selling their book within 4-6 weeks.

Here are a just a few examples:

1. A relationship counselor taking her 15-years of experience and packaging it into a series of relationship help ebooks and coaching program that has now allowed her to work from remote locations she previously hadn't believed she would ever be able to do

2. A bank teller, customer support worker who packaged a book on the in's and out's of saving and investing – a great combination of his own experience/training and supplementary research

3. The grandmother of 6 who at an age approaching 60 decided to write a health-oriented book on living with a very common health condition – again a combination of her own experience with some additional research

4. Add to this hundreds of others who have packaged ebooks and books based on hobbies, health, personal improvement, business, food, financial, social conditions, relationships, and many more…

Here's another terrific example I came across this morning – a pastor that wrote a book about the "little" miracles he has experienced within his community over the last number of years, a topic that became so successful Hollywood is considering turning it into a movie!

Here's a telling quote from Rev. Jack Duis that sums up the potential we each have for making a huge difference in our lives (and those around us) by writing and marketing out own books:

“People don’t just say ‘Hey, I think I’m going to write a book,’ especially if they haven’t written one before or if you haven’t taken any college courses on writing,” Duis said.

But that’s just what he did.

Just another example of people putting aside their doubts about whether they could write a book and get on with it…your turn next?

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