What is the Cheap Way to Make Ebooks?

The advantages of selling information through ebooks should be quite obvious. There are no production costs, no inventory costs and no shipping costs. And information products sell very well on the internet. If you have the solution to their problem, people are very willing to buy immediately and pay a premium.

But how do you write and market an ebook? Well, the focus of this article is more on the actual creation of an ebook, but let me give you a quick run down on how to write a best selling ebook in one month. First, you need to choose a niche and does some keyword research in that niche.

My favorite tool for this is Wordtracker. Wordtracker will give you the number of times a keyword or search term has been searched in the major search engines for the past 120 days. It will then give you the number of competing web sites for that search term. Find a niche that has lots of search terms with high demand and a low number of competing pages, and you will have a great ebook on your hands! Wordtracker is like a free e-book coach.

Your keyword research will tell some of the major topics for your new ebook, but you can also use a survey to fine tune the topics and create an outline for your ebook. Survey monkey is a great way to send a survey to your niche and it is free.

Now that you have a rough outline of your ebook based upon what your niche is telling you, it is time to create your ebook. Your ebook needs to be in a format that EVERYONE can read. Most people do not need professional e-book reader software. They already have the acrobat reader on their computer. So, you need a quick e-book creator that creates PDF files that all computers can read.

There are many PDF programs out there that make for simple e- book creation and fast e-book publishing. Just do a search at TuCows or Download.net. I suggest you get one that allows you to create clickable hyper-links in your PDF so that your readers will click on the resources and come back to your site. The free PDF programs do not allow this.

Now, a word to the wise. To overcome the perception that your ebook is just a PDF file, you need to create a cover for it. This is the 3-D image you will put on your web page to add pizzazz and increase perceived value. There are many e-book cover creator programs and even some freeware. But spend a little money and get one that works well. Heck, you may even want to use this software to start an affordable ebook cover design business!

Of course, the real question is, "How do I set up a page to download ebooks from?" There are a variety of ways including setting the adobe e-books security function so that your readers need a password to read your ebooks. Of course one of the main problems is that that someone might download your e-book and email it to 100 of their best friends.

If you put your e-book in html form and kept it on the server, then you could control who viewed your e-book (only paying customers) through a registration system and for how long they could view it (that way he doesn??t give the access code to 100 of his best friends so they get your book for free!). Meaning, only paying customers could view this book and because it does not download to their hard drive, they can not pass it along??they can only print it out. You could even disable someone??s access to your e-book if you needed to.

Another way is to use a product like lockmyproduct.com ebook where you control who downloads your ebook, who reads it and for how long through a password connected to their ip address.

Now, all you need is a way to automatically give people access to your e-book when they pay for it. Meaning, one of the huge reasons people buy e-books is to get the information now! Even if it is 2 am. You can either use a clearing house like Clickbank to accept the money for you or you can use a shopping cart that is tied to an automatic payment gateway.

So when your customer pays, they are immediately sent an email with a registration code that gives them access to your e-book. You can conceivably sell an e-book, take the payment and deliver the e-book while you are skiing with your family in Colorado! Now that is a business idea worth pursuing!

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-- Stephen Beck is an expert on teaching non-techies how to start a business on the internet. He has created an electrifying report, How to Find the Right Products to Sell on the Internet. For a FREE copy, visit: www.familyebiz.com/