EBook Writing and Marketing Secrets

When I first began to build my online business, no one told me I would need to do so much writing. I just wanted to work from home and make more money than I could doing anything else, so I started writing.

I had always wanted to write, but had been told by various people over the years that my writing was not very good. So, for twenty years I did not write. I edited other people’s writing. I was a teacher and also worked in real estate. There were lots of papers and reports that needed to be edited and I was the one to do it.

Almost three years ago I began to pursue my online business, and that is when I found out how much writing was involved. These are the 5 types of writing I now do daily:

•  Emails – it is important to make your subject line interesting, or people will not open the email to see what you have written

• Blog posts – I have several blogs and always want to write posts that are informative and interesting to my readers
• Articles – I have now written almost seven hundred articles during the past fifteen months. The articles must teach the reader something they want to know and make a point about the topic you are writing on.
• eBooks and special reports – these are short books on a particular topic. I am now writing my fourth eBook, which will be sold online and bring passive income for years to come.
• Sales pages – this is copywriting for the internet and is the way to sell what you have created, such as eBooks, special reports, audio files, and other products.

I now look forward to writing every day. If you enjoy writing, you will love working on the internet. Keep this in mind when you begin to work online. Writing will be the key to your success.

It is important to lay the foundation before you begin any new project. Before you start writing your eBook, research your topic thoroughly to make sure there is a large group of people who are hungry to purchase information on this subject. The best way to do this is to spend time searching your keywords, your competitors, and the products and services that are currently available online to people who are searching.

Use one or more of the free keyword selector tools to see how many people are searching each month for the keywords that best describe your product or service. Send me an email if you want the URL for any of these free sites. The keywords are the words and phrases that someone would type into Google or any of the search engines when they are looking for information on the internet.

Google your keywords to find out who your competitors are. On the internet it is a good thing to have competition. It tells you that there are people who are already purchasing products and services online in your niche. Take a look at what your competition is doing and then do it better.

Go to your competitor’s websites and see what they are offering, how they reach their prospects, and what you can do that is similar or an improved version of what is already being done. You can even right-click on your competitors’ websites to see what keywords they are using. This is a great way to develop your own marketing plan and get your online business started.

Once you have completed all of these tasks, begin to write your eBook. You will know exactly what people are looking for, what others have to offer, and how you can best compete online so that people will choose to purchase from you instead of from somebody else.

I am often asked by prospective students what they can do to make their writing stand out from that of others. They find that there are so many eBooks available online, and so many people writing articles and blog posts. They feel like their writing will just get lost in the plethora of reading material that is available online.

The answer is to give the readers a piece of yourself when you are writing. Share a story about how something that happened to you or someone you know made you think or do something differently. Explain how your perspective is based on your experiences. Tell them something in your writing that you would normally only share with someone you were speaking with face to face. In other words, write to the masses while speaking to only one.

Only you have lived your experience and have your perspective on any given situation. For example, I am writing an eBook about dogs with diabetes. Three months ago I would not have been passionate on this topic; when my own little dachshund, Jack, was diagnosed with this disease a couple of months ago, everything changed. My book is non-fiction, but it will be written with my unique perspective on this issue and how it has affected his life and the lives of many people and animals around him. Even though my target audience is comprised of thousands of people, I am writing this eBook to one person out there who is now facing this situation with their own dog.

Give this method of writing a try and see how it feels to you. Please feel free to leave your comments.

Word of mouth marketing can be very powerful. If you write an article or an eBook, and your readers tell others about it or reference it in their blog posts, you can be an overnight sensation. I also think of this as viral marketing, but David Balter makes the distinction in his new book, The Word of Mouth Manual - Part II. For a limited time you can download a copy of this book here. Read it and see how you can apply the ideas and principles to your business, whether it is online or off. eBooks and other online writing is particularly well-suited to this one-to-one approach. One person reads the information, finds it to be useful and helpful to their problem or situation, and passes the source on to others. This will be considered far more reliable than anything that is written or published. First-hand, word of mouth recommendations and testimonials will always be the best way to promote your product or service to others.

When you are writing an eBook, special or short report, sales letters or web copy, or anything that will be read online, it is best to use san serif fonts. Even though these fonts are more difficult to read, they are still considered to be the most effective online, especially for headlines, captions, and other short lines of text.

The terms serif and san serif come from long along, when typesetting was used to print newspapers and other documents. Serifs are the small lines that appear at the end of letters, numbers, and other characters. The word sand means without, so sans serif typefaces are those fonts that are without these small lines. The most popular serif fonts are Times New Roman, Courier, and Palatino. Popular sans serif fonts include Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, and Geneva.

When I am writing sales letters I like to use 16 point Tahoma for my headlines and 12 point Arial for the remainder of my web copy text. This seems to be more appealing to the readers and have a higher conversion rate for views to sales. Of course, this will continue to be highly debated for years to come, so you will want to do your own testing based on your niche market and type of product or service you are selling.

For eBooks, I like to use a combination of 14 and 16 point font size for titles and sub-titles, and 12 point font size for the body of text. Again, I prefer Tahoma or Verdana for the titles and sub-titles, with Arial as my preference for the text body font. Experiment with your eBook content and see what is easier on the eye. Take a look at other eBooks you have purchased and pay close attention to the fonts used.

Now that you have decided to write an eBook, you must choose a topic. There are traditional books and eBooks on almost every topic these days, so you must choose one that meets several criteria. Here are some things to think about when choosing a topic for your eBook.

• What are you interested in? Take a look at what you enjoy doing – activities, sports, hobbies, collectibles – and see if there is a niche that you would like to write about and share what you know with other people. Specialized niches, such as model trains that are N scale, have many thousands of enthusiasts who are hungry for new information on a regular basis.
• Think about jobs and work experiences you have had over the course of your life so far. There may be an area where you have specialized knowledge that could be of interest to others as well. I have been a real estate appraiser for almost twenty years, even though I do not work at it any longer. There are many people who are trying to break into (more…)