I know everyone and their mom has done this, but there are several things that I am passionate about, and helping people is one of them. I'd like to write some e-books helping people people to find careers that they are passionate about and many other topics. My idea was do everything via e-mail, but is this possible or do I definitely need a site prior to doing this.
If anyone has experience in writing e-books, including which program to use, and how to generally start something like this let me know, I'd love to discuss ideas. I know this is not the big idea that I want in the long run, but I'd like to make a little extra income each month while helping thousands of people. If anyone has e-books that they are willing to share I'd appreciate it as well. Not interested in selling others material for my own profit at all.
Being passionate about your subject can go a long way towards creating a quality product. Ebooks are a great way to accomplish your goal of helping others find their passions.
Creating an ebook is a fairly simple process. You don't need a special program. The easiest way to produce an ebook is to write it using Microsoft Word. The newer versions of Word have a button in the tool bar that you simply press when you are done and it turns it into a pdf file. Pdf is the most easily accessible way for others to download and read ebooks (with Adobe Acrobat which is free). You can use formatting and simple graphics to spice it up. You cannot go back after you've covnerted the .doc file into a .pdf file to make changes. So perfect it in Word first.
You can go several different ways then to market and sell your ebook(s). You can set up your own web site with additional content (see mine below for an example). Or you can simply use a "sales page" site. I use a combination of styles. You can use affiliates to sell your ebooks too (you need to give them about 50% of sales dollars to make it worth their while).
I would suggest reading "The E Code" by Joe Vitale. It has a wealth of information on writing ebooks and how to get content for the books. There are a lot of little tricks that he uses that can come it handy for you. On an alternative route, you can go to elance.com or another site that you can post jobs to be outsourced (this is if you don't acutally want to write the ebook yourself). Just a couple of thoughts,
It sounds to me that you might have the beginnings of two things -- ecourses and ebooks. And the third thing would be to create a book and go speak, too!
What I did, was start by writing articles on a specific topic and then put it all in an ebook. And after that I started to plan for my ebooks i.e. wrote the table of contents, then wrote the articles.
Now I have 15 or so ebooks, ereports and etemplates that help business owners and one that helps career seekers (like I was a long time ago).
You can learn more about how I did it and how other are doing it by listening to podcasts or downloading MP3's from Article Marketer (free) http://www.articlemarketer.com/write.php?a_aid=c6438141 To see all the audios or IPODs, click on show all audio clips at the end of each section.
Go for it!
Maria Marsala
Let me help you substantially grow your financial advisory business or nonprofit with P.E.P. Increase productivity, efficiency, and profit.
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