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E-books are a good way to earn extra money. The great thing is, as a designer or developer, you’ll also have your existing expertise and knowledge to look to in order to come up with a viable e-book topic, and many of the skills you already possess will make the e-book production process easier.
You have to know (or learn) quite a lot about online marketing in order to successfully pull it off, though.
In this short guide, I will outline a fundamental strategy for writing and selling an e-book, breaking it down in only 6 steps.
But first, for inspiration, let’s look at a few examples of web designers and web developers who have produced income from e-books.
You might already know that some web designers and web developers are making thousands of dollars online with their e-books.
Examples:
You can read more e-book success stories here: Web Designers Making Thousands of Dollars in Passive Income.
What follows are my steps for writing and selling your own e-books.
I once did an interview with Neil Patel, the founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.
I asked him this question:
"What are the most important things that people who want to start an online business should be aware of?"
Here is one piece of advice from that interview that really made me think:
"The number one thing that you should be aware of is this: Don’t create an idea that you just want to create, create a business that solves a unique problem that people are facing right now and they’re willing to pay to solve it. This is the number one thing that you should be aware of, because if you’re not able to do that, you won’t be able to create a business that’s doing well."
Many people miss that very important thing. In order to make money with any product, you have to find and solve a real problem.
It’s not about what you think would be cool, it’s about what your potential customers actually need and are willing to pay for.
Even though you have found a good problem to solve, an e-book subject you think people will pay for in order to solve a knowledge gap they have, you might still get on the wrong path because it isn’t easy to predict what people actually need.
You don’t want to spend your valuable time and resources building something that nobody wants. An e-book can take weeks or months to produce, so it’s important that the effort can produce a good outcome for you.
That’s why you should validate the e-book idea before you start putting in some serious work into it.
The easiest way to see whether someone is actually interested in your e-book idea is to do this:
It’s important to understand that you can’t expect to sell a lot of copies of your e-book if you can’t even get people to subscribe to a free email list.
However, if you manage to get 100-200 subscribers, that’s a solid indication that there is at least some interest in your e-book idea, and that it might be good to move forward with it.
Many people make the mistake of trying to sell something to their potential customers right off the bat.
Nathan Barry explains this mistake very well:
Imagine you and I meet for the first time on the street. After a quick introduction I ask, "Do you by chance work with software?"
"Yes, I’m a developer." you respond.
"Perfect! I just wrote a book about designing better web applications. Would you like to buy it?"
How many copies do you think I could sell this way?
Right then you are probably thinking that we just met 30 seconds earlier and you have no reason to trust me. What indications do you have that I even know anything about designing software? It’s probably a good time to say something noncommittal like, "I’ll check it out," and find a way out of the conversation.
This scenario seems completely ridiculous when described as an in-person encounter, but it actually happens all the time online.
People tend to buy things from individuals and companies they trust. You are not likely to get someone to trust you by bombarding them with endless sales pitches.
People trust those of us who prove ourselves by adding value over an extended period of time.
Only when you have gained that trust can you expect to sell something.
Email marketing is an excellent way to build trust over time.
You offer people something valuable as an opt-in incentive to your email list (free e-book, design resources, videos, courses, etc.)
Then, you send them a useful email (no sales pitches!) every few days, making sure that every message adds at least a bit of value to your subscribers.
You only make your offer after you have given your subscribers a lot of free valuable material.
Good news: You can automate this whole process. You only need to create content and set up an autoresponder sequence once. Then, you can focus on driving traffic to your landing page and getting more subscribers, and your autoresponder sequence will take care of the whole pre-selling part.
Writing an e-book might seem like daunting task, especially if you are a web designer or a web developer, and not a writer.
It’s very doable though, presuming that you approach this process the right way.
What do I mean by "right way"?
Here are some things that professional writers do when they tackle big projects.
Writing without a plan might work for fiction writers sometimes, but if you write non-fiction books, you have to plan ahead. Otherwise your writing will be incoherent and hard to follow.
Writing and editing at the same time is a recipe for writer’s block. You have to write first and edit later, otherwise you will waste hours and hours staring at a blank Word document.
You can’t sit around waiting for inspiration if you want to get any writing done. Set a daily quota of, let’s say, 1,000 words and keep pushing no matter what until you have your e-book. Writing is a lot less about needing inspiration or motivation, and a lot more about consistency than people tend to think.
Don’t worry too much about your writing skills. Keep in mind that you are writing a book for web designers and web developers, who bought it to learn particular things, and couldn’t care less about your writing style as long as they learn whatever it is they need to learn in a quick and efficient manner.
Most email lists convert somewhere within 1%-10% range. I usually use 5% as an estimate when I try to guess potential revenue for information products.
This means that 50 out of 1,000 email subscribers will actually buy your e-book 24 hours within the launch.
Also, most people make the biggest lump of money in the first 24 hours within the launch and then sales decrease dramatically — this pattern becomes clear when you take a look at Sacha’s, Nathan’s and Jarrod’s e-book launches.
That’s why I’m suggesting you wait until you have at least 1,000 subscribers if you want to have a profitable launch.
Here are a few tips for your launch.
Give your email subscribers updates on your upcoming launch. For example, you can mention in an email blast that it’s going to be next month, then once you know a certain date mention the exact date, then a few days before it, let them know that it’s only few days left until the big day, etc.
Give your subscribers a sneak peak into the upcoming e-book to whet their appetite (e.g. send them a preview version or a free chapter).
Offer your subscribers an "early bird" discount for the launch day/week (e.g. let them know that your launch price will be with 25% off your normal price).
I don’t recommend pouring your efforts into trying to create a big buzz on the launch day, because that is too late, and you’ll be extremely busy that day with a lot of other things.
You want to build your own audience that is eager to buy your e-book by driving traffic to your landing page, converting that traffic to email subscribers, and putting those subscribers through your autoresponder sequence. That will allow you to have a successful launch once the big day comes.
You must do most of the work before the launch — not during or after it, otherwise your product is very likely to fall flat.
What do you do once you had your successful launch and want to keep making sales?
The best way to go about this is by way of an evergreen launch.
An evergreen launch means that you set up your email autoresponder sequence in a way that every subscriber goes through the same sequence of emails that escalates from messages that add value, to emails that mention your e-book, to a sales pitch, to a follow up to a sales pitch.
That allows you to automate both pre-selling and selling parts.
Your focus should remain pretty much the same as it was prior to the launch:
The beauty of this strategy is that hardest parts of the process (pre-selling and selling) are automated, and your job is done once a person has subscribed to your email list.
You can relax and watch the sales come in.
To implement the strategies I have discussed above, these are the things you need, at the bare minimum.
You will need a reliable way to handle email marketing such as Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.
There are tons of options, so give ample time to researching and deciding on what email marketing service you eventually end up with.
You will need a reliable way to handle payments and e-book downloads.
There are quite a few options for that, the most notable ones being Gumroad and E-junkie (my personal preference is Gumroad).
You will most likely need a PayPal account for getting money from your e-book distribution/payment gateway.
To see other options for taking in payments online, read this: 10 Excellent Online Payment Systems.
There’s much more to writing and selling e-books, and I have merely provided an overview of the writing and selling process so that you can get a preview of the things that lay ahead, should you choose to write and sell your own e-book.
There is plenty of content that you can find online about this topic. You will need to do a bit more additional research on specific parts of the e-book production process.
Hopefully, though, this short guide can help you on your way.
Here are some topics that you might want to take a closer look at.
Copy is what makes or breaks a landing page, an email autoresponder sequence, or a sales pitch. Take time to learn at least fundamentals.
The Copyblogger blog is a good place to start.
This is also sometimes called an "autoresponder series".
Setting up an autoresponder sequence that performs well is not as easy as it might sound.
You might want to register to as many newsletters in different niches as you can, in order to see what techniques people use to sell through email. This will give you a lot of ideas for your own autoresponder sequence.
You will find it hard to sell online products if you don’t have a clue about online marketing, therefore I suggest looking into this subject.
There is plenty of content on the Web about this topic. For example, check out my own site FounderTips — a site where web designers and web developers can go to learn how to make money online.
There are books about online marketing as well.
Interested in writing and selling e-books? Give it a try!
E-books are a great way to get into online entrepreneurship.
Why?
Worst case scenario: You have wasted your time on creating a product that nobody wants. You have learned a lot of valuable business lessons, though.
Best case scenario: You’ve sold many copies of your e-book and have made a lot of money. You have also learned a lot of valuable business lessons.
Time will pass anyway. Why not put it to a good use?
Agota Bialobzeskyte is a writer at FounderTips, the only online marketing blog for web designers and web developers.
The post 6 Steps to Writing and Selling Your E-book appeared first on Six Revisions.
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We’re all familiar with Adobe Creative Cloud (née Creative Suite). Popular favorites are Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Fireworks. They’re great tools that are extremely powerful, get the job done and help create the best product for designers and consumers.
However, Adobe’s switch to a subscription model has infuriated some users; many swearing off the software giant’s applications, and searching the web for alternatives.
Whether you object to Adobe’s market dominance, can’t afford a Creative Cloud subscription, or just think it’s healthy to use a range of software, there are alternatives to the CC behemoth. Small independent software houses and international mega-corps offer plenty of choice for non-Adobe web design. Below are some of the best to get you started.
Bohemian coding’s Sketch is being touted by many as a viable alternative to Fireworks. At $49.99 it’s an affordable alternative to high-end vector applications like Illustrator.
Stencyl is a game creation platform that claims to create an easier workflow for you while rendering beautiful results. The best part of Stencyl is it exports using Flash or HTML5, depending on your preference. This is a great alternative to Adobe Flash and a great way to use HTML5 to create games and apps for interactive designs.
It’s tough to find a formidable bitmap application to rival Adobe’s Photoshop. We all use it and use all it’s features heavily. Pixelmator is a decent program that does pretty much everything Photoshop does. Of major importance is the fact that Pixelmator is built primarily for Mac OS so it links well to other Mac programs. Pixelmator is currently available in the Mac App Store for $14.99.
It’s almost impossible to talk about design programs without mentioning Gimp as a close second to Photoshop. This open source solution is used for photo and image retouching, composition and authoring. Gimp also has the ability to create animated GIFs and MPEG files that can be used online.
Inkscape is an open source vector images editor that’s very similar to programs like Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. You can create almost anything in such a program whether it’s a logo or website design. Inkspace is also relevant to those of us who want to create and support SVG capabilities; Inkscape supports this file format which makes it easier to use online.
Acorn is seen strictly as an image editor because it’s so simple. Sure, you can create more complex things like website designs and such, but Acorn is really great for enhancing your images. It’s quick and easy and many of the effects are editable and non-destructible. This is definitely great for the developer who doesn’t want to design a full website, but wants to make sure their images are correctly edited first.
If you’re not into WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors, then this is probably the text editor for you. It’s extremely sophisticated, easy to use and it just makes sense. It has excellent predictive code to help you create clean files. It also formats your code cleanly (if you let it). There are so many great features Sublime has to offer to make coding understandable and easy whether you’re a beginner or pro.
Silverlight can fit just as well into a graphics application, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll make it about development. Silverlight is a framework that’s dedicated to helping create rich Internet applications. It’s considered the necessary framework for creating Windows Phone applications, but the support for Silverlight hasn’t gone widespread, and with the collapse of the Flash market and the rise of jQuery animation, it’s questionable how long it will be around.
BlueGriffon is a WYISWYG editor that’s based on the rendering engine of Firefox. They claim their interface is extremely easy to use for beginners and advanced developers as well. BlueGriffon is great for those of us who want to create web sites that still maintain the necessary web standards. It’s not the most beautiful application, but it gets the job done.
First and foremost, this application is only for those of you using Windows. This HTML editor is a slimmed down version of the popular CoffeeCup Editor, but it still maintains some of the features used such as Code Cleaner which makes sure your code is squeaky clean. It’s a WYISWG editor that focuses on making development easy for all skill levels. This is a great tool if you’re looking for something and are a Windows user, there’s also a more advanced version at $69 should you wish to upgrade.
This is the Free HTML Editor’s big brother, this time developed for MacOS. This powerful application allows you to make whole sites and get started in seconds. If you’re familiar with Dreamweaver, a lot of what you can do with that is available here in this Web Editor. You can link your files, upload via FTP and so much more with this tool. This Web Editor is available for only $69 which is honestly a steal for the features and value.
There are two groups of people who should be using KompoZer: the person who knows everything about coding or the person who knows nothing about coding. There’s no in between. KompoZer is extremely basic and isn’t as caught up in the fanciness as a CoffeeCup Web Editor may be. However, it’s still great for the pro who wants to check his work or the beginner who wants to fool around to see if they can make something.
As you can see, Flow claims to be the Mac’s best FTP + SFTP Client. Right off the bat, I’d have to agree. FTP’s (as you’ll see as you scroll down further) aren’t the most intuitive things in the world. You typically just find a way to upload your files and kind of go your ways. Flow has so many features that just make sense, like the ability to copy URLS, drag and drop files easily and preview images and files as you go along. Flow is available in the Mac App Store for $4.99 I recommend you all get it if you’re fed up with your old FTP client.
One of the most relied on FTP clients on the Mac, if you’re looking to replace that upload feature in Dreamweaver you should definitely check out Transmit. The Disk feature, allowing you to launch any of your saved favorites directly in the finder is awesome.
This open-source FTP client is a little different because it’s been developed to work with your favorite cloud service. The interface is a bit easier to use than most standard FTPs, but it’s nothing that’s extremely out of the ordinary. Cyberduck gets the job done while working with your cloud storage for Mac and Windows.
Earlier we talked about some platforms that make it easier to make rich applications. Prototypes is a simple tool that I think most designers, as well as app developers will want to work with. It shares and tests iPhone apps as you still design them. You can take your stand alone images from Photoshop, Illustrator or wherever and use Prototypes to make your application interactive. While it’s not exclusively web design, it’s definitely useful in making sure things work well for iPhone users.
There’s something in this list for everyone interested in creating websites. You may have to pull a little trial and error to figure out what’s best for you and what works for your skill set. Web design and development is a very challenging task, but with the right tools and applications, anyone can create stellar sites in no time.
Will you be taking out a Creative Cloud subscription or hunting for alternatives? Have we missed any of your favorites? Let us know in the comments.
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One of the biggest challenges of online retailers is to build a list of customers who will come back over and over again. One way to do that is to give something away, something of value that the customer would be happy to pay for. If you show the customers you really care about them, you'll build trust and loyalty over time.
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Former software rivals Microsoft and Oracle have announced a partnership that will allow Windows Hyper-V and Azure customers to run Oracle software on these platforms.
]]>The USM Board of Regents has required all USM institutions, including UMBC, to provide a healthy, smoke-free environment for all faculty, staff, students, contractors, and visitors by July 1, 2013.
In response, a Smoke-Free Campus Task Force was appointed – with representatives from UMBC’s shared governance organizations, including students, faculty, and staff members – to make recommendations about how best to implement this policy on our campus.
After working throughout the spring semester, the task force has recommended that smoking be allowed in two designated areas removed from major pedestrian traffic, in order to provide a safe space for any students, faculty, or staff who may continue to smoke – especially after dark. For students, faculty, and staff who would like to stop smoking, University Health Services offers free visits with a medical provider who will provide support and discuss various options for quitting.
This new policy reflects a national movement to provide healthy, smoke-free environments on college campuses and brings UMBC in line with more than 800 colleges in the United States that are already smoke free. Your support and assistance is appreciated, as UMBC implements this new policy designed to make our campus community healthier for all who study, work or visit here.
More information about the full implementation plan will be provided in the coming weeks.
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Each year, the Daily Record publishes the VIP List, or “Very Important Professionals, Successful by 40.” According to the Daily Record, VIP recognizes Maryland leaders based on their professional accomplishments, a commitment to inspiring change in their community, and their tremendous accomplishments achieved before or by age 40.This year, two UMBC alumni made it on to this prestigious list:
From the Daily Record’s website:
“Our VIPs are the ones to watch, at law firms, companies, hospitals, nonprofits and universities.”
Click here to see the complete list of honorees!
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