Making Money Online Selling eBooks

I talked about making money online with your blog using Google Adsense as well as Affiliate Marketing and now we’ll make some money with ebooks.

Creating an ebook can help you make money online via your blog.

When you create an ebook on a subject you know well, and that holds valuable information for others, you can either give it away for free or charge for it.

Create an Email List

Why would you take the time to create something for free? Well, when you create a valuable information product like an ebook, you not only provide valuable information that others can use, you also drive traffic to your blog.

What can you do with that traffic? You can provide a form on your blog for people to sign up and they’ll receive the ebook.

This is a great way to start a mailing list. I’ll be starting an email list in February 2009. Now that I’ve written almost a month’s worth of articles, I’m following all the experienced business folks that repeat the mantra, “Start a mailing list right away.” Okay, okay, I get it.

Completely FREE!!

But, you might want to offer your ebook completely free – no cost, no email address, no nothing. Your blog visitor only has to click once to download the ebook.

What you can do with this, is embed an affiliate link or two in the ebook. This way, your not putting any barrier in front of your readers to download your ebook. What you’re hoping for then is the reader will like what you have to say in your ebook and end up clicking on an affiliate link in the ebook.

This can work well because the ebook will be downloaded for a long time and could provide a steady stream of income depending on the affiliate product that is being sold by a link in the ebook.

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

All this takes traffic, traffic to your blog or website where many eyeballs will see your free ebook and download it. That’s why it’s important to drive traffic to your site.

Affiliate Program

And yet another way is to charge for the ebook. Not only can you make a bit of money charging for the ebook but you can also setup an affiliate program for your ebook.

Let’s say you’ve created an ebook and you’re charging $50.00 for it. You also decide to setup an affiliate program with your ebook and for this example you’re affiliate payout is 50%. That means you’ll pay $25.00 to each person who advertises your ebook.

Now, that is considered sneezing a product in my opinion. Sneezing means, while you make $25.00 selling your product, other people (sneezers) or affiliates are also making $25.00 for each sale.

Now you’ve got people (sneezers) selling your ebook for you and you’re making some money as well as the affiliate.

Sounds wonderful, but again, you have to create something of value in the ebook, generate the traffic, as well as get folks to sign up for your affiliate program and promote your ebook. It’s that easy.