Can You Make Money Selling Ebooks? 6 Questions To Answer First…
By Anna Johnson on July 29th, 2010A few days ago a Kikabink News subscriber contacted me to ask what kind of money can be made selling ebooks. The short answer is: anything from zero to millions of dollars.
Ebooks are actually becoming BIG business with the advent of the iPad, Kindle, Nook and other e-readers. Meanwhile, they have been the Internet marketers’ medium of choice for providing how-to information across a range of niches online.
Of course, how much YOU can make from an ebook YOU write and market in a particular niche depends on a number of factors.
These factors range from whether there’s a sizable market for your topic, to whether you can produce a high quality ebook that people want to buy, to whether you can market that ebook effectively.
Before you invest any time, effort or money on a given ebook project, however, you want to have answers to six specific questions. These questions are set out below.
Unfortunately, it’s beyond the scope of this article to provide a detailed, step-by-step guide to producing and marketing an ebook. If you’re looking for that level of detail I recommend Paul Myers’ Simple Online Business System, which Kikabink publishes and is available here.
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Here’s what the Kikabink News subscriber wrote:
“Would love to hear some feedback about what sort of money can be made with just information ebooks. I don’t expect to make mega-bucks, but would like to eventually bring in $1,000 a month working 20 hours a week. With all of the free information on the internet I just don’t want to spend time and money creating a product that is not marketable.”
The reality is that NO-ONE can guarantee that any particular information business will generate a certain amount of income for a certain number of hours work. Answering these six (6) questions will, however, give you a good indication of whether or not you should go ahead with a certain ebook project.
1. Does the topic interest you?
In general, I recommend producing products and services – including ebooks – in areas or topics that interest you. It’s this interest that will carry you through when you encounter the inevitable challenges that crop up in research, product development, marketing and everything else involved in building an online business. To give yourself a few options, though, think of a few topics that interest you.
2. Is there a market?
Once you’ve identified some topics of interest, you’re next question is whether there’s a market for products and services in the related ‘niches’.
The quickest way to find out if there’s a market is to see how many people are using the search engines to search on keywords related to those topics or niches. If a lot of people are searching on keywords related to a specific topic, you know there is a high level of demand for that topic.
There are a number of tools – Wordtracker, Market Samurai and Google Adwords Traffic Estimator – that will indicate the volume of searches for a given keyword or keyphrase.
For example, at the time of writing I discovered there were 90,500 monthly searches using the term ‘anti-virus’ in Google, based on data from the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator.
3. Can it be monetized?
The next question is whether the highly-searched-on keywords you’ve identified reflect a market of paying customers. The best clue to this is to see whether there are a lot of advertisers paying for pay-per-click ads in the search engines. If, for instance, there are lots of ads on the right-hand-side of Google for that search phrase, you can bet businesses are making money in that market.
Continuing our example, I see that numerous Google Adwords ads appear when I type ‘anti-virus’ into Google.
4. Can you reach the market?
The fourth question is whether you can cost-effectively get a product or service in front of the market you’ve identified.
When it comes to search engine marketing, you might ask: (a) can I optimize my website for the search engines and achieve a high search engine ranking for the search phrase I’ve identified which will then translate into a decent amount of traffic to my site? and/or (b) do I have the budget to run pay-per-click ads that will get noticed by enough prospects who, in turn, come to my website?
5. What unique value can you offer that market?
Can you produce a product or service that delivers such value to your prospects that they will gladly hand over their hard-earned cash for it? Here’s where you need to consider how you can offer a solution that is unique and superior to what is already available. The more unique it is, the more it will stand out from the crowd. The better it is, the more likely people will buy it and spread word about it to other prospective customers.
6. Is the return on investment (ROI) sufficient?
If you’ve worked out that there is indeed a monetizable market or niche, that you can reach it cost-effectively, and you can develop a unique and superior product, the final question to consider is whether all this will deliver a sufficient ROI.
In other words: will pursuing this particular niche deliver you the highest returns compared with the other opportunities available to you?
This is where it pays to consider more than one topic or niche. You might find that one offers a much higher return than the others for the SAME investment of time, effort and money. Of course, it’s not just about financial returns. Also factor in your own enjoyment when considering alternative businesses.
If you’ve answered the above 6 questions in the affirmative, you have the green light for your ebook project. Get to work!
Again, if you’re not sure about how to implement one or more of these steps, check out Paul Myer’s Simple Online Business System, which Kikabink publishes. Paul’s system is especially ideal if you want to sell ebooks. Go here for more information: Simple Online Business System.
July 30th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Good tips. You also need an internet presence, good social media skills and persistence. Can people sell ebooks and make money? Absolutely. Is it real work that takes time? Absolutely.