Affiliate marketing with e-books is hot right now. This article will explain a little bit about how to properly write a free or paid ebook with the intent of making residual affiliate income from your e-book.
Step 1: What Do You Know & Love?
For starters, if this is the first time you are putting together an affiliate e-book, make sure you choose a topic you already know. Everyone knows something about something. Even if you don’t feel you’re an expert on a topic, you can always research it. As long as you choose a topic you have a genuine interest in, the process will be fun.
Step 2: Finding A Good Affiliate Program
When you’re writing an e-book in the hopes of selling other peoples products or services, you should always find a highly reputable company to partner with. The more recognizable or professional looking, the better. However, you can promote virtually anything by writing an e-book. Before you choose a specific topic for your affiliate e-book, make sure you already know what products and services you will promote.
There are a few good ways to check for affiliate programs. For starters, you can do a simple Google search. Say, for example, I wanted to write a book teaching people how to play the acoustic guitar. I would do a Google search for guitar affiliate program or acoustic guitar affiliate. When doing a search like that, dozens of options come up. And don’t forget about one of the oldest and most popular affiliate programs on the web. Amazon.com has their own affiliate program as well. The commission percentage is a bit on the low side with Amazon, but it converts like crazy.
You can also use a service like ClickBank.com or CommissionJunction.com. Each of those free services contains thousands of companies searching for affiliates like you to promote their products and services. They have existed for many years and will be around for years to come.
Between all of these different ways to find a great affiliate program, you should be able to find a great product or service to promote related to just about any topic of any industry.
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Step 3: Choosing A Topic For Your Affiliate E-Book
Now, before you settle on a specific topic, there is a little bit of research you should do. Go to the Amazon Kindle Store and start searching for books in your topic. Are books related to your topic selling well? If not, yours probably won’t sell very well either. On the other hand, how stiff is the competition? If you think there is too much competition, you can always narrow your niche.
For example, let’s take my acoustic guitar example. I might realize after looking in the Kindle store that there are too many e-books teaching people how to play the acoustic guitar. No problem. I can simply narrow my niche down to an even more targeted audience. I could make my book about “how to teach your child to play the acoustic guitar” or “how to choose the right acoustic guitar” or “the history of the acoustic guitar” or any other branches of that topic. There is always a way to spin your e-book to a more targeted audience (and sometimes, that’s the best way to get your e-book sold anyway!).
Step 4: Writing Your E-Book Or Having It Written For You
At this point, you will need to write your e-book. If you have affiliate links, try to find a way to get it in there as early as possible. Don’t make the beginning of your e-book a sales ad, but just casually link to your affiliate in a passive way. Then, later on in the book, you can make a bigger case for why people should sign up for a certain product or service.
The biggest issue here is, you want your e-book to be super helpful to people and well-written. If it’s not, you’ll get poor reviews and poor reviews are a killer for any e-book (at least in the Kindle store). Plus, it just sucks when someone puts out an e-book that isn’t helpful at all to anyone. So, don’t be that person. Make the book really helpful and fun to read. You’ll be rewarded through more affiliate sales.
What I’m talking about above is the CTPM process. Click here to learn more about it.
If you have really poor writing skills or don’t want to write the book yourself, there are many ebook creation services out there. Just do a web search for e-book writing services and you’ll have a whole lot of options to choose from. You can also hire a freelance writer directly by using a service like Elance.com or Freelancer.com.
Before you pay up, make sure the book is very helpful and also check for spelling and grammar errors. You’d be surprised at how stringent many people are about spelling and grammar in e-books. Just a few errors can be enough to earn you a poor review, so be very careful.
Step 5: Pricing Your E-Book
If you’re going to be selling your e-book on the Amazon Kindle Store (highly recommended), you should price it for free until you have a few positive reviews. Once you get some positive reviews, you can then increase the price if you want. Do some experimenting. Some books will sell well at higher prices while others might be tough to sell at any price. Also, keep in mind that free e-books tend to get downloaded much more than paid books. You might be better off keeping the book free if you have a large amount of affiliate commissions.
Step 6: Promoting Your E-Book
Amazon and most other e-book stores provide instructions on how to properly format and submit your e-book. If you want to sell if privately, you can always use a Microsoft Word to PDF converter to quickly and painlessly make your e-book. So, once that’s done, you have to promote the book.
The best way to promote the book is through having your own website. I teach you how to develop a great website that attracts a ton of free visitors in this amazing training program. If you haven’t signed up yet, I highly recommend it.
You can also promote your book through paid advertising, on social media, by contacting other blog owners and giving out review copies, etc. There are even ways to promote your book offline such as radio, TV, billboards, and newspaper ads. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have money to spend on advertising, and that’s why I always recommend a website as the single best way to promote an e-book. After all, these days, anyone can build a website.
