If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that I’ve been working on an ebook site for quite a while now. I originally wrote the site to help people find a good recipe for vegan food, so that they could prepare it themselves without needing to buy all the ingredients from a store. Now that the site is up and running, I’ve decided to put together some tips and tricks on how to make the whole process easier and less stressful.
Set A Budget
One of the first things you need to do is set a budget for your ebook site. I recommend setting a budget that is at least one month’s income, as this will give you enough money to cover your basic costs. After you’ve set your budget, you can look to the rest of this article to get started on creating your ebook site.
Choose A Niche
If you’re passionate about a certain topic, you could choose to write an ebook about that topic. For example, if you’ve always wanted to write about fashion, you could start by writing about styling tricks for men and women, and then you could move onto styling different types of clothing such as swimsuits and evening wear. Remember: your goal is to make money from your ebook site, so pick a topic that you know enough about and that will be helpful to people. If you’re not sure about the topic, ask friends or family members who know more about it than you do.
Content Is King
You want to make sure that you have content on your site, whether this is a regularly published blog post or some content that you’ve created specifically for the ebook site. It’s important to note here that the content you create for the ebook site doesn’t necessarily need to be good. As I mentioned above, I originally wrote the site to help people find recipes they could prepare themselves, so I didn’t want to over-saturate the content with too much information. However, as I’ve gotten more experienced, I’ve found that having more content always works to improve the site. When someone arrives at your site looking for a certain recipe, they want to find that recipe as soon as possible, so having more content that is relevant to what they’re looking for will increase the chance of them finding what they need. Remember: your primary goal is to get people to click on the ads that are on your site, so try to give them content that they’ll find useful or interesting.
Monetizing Is Key
Last but not least, we have the money topic. As I’ve mentioned above, my original motivation for creating this site was to help people find recipes they could prepare themselves, so I didn’t need to rely on store-bought foods. However, since the site has gotten more popular, I’ve realized that people are turning to it for other reasons, so I’ve started to incorporate money-making strategies into the site. One of the simplest yet most effective ways of making money from an ebook site is through affiliate marketing.
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a type of marketing where you’ll never talk to a human being. All you’ll ever interact with is a click of a button, which then takes you to a website that has a product to sell. You then get a commission (usually a percentage) whenever someone clicks a product or service that you’ve advertised.
The simplest and most basic form of affiliate marketing is when you advertise a product and then send people to a website with a big ad promoting that product. For example, if Banana Boat is having a sale on their swimsuits, you could create an ad that simply says “Win a bikini from Banana Boat! Just click here to learn more.” When someone clicks that ad, they’ll be taken to a website where they’ll find out how to enter the draw for a free bikini. If someone decides to purchase that swimsuit after learning about the competition, you’ll get a commission.
You can also do affiliate marketing with a product that you’ve never heard of or used. For example, if you’re an affiliate for Nike and they’re having a special offer for college students, you could create an ad that says “Nike is offering an awesome deal for college students. Just click here to learn more.” When someone clicks that ad, they’ll be taken to a website where they can find out about the offer and if it’s relevant to them. If someone decides to purchase a Nike product after learning about the offer, you’ll get a commission.
Creating An Ebook Site That Makes Money
With all of this in mind, you can now start to create your profitable ebook site. Remember: you’re selling content, so you’ll need to work on producing content that people will be interested in purchasing. As I mentioned earlier, my original motivation for writing this site was to help people find a good recipe they could prepare themselves without needing to rely on store-bought foods, so I started by looking for recipes that didn’t call for a lot of ingredients that I didn’t have in my kitchen. To find these recipes, I searched for a certain category (such as “paleo” or “vegan”) and then looked for any recipe that was either tagged with these terms or had these terms in the description.
Based on this search, I then began to create a recipe index page, where I’d list out all the recipes that matched these search terms. From there, I could add some useful information about each recipe, such as the number of servings it would make and the ingredients required. People could then find these recipes quickly and easily, helping them to understand what the site is about and what they’ll find when they arrive at your site. You can also look to this same index page to see if there are any new recipes that you should add to the site. Once you have a good amount of content on your site, you can then move onto the next step.
Make The Page SEO-friendly
To ensure that your ebook site will be found by someone looking for the content you have on your site, you’ll need to make the page SEO-friendly. When a website is SEO-friendly, it means that all the page’s content, including titles, headings, and the text within the page is relevant and contains the right keywords. You can use a free resource like Google Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords and then use these keywords in your content.
When a human being types in a search term into the Google search bar, the search engine will first try to match the words they’re looking for with what’s available on the web. If they find a good match, they’ll click and be taken to that website.
So, what is SEO and how does it work?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of making a website more likely to be ranked highly by search engines like Google when someone types in a search term. There are three basic steps to making your website more SEO-friendly:
- Make sure your site has a quality web design.
- Fill out your content with useful information.
- Use the right keywords in your content and throughout the site, when possible.
Let’s say you’re writing a blog post about fashion, you might want to include the keyword “fashion” somewhere in the post’s content. If the post’s content is simply “Fashion is a popular topic right now, so I thought I’d write about it,” the web browser will not be able to find any relevant information because “fashion” is not a keyword that’s typically used in connection with content related to fashion blogs. However, if you inserted the keyword “fashion” into the text in some places throughout the post, the web browser will then be able to find and utilize this information when someone is searching for “fashion” blogs or websites.
The above example shows the difference between using keywords and not using keywords. When creating content for an ebook site, it’s always a good idea to use keywords in your article titles, subtitles, and the first few paragraphs of the content itself. After you’ve done this, you can then move onto the next step.