Advice for writing and selling e-books/infoproducts

Though this isn't really related to AdSense at all, anyone who's ever thought of writing and selling an e-book or infoproduct (”information product”) should check out Aaron Walls's great posting How to Create, Market and Sell an Information Product Online. Loads of great advice from someone who's been there. Let me add a few comments of my own.

I've talked before about how great articles are in getting traffic to your site. Well, as Aaron states, they're also great for generating publicity for your book. The two go hand-in-hand, of course, since you'll need to create a site to promote your e-book. Create the site first, though, and then make sure to place copies of the articles you write on the site itself. Ideally, make sure that copies of the articles you submit to other sites link back to those original articles on your site. You'll also want the bio box to promote the fact that you have an e-book, so be sure to mention that you're the “author of such-and-such, an e-book about blah-blah-blah”. Those two things will get more people visiting your book's site.

So here's a question for you: do you place AdSense ads on your book's site or not? My gut reaction is to say “not”, because the primary purpose of your site is to promote your book, to lead people to the order page. This is a constant struggle for many people who run e-commerce sites selling things. It's different when you're providing information for free — in that case the AdSense ads make perfect sense. When you're selling the information, though, it's usually better to just promote your own stuff, not someone else's.

That said, realize that when people republish your articles on their sites, they're going to take them and wrap them with ads. That's how they make money. So you could do the same with the “original” copies stored on your site. I just wouldn't put the ads elsewhere on the site. Again, your goal is to move people through the buying process, which consists of these steps:

1. Need recognition
2. Information search
3. Evaluation of alternatives
4. Purchase decision
5. Postpurchase behavior

That list comes straight out of a marketing textbook, Principles of Marketing. The articles you write to promote your infoproduct address #2. But when they eventually get to your site, any ads they see may factor into #3 and cause them to look elsewhere — after all, the ads will normally be well-targeted and relevant to the consumer's current quest.

If you want to experiment with the ads, though, a better way to do it would be to setup a second site to promote the e-book. Fill it with the articles and whatever content seems relevant and put ads on those pages. Make it act as a funnel to your main sales site. See how well it makes money. Or not. Maybe repeat the process if it works well.

And, by the way, I second Aaron's recommendation of OpenOffice as a great way to build e-books. Within Writer (the word processor, it's equivalent of Microsoft Word) there's a menu item labelled “Export to PDF…” that does exactly that. It's what I used to create my little e-book the two words that can make you rich and what I'm using to write Uncommon AdSense. There is a bit of a transition in moving from Word to Writer — it's not exactly the same — but you can work though it and come up with a pretty decent looking product in the end.

One last thing: you might be thinking this e-book/infoproduct topic doesn't apply to you, but are you sure? If you've been blogging extensively for a year or two about a subject, for example, chances are you've got some great material with which you can write a book. Same with any of the articles you've written — more material for an infoproduct. Just because you've put the material out there for free doesn't mean you can't bring it all together and repackage it into a different format. You can even build audio versions of your stuff! If people are reading what you're writing, chances are a small subset of them will be willing to pay for the privilege of more/better/expanded information. Think about it…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

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