Make Money Online- the baby steps part 37

We figured you had some questions about the more practical parts of getting your e-book out there and we will try to adress some of the more important issues right here in “Make Money Online- the baby steps part 37″.

First and foremost of all questions is usually: how long should an e-book be? While there are no actual rules, we can give you some guidelines, based on what has become some sort of “standard practice”. E-books come in all forms and sizes, and the size of your e-book is in most cases a function of what you want to achiece with it. If you are simply trying to get hold of a few more e-mail adresses to your list, then you will probably find that 5-50 pages will do the trick. A good way to go about it is to take one of your most popular topics or posts and expand a bit on it. Think it through and provide an even more thoughtprovoking piece on it. If you couple that with a riveting and “selling” title, and a nice “packaging” effort you, your e-book and your e-mail list should do just fine. If a solid list is what you are trying to build then this is probably your best option. Be cartain to provide value. Be relevant and to the point. Don´t overdo it, especially if you are doing it on a niche website. Just give them what they are looking for, and collect those e-mail adresses.

In many cases, the number of pages an e-book has is meaningless information. It has to do with the fact that many bloggers have made it a habit to take a 50 page booklet and transform it into a 120 page” book” simply by reducing the number of words per page. Usually the number of words per page are running in the neighbourhood of 500. But if you drop that number down to 150-180 words per page the content stays the same but the number of pages goes up significantly. We are familiar with cases where an e-book was being touted as a 600-page brick-master piece. Once we read the book we quickly realized it was more of a 60-pages piece of junk spread out over 600+ pages. We do not like this practice at all, as we feel it is sneaky. We feel you should always tell your visitors exactly what they can expect from the book, and then deliver precisely that. No exceptions.

We also feel that a far more relevant number regarding the size of an e-book is the number of words it contains. A regular print book usually ranges between 50 000 and 100 000 words. Editors will tell you that the standard minimum length of a normal-sized novel is 50 000-60 000 words. As a rule of thumb, most e-books are shorter than 50 000 words, some are considerably shorter. E-book prices tend to move in harmony with the length of the book. In general, the longer the e-book, the higher you are able to price it.

As far as the technical aspects are concerned you are going to create your e-books as PDF-documents, as this is the industry standard more or less. It´s good if you own a copy of Adobe Acrobat, but it is not neccessary. There are programs like PrimoPDF or Adobe´s Create PDF service to help you out. If you can´t stand the hassle of all the minor details you need to consider when you need to put the finishing touches on your e-book there are easier ways. Just finish your e-book as an ordinary word document and then contact a freelancer to add some additional formatting and design touches to it. This will cost you a bit of money, but you will save plenty of time and headache, especially if you are not a design wizard and are not that familiar with the technicalities of creating a functional e-book.

We are guessing that most of you would want to sell your e-books on your own websites down the road. If that is the case there are a number of factors surrounding your book which will determine the number of sales you can expect from it:

1. Quality of your website. Whether you are operating a blog or a website the number of sales you make is a direct function of how well your blog or website is perceived among your visitors. This isn´t exactly a shocker. If people like what you are producing on your blog or website, they figure they are likely to like the e-book you´ve created as well. Blogs tend to outsell ordinary websites when it comes to e-books.

2. Relationship with customers. The relationship that you are building with your visitors is an important factor behind the success of your e-book. We know internet marketers who can move ridiculous amounts of e-books or other products simply by giving them the nod. This type of following doesn´t come easily. It is built upon years of trust, building a mutually beneficial relationship, telling it like it is, and never going for the quick, easy buck. Blogs tend tp outsell ordinary websites when it comes to e-books. This is a direct function of the fact that blogs are more personal and that bloggers are generally much better at establishing a relationship with their readers.

3. Authority. Does your site have authority status. If so, you are in a great position to sell those e-books. Authority sites have better sales and higher conversion rates in general. If people feel you are top dog in your area, your recommendations and offers are going to sound that much more tempting. Why would they wanna buy it from any old copycat, when they can get the goods straight from the source?

4. Price tag. Prices of e-books generally tend to move up alongside the number of pages of the e-book. Also, the subject which is covered has meaning for the price. We have certainly noticed that pricing has a major impact on e-book sales. We know of cases where e-books have been selling poorly, but as soon as prices were cut sales shot through the roof. Strangely, we also know about instances where a book was selling poorly, and then started selling like crazy when the price tag was tripled and the packaging of the book was altered. It´s difficult to give you any hard rules about pricing of your e-book. Our best advice would be to do some experimentation. A good rule that does affect sales positively according to research is to price your book at psychological levels. A book price of $ 9.95 is much better than a book priced at $ 10.05, and the former will statistically outsell the latter by a significant margin.

5. Relevance. The relevance to your audience will play a major role in the sales of your e-book. If you are operating a website with lots of content about cars you are not likely to do particularly well trying to sell e-books about internet marketing. If on the other hand you would offer an e-book dealing with the 100 most important things to consider when buying a new car, chances are that you might get some nice sales going for you. In the latter example you are clearly catering to the needs of your niche. Your content is relevant to your visitors, and by being relevant it is also highly sellable. Content that is relevant to your visitors and helps them solve a need will do well. That is the rule.

It´s time to move on. You now know the most important aspects of e-books and how it all works out. Let´s move on to “Make Money Online- the baby steps part 38″.