Internet Business Mastery: Business Development and Internet Marketing for the Web 2.0 Age » Creating Information Products

How to Get an eBook to Write Itself in 3 Easy Steps

Pat Flynn -GUEST- — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 10:35:44 +0000

You have many choices when it comes to product creation for your internet business. You’ve got membership websites, physical books, eBooks, DVD/CD packages, webinars, teleseminars, newsletters, software, and consultation type services – just to name a few. Today, I’d like to highlight one of the aforementioned products that is easy to create and at the same times gives you the potential to really skyrocket your business and take it to the next level. I’m talking about eBooks.

For those of you who don’t already know me, my name is Pat Flynn. I’ve been mentioned here on Internet Business Mastery a number of times, and was even featured in a case study video interview by Sterling and Jay last year.

Most of my internet success has come from eBooks that I’ve written. In 2009, for example, my business grossed $162,192.85 in eBook sales alone, and that’s just from two products. I’ve also written an eBook for my entrepreneurial blog, which helped me generate over 2000 email leads in less than two months.

The power of an eBook to expand your business and brand, whether you sell it online for profit (the ROI is ridiculous!), or give it away for free to generate leads, is heightened by the fact that you can automate the entire process. So, if you don’t yet have your own product for your business, I definitely recommend writing an eBook.

And the best part is…it’s easy!

Using the following process, you can virtually have an eBook write itself.

Step One: Mind Map it Out

You’re probably already familiar with mindmapping because Sterling and Jay talk about it all of the time. If not, it’s basically a visual way of brainstorming, using bubble diagrams to show how ideas relate to one another and a hierarchy of strings of your thoughts. You can do this on paper, or use software such as Mindjet to make it easier for you – it’s up to you.

Start with your central topic of choice and just branch out from there, mapping out all of the related ideas, thoughts, potential topics and sub topics that surround your topic. I recommend getting as detailed as possible, and don’t be afraid to branch out far from the central topic – it’s all important information if you thought of it.

Here’s an example of a mindmap for part of a potential flyfishing eBook, just so you can see what it looks like:

As you can see, mindmapping is a great way to organize a ton of ideas and categorize them in a way that’s easy to understand.

Get as deep and as detailed as possible, because the more you write at this point, the easier the eBook will create itself in the following steps.

Step Two: Create an Outline

Using your mindmap as a guide, write an outline of what to include in your eBook.

The only real difference between the mindmap and the outline is that the outline should be parts of your mindmap listed in an order that seems logical for a person totally unfamiliar with the topic. Put yourself in the shoes of a newbie and try to determine the order of information that makes sense.

Don’t forget to create topics and subtopics in your outline, just like you did with your mindmap.

At the end of it all, you’ll have what looks like a Table of Contents for a book. In fact, that’s exactly what it becomes!

Here’s part of an outline that can be created from the flyfishing mindmap above:

Chapter: Fly Fishing Equipment
- Section 1: Fly Rods
  - Part 1: The Flex
    - Stiff
      - Pros
      - Cons
      - Recommendations
    - Flexible
      - Pros
      - Cons
      - Recommendations
  - Part 2: Care For Your Rods
- Section 2: Fly Reels
- Section 3: Flies

…and so on and so-forth.

Step Three: Treat Parts of Your Outline as Individual Blog Posts or Articles

At this point, you can turn your outline/table of contents into a checklist of articles to complete. If you think about each part of your outline as an individual blog post or article, finishing the entire eBook won’t seem that far out of reach.

The nice part about this process is that you can choose which parts of your eBook to write first. You don’t have to start at the beginning, which is often the hardest part. Choose an “article” that you feel the most comfortable with, crank it out, and move on to the next. Literally crossing them off the list as you finish totally helps for motivation too.

If you’re not a writer, or don’t want to write the eBook on your own, you can easily hire a ghost writer to complete the job for you. It will be easy for them, since they have a detailed outline of exactly what’s needed already.

This three step method is what I used for all of the eBooks I’ve written, and it works like a charm every single time.

Good luck!

————

Pat Flynn is a successful entrepreneur, blogger, author, husband and father who writes transparently about what he does online. You can read more about his online adventures at The Smart Passive Income Blog.

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

IBM 45 | In These Uncertain Times, How Do You Find True Security?

Sterling (Jeremy Frandsen) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:31:02 +0000

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In this episode of Internet Business Mastery we ask the question: In These Uncertain Times, How Do You Find True Security?.

Plus we have a quick tip about called: The Ideal Platform for Creating a Flexible Membership Site for the Web 2.0 Era.

Items mentioned in the episode:

Congratulations to Chuck Wood for winning the Book of the Month Contest
Internet Business Mastery Academy – Coming July 16, make sure to get on the early notification email list to receive special discounts and sneak peaks of content within the Academy!
aMember.com

How to Quickly and Easily Get Your Customers to Buy Ten Times More

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 00:12:42 +0000

There’s a relatively easy way to make your marketing drastically easier and significantly increase sales (and hence profits). Unfortunately, the *majority* of businesses completely overlook a critical element of sales and their businesses suffer for it.

What is this critical piece of business wisdom and marketing prowess? It’s probably more obvious than you realize.

Sell what your market *wants* most.

That’s it. Are you let down? Seem to easy? Well then why do so many people get this wrong?

Here’s how most businesses go about product development and sales. Someone gets a great idea. Their positive it’s what people want. They fall in love with it. It the best things since sliced yak meat. They build it. Then they go try to find a market to sell it to. Maybe they succeed. Often they fail.

The problem is that this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they should do.

The surefire to creating a product that sells is to…

Find a carefully targeted, starving market. Determine what they
desire most. Give it to them better than anyone else can.

Let’s break this seemingly simple process down.

Find a Carefully Target Market

Know who it is you are trying to reach. Know what makes them tick. This is easiest if you’re a member of the target market yourself. Make sure the market is large enough and has money to spend. At the same time, the more carefully niched your market is, the easier it is to stand out and be THE go-to-guy (or gal) for your market.

Find a Starving Market

Make sure your market has a hungry passion, burning need or insatiable appetite for something you can provide. For example, golfers will settle at nothing to remove one stroke from their score. If you have acne that embarrasses you, you’ll pay good money to have it solved NOW. Make sure they have money they are willing to spend to scratch their itch.

Disgruntled employees get to the point that they will do anything to quit their job and find something else to fulfill their lives and reach their dreams. (This begs the question: what do GRUNTLED employees want?)

Determine What They Desire Most

Attract the market. Communicate with the market. Develop a relationship with them. Ask them what they want most. Don’t assume what they want and certainly don’t make the mistake of guessing or assuming what you think they need. You’ll more than likely miss the mark enough to cost you considerable money.

Keep in mind that what they *want* and what they *need* could be two different things. It’s much easier to sell someone what they want.

For example, don’t assume that your spouse needs a treadmill for their birthday when what they really want is flowers or a golf club…doh!

Give Them What They Want

If you communicate with your market, you’ll learn a lot. Survey them. Visit forums. Observe what problems and questions are raised the most. What is it they want but are not getting? The better your relationship is with the market, the easier it will be to get meaningful feedback. The ideal people to ask are your own prospects/customer/community.

This is how I chose the topic for my book. When I surveyed the podcasting landscape, the number one desire of podcasters (whether they were beginner, advanced, indie or professional) was that they wanted more listeners. Hence I wrote the book, Promoting Your Podcast.

Give it To Them Better Than Anyone Else Does

Your market may have multiple options for getting what they want. This is why it’s important to have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Answer the question: why should they get what they want from you over every other option available to them? Here’s a hint. If your reason is “because I’m cheaper” than time to get back on the thinking yak and come up with a new USP.

—-

Now it’s time to “practice what we preach” and “teach by example.” Yeah. I know. We’re cool like that.

We’re continually working on new products and services to help you launch an internet business and online presence that will:

Bring you more freedom and fulfillment in life
Make you a recognized expert (or even celebrity) in your field
Create new revenue streams and increase your income by 100+%
Make sales, marketing and lead generation easy (and even fun)
Build a large community of loyal fans around your brand

We plan to launch a number of new things throughout the rest of 2008.

BUT FIRST, we need your input. This will help us continue to develop products and services that will best serve your needs…er…wants.

Please take a moment to fill out the following survey. It consists of one short page.

There are two reasons why you should take this survey.

To have your voice heard and ensure you get what you want from Internet Business Mastery
To flat out steal from us and save yourself the time and energy of coming up with a survey for your own market. Just look at what we’ve done and adapt it to your own market.

No worries…we won’t take it personally if you swipe from us. Actually, we might take it personally if you don’t.

We greatly appreciate your feedback. It will directly impact he creation of valuable new products/services for you.

Now, what say you on this matter? What have I missed? If nothing else, can you please offer me a definition for the word gruntled? Let’s hear it in the comments below. (BTW, a new episode of the podcast is coming next week. Promise.)

Here’s the link again for the survey

IBM 32 | 5 Ways to Use Recorded Content to Continually Make Money and Drive Traffic

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:17:42 +0000

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In this episode of Internet Business Mastery we discuss five ways that you can use coaching recorded content to continue to make money and attract traffic. We use examples from what we have planned with the content from the Internet Business Mastery Coaching Course.

We also discuss three big lessons that we learned from the process of doing an online coaching course.

Items mentioned in this episode:

Brian Clark – Copyblogger
Sterling’s top course and book recommendations
Voice over talent deal for Internet Business Mastery listeners

When is the Best Time of Year to Launch a Product?

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:29:21 +0000

Did you know that there is a whole process to successfully launching your product? There is a lot more to it than launching a sales page and sending an email to your list.

Jeff Walker is THE expert when it comes to learning the process you should use to successfully launch a new product and male the most money from it. His system heavily influenced the way we launched our Internet Business Mastery Coaching Course (which sold out fast).

I just watched a video where he explains the best times of the year to launch a new product. You can watch it here.

IBM 31 | How We Created Two Webinars that Generated nearly $100,000 in Sales?

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 01:40:36 +0000

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Where have we been the last couple months?!…off making money of course. And in this episode we outline the process that we developed for running our coaching programs after months of planning and surveying our communities. These coaching programs resulted in almost $100,000 in sales.

We reveal the tools that we used to create the course materials, including a revolutionary presentation tool that gives PowerPoint a run for it’s money! Some of the teaching techniques we used in this coaching course have never been used like this by anyone else.

We also introduce new open music, close and production elements to put a shiny spit shine on the show.

Items mentioned in this show:

Jay’s Twitter Page
Sterling’s Twitter Page
GetMyWebinarTool.com – the webinar/screen-sharing tool we used
Camtasia – the screen recording software we used
iShowU – a screen recording software for Mac
Special voice over deal for Internet Business Mastery listeners
Sterling’s recommended affiliate tool

Video Tutorials on Creating and Selling a Niche Information Product

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 13:01:42 +0000

One of my favorite bloggers has a video tutorial that I recommend on how to create and sell a niche information product.

If Sterling and I haven’t yet convinced you of why you should create and sell information products, then watch this short video from Brian Clark.

Besides their excellent information, I love these tutorials because Brian created them using some of my favorite tools.

1. Camtasia

Camtasia is a screen capture program that records your computer screen and audio. It’s the perfect way to make video tutorials. I’ve made an entire membership site before using Camtasia.

In full disclosure, I should mention that Techsmith, the creators of Camtasia, are sponsoring an event that I am helping to organize. In addition they provided me with free software to help them beta test the latest version of Camtasia. However, I was a fan of Camtasia long before that.

2. WordPress

The whole Tubetorial site is published using my favorite blogging software, WordPress. That the same software that runs this site and many other of my sites.

3. Mindjet

It’s no secret that Sterling and I love mindmapping software. We’ve recommended the free Freemind software in the past. In fact, if you sign up for our email newsletter, you’ll get Sterling’s video tutorial on how to use Freemind.

Mindjet is Freemind on steroids. When you’re ready to step up your mindmapping, Mindjet is the way to go. A great way to create your information product is to mindmap it and then record yourself walking through and explaining the mindmap, with Camtasia just like Brian has done in his tutorial.

—–

So give those tutorials and tools a try and see if they give you just the boost you need to create your first information product.

IBM 15 | THE Best Thing to Sell Online Part 2

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 23:56:22 +0000

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On this episode of Internet Business Mastery we continue our discussion about information products and why they should be part of your Internet marketing and if not THE focus of your Internet business. We look at the pros and cons of digital and physical information products.

You can find a list of example information products here.

Also, Jay reveals the specifics of his new time management system that has greatly increased his productivity, helped him manage several Internet business projects and kept him focused on his priorities as an entrepreneur.

Here’s the time management software that Jay uses (Mac only)

Here’s a similar software for the PC

Finally, we talk about making decisions and taking action quickly as we share our stories of how we got into marketing information products on the Internet.

In the show we mention the first course/seminar that we both studied on Internet and information marketing:

Ron Legrand’s Information Marketing Boot Camp (click here to search of it on ebay)

It can be found for incredibly cheap and is packed with value. Last time we looked on ebay, the price was surprisingly low.

We’ve posted a new index of recommended Internet business resources. These are the products and
services that we use on a regular basis to build our own businesses.

IBM 14 | THE Best Thing to Sell Online

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 07:47:35 +0000

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In this episode we talk about the three main types of things you can sell online as well as their pros and cons. We reveal our favorite kind of product and why we focus our businesses on it.

We discuss the best thing a professional consultant or service provider can add to their business to boost revenue and get more client leads.

Also, Jay talks about his new time management system that is he’s using to increase productivity and avoid being to hard on himself about what he accomplishes each day.

IBM 8 | 7 Tips for Easily Writing an e-book that Generates Profit

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 04:14:04 +0000

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7 Tips for Easily Writing an e-book that Generates Profit

Sterling and Jay’s Weekly Business Update
- Jay’s e-book turns into a big busines deal!
- Jay’s Priority Spreadsheet Example

Success Mindset: What you need to know in order to be successful at business and life!!

Featured Segment: 7 Tips for Easily Writing an e-book that Generates Profit
1. Title/Headline
2. Write as if you are speaking to one person
3. Use short paragraphs and sentences and simple language
4. Tell a story and use personal anecdotes and examples
5. Use the ebook to drive traffic back to your site, promote your backend and sell affiliate products
6. Use the correct Formatting to Make the Book More Interesting and Easier to Read and Use
7. .PDF Tips and Suggestions
Listener Comments Segment:
- Special Thanks to:
  - Burke Jones of www.bootstrappernotes.com
    Thanks for the glowing recommend.
  - Dane Carlson of www.business-opportunities.biz .We’ll be interested to see what you have to say.
- Thank you for all the wonderful praise, comments and suggestions!
- Here is how we will handle Comments and Questions:
  - Unfortunately, we don’t have to time to be MENTORS, but we appreciate all the requests! If we get enough questions about a certain subject we will make the subject into a show!
  - We will respond as soon as we can, though it may take a while due to how busy we are at that time.
  - The highest praise we can get is if you mention the show on your blog and/or podcast!!!

Tags: internet marketing, online business, internet business, ebay tips, entrepreneur, e-myth, entrepreneurship, eBay secrets, internet based home business, online auction, ebay, make money, sterling and jay, internet business mastery, marketing online

IBM 7 | Establishing Your First Income Stream, Part 4

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:50:33 +0000

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Establishing Your First Income Stream:
From Concept To Creation, Part 4

Sterling and Jay’s Weekly Business Update
- Sterling’s Highest Book Recommendation, again…

Success Mindset: Get PAID to make your product!

Featured Segment: Establishing your first Income Stream,
Part 4: Creating Your Product
- Sit down and write it…
- Ghostwriter…
- Outline, Talk, Transcribe…
- Record a Seminar
- Public Domain
  - alibris.com
  - autorespondermagic.com
  - Public Domain Book

Tags: internet marketing, online business, internet business, ebay tips, entrepreneur, e-myth, entrepreneurship, eBay secrets, internet based home business, online auction, ebay, make money

IBM 6 | Establishing Your First Income Stream, Part 3

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 07:13:39 +0000

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Establishing Your First Income Stream:
From Concept To Creation, Part 3

Sterling and Jay’s Weekly Business Update
- Jay’s talks about Google Base and Marketing

Sterling’s eBay marketing TIP!
- Highest Book Recommendation!

Success Mindset: The Mystical Powers of the Money Funnel Product Model

Featured Segment: Establishing your first Income Stream,
Part 3: Choosing Your Product
- Several Main Product Types Discussed:
  - Free Content Site
  - The Fabulous e-Book
  - Physical Product
  - Paid Membership Site
    - Exclusive Content
      - Articles
      - Audio
      - Video Tutorials
    - Paid Membership Site Example

Tags: internet marketing, online business, internet business, ebay tips, entrepreneur, e-myth, entrepreneurship, eBay secrets, internet based home business, online auction, ebay, make money

IBM 5 | Establishing Your First Income Stream, Part 2

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 18:18:11 +0000

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Establishing Your First Income Stream:
From Concept To Creation, Part 2

Sterling and Jay’s Weekly Business Update
- Sterling’s New eBay TIP!

Jay’s new traffic generation TIP!
- OPT-IN Example
- YANK!

News
- Google Analytics
Featured Segment: Establishing your first Income Stream,
Part 2: Research Your Niche
- Sterling’s eBay Research Breakdown
  - Who is your REAL competition?
  - The two most important things to research before choosing a product price
  - The almighty BACKEND
- Jay’s Online Business Research Breakdown
  - Keyword Research
    - Wordtracker vs. AWESOME Free Service
    - Overture Tool
    - The KEI Fallacy

IBM 4 | Establishing Your First Income Stream, Part 1

Jay (Jason Van Orden) — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 05:33:52 +0000

Download audio file (IBM004.mp3)
Click here to download this episode.

Subscribe to the Feed Now:

Establishing Your First Income Stream:
From Concept To Creation, Part 1

Sterling and Jay’s Weekly Business Update
- Jay’s Convention Suggestions
  - Make a Quick Business Shirt!
  - Fast Business Cards

Sterling’s eBay MEGA Fiasco
- GOOGLE ALERTS

Success Mindset: Niche and Grow Rich

Featured Segment:
Establishing your first Income Stream, Part 1: Choose the Correct Product!
- #1 – Pick YOUR top 10 Hobbies, interests, areas of expertise, things you are passionate about.
- #2 – Write your FAMILY and FRIEND’s top 10 Hobbies, interests, areas of expertise, things you are passionate about.
- #3 – Make the Short List – Cut the prior lists down to the best of the best top 3-5 ideas
- #4 – Quick Research on the Short List.
  - Solid Backend Possibilities
  - Ability to Automate
- Additional Mindset Tips you MUST hear