What if, 30 days from now, you had a finished, well-crafted eBook sitting on your hard drive, ready to distribute and sell?

That might sound next-to-impossible to you, but it’s not.

Every November, over 200,000 people worldwide take part in NaNoWriMo — “(inter)National Novel Writing Month”.

NaNoWriMo participants aim to write 50,000 words during the month, and tens of thousands of them manage to do it.

If those writers can do that, you can write a 20,000 word ebook in a month.

And I am absolutely not talking about some scrappy, thrown-together document. You’ll have more than enough time to properly plan, organize, and edit your eBook as well.

Think I’m pulling your leg?

Here’s how to do it:

Pick your topic (Days 1–2)

Maybe you’ve got an idea in mind already: a book you’d really love to write.

Go ahead and write that idea down, and then store it in a safe place.

Leave it there for the next 30 days.

Yep, seriously. You’d probably have a great time writing it … but chances are, it’s not what your audience is looking for, so it’s not going to sell.

A great ebook idea needs to be:

• Specific. Don’t try to write the definitive guide to your topic: it’s overwhelming for your readers, and it doesn’t leave you much room for your next eBook.
• Useful. If you do consulting or coaching, what problems come up again and again? Do your blog readers always ask for posts dealing with a particular issue?

Ask your audience what they want, and give them a few possibilities to choose from.

You’ve only got two days here, so you won’t have time for a full-blown survey — but you can tweet out a question, or put up a thread on your Facebook page.

Be prepared to be surprised!

Once you’ve got a solid idea, you can …

Create an outline (Days 3–4)

Your outline is your roadmap.

It lays out the territory ahead, and lets you spot any tricky patches before you’re half-way through the first draft.

There’s no one “right” way to outline, but one or more of these might work well for you:

#1: Draw a mindmap. Put your topic or ebook title in the centre and start adding ideas to it as they occur to you. Use lines or arrows to create connections. At this stage, put everything down, however big or small — you can tidy the entire thing up later.

#2: Work backwards. Start at the end: what do you want your reader to be able to accomplish once they’ve finished your ebook? Then take a step back — what will they need to know before they can do that? And what about before that?

#3: Write a list. If you’re already extremely familiar with your topic, you’ve probably got an outline in your head. Start writing a list: what chapters or major sections will your ebook need? Once you’ve got the big pieces in place, write a list of 3–5 key points for each chapter/section.

#4: Examine other eBooks and books. Look through several chapter lists to see what topics appear in almost every book. Is there anything that you’re missing from your outline?

At this stage, it’s worth considering whether each chapter (or each section) could have a consistent structure.

This will make the writing process much easier and faster: you’ll have fewer decisions to make.

For instance, your chapters could follow a simple pattern like this:

• Quotation at the start
• An example mid-way through
• Practical exercise at the end

Once you have a clear outline and, if possible, a structure in place, it’s time to …

Start writing (Days 5–25)

This is where the bulk of your time will be spent: 20 of your 30 days.

If you’re aiming for a 20,000 word ebook (around 80-100 pages, assuming you’re including a few images) then that breaks down to writing 1,000 words a day.

Yep, that’s a sizeable commitment –- but, the trade-off is, you’re going to get your ebook done within a month, instead of having it drag on for a year or more.

Here’s a few tips to speed up your writing and get to 1000 words a day:

• Work on your ebook at the right time of day. If you’re focused and motivated in the mornings, write in the morning. If you’re at your best at 10pm, do your writing then.
• Turn off distractions when you’re writing. You might want to switch off your internet connection entirely, or use a program that blocks it for a certain period of time.
• Use a timer. Set a timer for 30 minutes, then write until the time is up. Having the minutes ticking away is a real help when you need to stay on-task.
• Don’t stop writing. If you need to check a quick fact, look up a link or add a screenshot, mark the place with yellow highlighter or something else highly visible — and come back to it later.
• Don’t edit while you write. Maybe you just can’t get the first paragraph right: it doesn’t matter. Leave it and move on. You can come back to it at the editing stage (and you may find that it works fine after all).

Aim to write every day for these 20 days — even if you only manage a couple of hundred words on some days.

The more you make writing a habit, the easier it becomes.

But you’re not done yet. You still need to …

Redraft your eBook (Days 26–28)

Ideally, you’d put your eBook aside for a while before revising it — but you’ve only got a few days left.

So, to see your eBook with fresh eyes, print it out — or transfer it onto your e-reader.

Read through the whole thing in one go, and make a note of:

• Any material that you’ve covered in more than one place
• Any missing information that you left out during the writing
• Chapters that would flow better in a different order

At this stage, don’t agonize over every word.

Obviously, fix any glaring typos or mistakes that you spot, but avoid getting too bogged down.

Spend these three days focusing on cuts, re-ordering and additions.

This might mean cutting out unnecessary tangents, juggling sections or paragraphs around, and adding in any hyperlinks and quotes that you didn’t have time to look up earlier.

At this point, your ebook might look finished.

But there are two days left, and you’ve still got time to …

Make final changes (Days 29–30)

These two final days can turn your eBook into a professionally finished piece.

Print out the ebook again, or view it as a PDF.

Read through slowly, checking every sentence and word.

Particularly, look out for:

• Clumsy or confusing sentences
• Misspellings (especially commonly confused words like “its” and “it’s”)
• Missing words — surprisingly common, and often hard to spot when you’re reading at a normal pace

And now …

Hurrah! You’re the proud author of a finished eBook!

Well, you will be that proud author

Which means it’s time to get out your calendar and write “EBOOK” onto every page of every day for the next month.

Yes, writing an ebook takes time, effort and energy. Yes, the next month looks incredibly busy already: but every month looks incredibly busy, right?

If you write a small, free eBook, you’ll have a great piece of promotional content.

Or, if you write an eBook to sell, you’ll be able to make money for months, even years, from just one month of work.

Right now is the best time to write.

One of the quickest and simplest ways to give yourself a motivational boost is to make a public commitment to your goal — so, write a comment below and tell us to look out for your finished ebook next month!

About the Author: Ali Luke is speaking at BlogWorld LA on “How to Write Ebooks That Practically Sell Themselves”. She’s the author of the Blogger’s Guide series of ebooks, including The Blogger’s Guide to Irresistible Ebooks.

As a professional copywriter, there’s one question that tends to pop up constantly from my readers and clients … “Can you teach me to write like you?”

My knee-jerk answer is usually something like, “Um. No. There is no other like me! I reign supreme! Me! Me! Me!”

OK, I’m not really that egocentric.

But I do typically respond with something along the lines of “I’d love to teach you how, but I don’t know how I do it … I just do it.” And then I run off to a dark corner somewhere to eat sweet potato French fries like they’re going outta style.

Writing meaningful, effective content day in and day out is difficult. To say the least.

I’ve thought a lot about how I get it done, and have come up 3 steps that serve me well, over and over again.

At least, it’s how I think I get it done

The holy grail for aspiring writers

I’ve struggled to convey just how I (and others I admire) actually write the way I do.

I’ve wanted to teach it in a way that you, the reader, can take and immediately implement on your own.

This is the one question that won’t. Stay. Down! Kinda like that game where you beat the hedgehog down and then an identical one pops up to take its place? Yeah. Like that.

It seems that in my rather meandering journey to becoming a ghostwriter-cum-blogger, I unexpectedly stumbled upon what seems to be the Holy Grail for many aspiring writers.

I’m talking about my voice.

It’s distinct. I like to think it’s funny and charming. I’ve been told it’s fairly no-bulls***.

Above all, it’s mine, oh mine, oh mine!

Regardless of where I guest blog, my voice is recognizable.

People read my stuff and they’re like “Hey … I know who this is!”

That happens even if readers don’t yet know that I am, in fact, the author. My friend Abby Kerr does this very well too.

You could say that that voice has now become part and parcel of my “brand”.

So, in the interest of fighting the good fight and teaching ya’ll something useful … I’ll now attempt to give you some pointers on how to unearth your own “voice” and write content that oozes your own flava.

In this process, you might even begin to find ways to brand yourself (so be ready!).

Here’s my 3 key steps to finding your voice and brand, mojo-writer style.

1. Speak your reader’s language

This may come as a surprise, but not everyone who reads your site is going to be a Harvard grad that speaks “ivy league” or whatever other language you specialize in.

Most folks reading online are reading at a grade school level.

That means all those big words you use are making people run screaming in the other direction.

It also means that cool industry lingo you’re so proud of throwing around is mostly falling on deaf ears.

Probably not what you intended to happen right?

When we write, we are creating content with a purpose. We want people to read it, to understand it, to enjoy it and absorb it.

Maybe we want them to take action — maybe we just want them to feel good after reading it.

They are only going to feel a whole lot of frustration if everything you say whips right over their head or they feel like you’re talking down to them because you can’t control your insane need to sound smarter than you probably are.

Not exactly warm and fuzzy advice, right?

Stop talking at your readers.

Stop talking over them.

Stop talking through them.

Talk to them, in simple lingo.

Write like you’re plopped down with them and sharing a cup of coffee and a bit of convo. My buddy SuiteJ pretty much nails this style and implements tip number 3 (we’ll get to it shortly) like gangbusters!

The result? You might be surprised at how many of them are willing to talk back with you.

2. Know why you are writing

All the writing skill in the world won’t do you any favors if you don’t know why you’re writing in the first place.

Lack of purpose is the death of success.

When you write something that has a clear cut purpose it’s reflected in a positive way. There is flow, there is rhythm and there is direction.

If you’re writing without a purpose, it’s kind of like doing one of those writing exercises where you just slap every thought that pops into your head onto paper.

Have you ever tried to read those things afterwards? Crikey, it gives me a headache just thinking about it.

If that’s what you’re serving up to your readers, you might as well be handing out free Tylenol in little blog goodie bags. At least that would be useful!

So if you want to nail down your own unique “voice” you need to start with purpose.

From purpose, passion is born.

From passion you are born, in all your unique glory.

Every piece of content you publish should have your name all over it, in more ways than one!

And that leads nicely into my last tip …

3. Brand it, baby

In addition to speaking your reader’s language and knowing why you’re writing in the first place, sprinkle your work liberally with your own little stamps of distinction.

For instance, people who read my content often recognize my voice simply because I use words like shite, or frack, or ya’ll. Or even crikey.

Maybe there are words you tend to gravitate towards on a regular basis, that perhaps not everyone uses.

Or, maybe you have some sort of signature “how ‘dee do” or “fare thee well” that you use regularly.

Maybe it’s not in the words you use specifically, but in the way you tie them together.

Perhaps you like to inject silly jokes or clichés in your content. (That’d be me!) Or maybe you’re madly uncomfortable with writing with a bit of humor and prefer to adopt a 100% serious tone. That’s still branding and it’s OK too (though it may not win you very many friends, just sayin’).

Regardless of which tic you like to tac, there are a variety of ways you can tweak your content and utilize your quirks, so that it reflects you and allows your “voice” to sparkle.

You just have to allow yourself to find them.

Any questions?

There now. I hope you found these three tips useful.

It’s hard sometimes to nail down how to find your “voice”.

The process is often different for everyone and some folks come by it more easily than others. It doesn’t mean that it can’t be learned though, and if it can be learned it can be taught!

Hopefully you’ve learned a little something here today and if you’ve got questions, please drop them in the comments below.

And, if you’d like more teaching, mayhap Brian and Sonia will invite me back sometime

Oh, and don’t forget folks … sharing is sexy! (No really, it is! I swear! Just ask Kristi!)

About the Author: Cori Padgett is a wildly hire-able freelance ‘ghost’ as well as the creative brains and dubious brawn behind her blog Big Girl Branding. If you’d like to harness her creative brains and dubious brawn to write for your blog, just stalk her on Twitter and ask. I’m “almost” sure she doesn’t bite. Well… like 95% sure.

Have you ever looked back through your old blog posts and thought, “Why did I give away all of this brilliant writing for free?”

Well, here’s some good news: Unless your blog topic is last night’s baseball scores or this week’s hurricane, there’s income potential in those old posts yet.

Loads of it.

If your posts have evergreen, highly useful information, they can be turned into paid products.

With a little effort you can recombine, reuse, repackage, and repurpose that old material into new forms.

And people will pay money for them.

Yes, I know. It’s illogical — why don’t they just go back through and read your blog for free?

Most readers simply don’t.

Happily, some people would prefer to shell out their hard-earned cash for a handier, fancier, or better-organized slice of your content delivered in a different format.

So, don’t disappoint them …

12 simple ways you can earn from that dusty archive

1. eBook. Once you’ve accumulated 50-100 posts or so, you have plenty of material you can repackage into an eBook. Probably two-thirds of my first ebook was adapted from my first 75 blog posts. You can slice and dice your stack of posts different ways, too, using the same post in more than one eBook. Create a “20 Best Blog Posts” eBook, for instance, a “Best of the Mailbag” for the reader questions you answered, or several short eBooks on a few of your most popular topics.
2. Teleclass. Print out a few blog posts and read them on a phone call, riff on them a little bit, take some questions from the audience, and you’ve got a teleclass. Charge a fee, or make the class free to draw a bigger crowd. Then, sell other products to your teleclass audience live, and sell the recording of the class on your website. You can also use the recording as a freebie incentive to help stimulate sales of higher-ticket products.
3. Webinar. Add some eye-catching PowerPoint slides to that teleclass, and now it’s a full-fledged Webinar — and worth more money — while still basically just recycling your blog posts. Don’t forget to make limited-time product or service offers during the broadcast to rake in additional sales. Don’t have another product? Presell the next Webinar you plan to do off another set of your old blog posts.
4. Paid speaking engagement. Perform that Webinar before a live, in-person audience instead of broadcasting it over the Interwebs, and you’ve got another revenue source. Start doing free talks, get some experience, and then see if you can find paid work. This recently happened to a friend of mine — he gave a live talk that essentially recycled a few of his recent blog posts, and was immediately told by a professional speaker present that he could command $5,000-$8,000 an appearance if he wanted to hit the pro-speaking circuit. Ka-ching!
5. One-on-one mentoring. Some people read your blog, but they just don’t get it. They can’t apply the knowledge you’re sharing to their own lives. They need personalized help implementing your teachings. String your blog posts together into a course, spend a few hours talking through your materials with them on the phone, customize your advice to fit their circumstances, and charge a premium for granting one person your undivided attention.
6. Group coaching. Instead of spending a few hours on one person, take the same information from those blog posts you use in individual mentoring and teach them to a group of 10 or 12 at a time. You can charge a more affordable rate, but your hourly rate goes up because you have more participants on the consulting calls. Group coaching is popular because it’s a way to get personal access to an expert without paying the individual-coaching rate. I recently introduced this and immediately sold out four times as many slots as I usually sold for personal mentoring in a month. Tape these sessions and you’ve also got a set of recordings you could edit down and sell at a package price.
7. PDF report. Boil down the gist of the blog posts you used to create your presentation into a report that sums up your key points and you can charge more, both live and when you sell recordings later. The report can also be used on its own as a freebie to drive signups to your email list. And once you build a list, you can sell stuff. The report is a major money-enabler.
8. Go back and link old blog posts to new offers. Once you’ve created those new eBooks or Webinars, you can turn old blog posts into perpetual sales-referral machines by going back and adding links to your new products. Prioritize your most popular older posts for link-i-fying, then try to go through your whole blogroll as time allows.
9. Charge micropayments. Think you’ve got some great older posts? Go back and place them behind a micropayment paywall, where readers can see the top free, but then have to pay $.99 to read the full post. There are a growing number of providers that can help you automate this process, including well-known names such as PayPal Micropay and Payments.Amazon, as well as many startup services. Watch out as many charge steep fees — one of the cheapest at the moment is CashSender.
10. Repost in your membership community. If you reorganize your blog posts under theme topics, you can present them as courses inside a paid membership group. The more content you have in your community, the easier it is to attract and keep those paying members, who’ll appreciate the convenience of not having to hunt through your blog for information piecemeal.
11. Audition piece to get paying gigs. If you’re interested in adding some blogging-for-hire to your resume, you can position your blog as one big “clip” to entice paying clients. Add a “hire me” tab to your blog, make sure your site has a clean, uncluttered design and your posts stick to your niche topic. (That one you wrote about the funny pig video on YouTube? Delete it.) Then target some company blogs in your subject area and start inquiring whether they need a paid blogger.
12. Rewrite and resell. Once you’ve written about a topic on your own blog, it’s usually not much work to rewrite it for a paying market. Throw a piece of breaking news into the mix that adds a new spin to your original post, go back to your notes for a few new quotes or additional points, find a new related link or two, give it all a light rewrite and presto — a whole new post you could sell to other blogs. Don’t be an article spinner and have some robot replace all your adjectives with hilariously inappropriate ones and call it a rewrite — write a completely new post on your topic. It usually takes me maybe 15 or 20 minutes.

Do you have cash sitting in your archives?

Remember that brand-new readers find your blog all the time — and they’ve never seen your older stuff.

Many of your current subscribers haven’t read all your posts, either, unless you’ve got a 100 percent click-through rate

So, do your readers (and yourself) a favor and scoop up your best older posts and turn them into a new, paid product.

How have you turned your “old” blog posts into income? Leave a comment below and tell us your technique.

About the Author: Carol Tice keeps finding new uses for the posts on her Make a Living Writing blog. She answers freelance writers’ questions Wednesdays at noon PST on her podcast, The Freelance Writer’s Free-for-All.

One of the original forms of content marketing is publishing a good old-fashioned book. It’s not the book sales that make most business authors wealthy, but what they can do because they’ve written a book — consulting, speaking engagements, and more.

But here’s the twist. A recent report out a few weeks ago that electronic books are outselling paperback books, and Apple expects to sell more than 28 million iPads by the end of 2011. So it’s no surprise that a lot of writers want to know how they can get a new-fangled electronic book into the iBookstore.

Getting your book into the iBookstore can be a low-cost and profitable route that exposes your work to entirely new markets. But getting a book approved by Apple isn’t a simple process.

You need to follow specific guidelines for preparing and publishing in order to avoid time-consuming headaches and a rejection email.

This post offers you a step-by-step guide to preparing and publishing your book for submission to the Apple iBookstore.

Preparing your book for electronic publication

It is important to make sure that once readers download your digital book, they have a really good experience with it. That’s what gets them to mention it to others, talk it up on social media sites, and rate it well.

Part of ensuring a good digital experience is in the editing process. This post on BubbleCow discusses some really important elements of self-editing.

You also need good design. Great covers sell books. And with digital books, it’s doubly important to capture reader attention, since the icons are small and there is so much to see at one time.

A couple of places to look for quality cover designers are 2H Designs (UK) and The Book Designer (US). Whether you use those services or not, they’ll give you a good idea of the types of design services out there.

Self publishing for the iBookstore

Apple’s distribution system for the iPad is a free app called iBooks. This app allows you to buy and download books from the iBookstore.

Apple doesn’t have too many restrictions on the books that can be uploaded to the iBookstore, but individual writers are not able to directly upload titles.

In that case, you must be wondering why I am writing this guide. Well, as it turns out, Apple has appointed a number of iBookstore aggregators that are approved to submit books to the iBookstore for you.

For this article I am going to focus on using Lulu. Another popular option is Smashwords.

Here are some things to take into consideration before you get started with an aggregator:

Cover Image. You will need a quality book cover image (JPEG) and it must be a vertical rectangle shape at least 600 pixels tall. The cover should include both the title and the author name. It cannot be a greyscale image and it cannot contain hyperlinks or web site addresses. Also, keep the image PG-13 (no nudity).

Content Restrictions. You must be the original author, or exclusive digital publisher or distributor. Apple strictly forbids content that encourages illegal activities, promotes intolerance or discrimination, invades the privacy of any person, or that slanders or libels a person or organization. Erotica that depicts underage people engaged in or witnessing sexual acts is totally off-limits, in addition to being just plain wrong.

Pricing. Apple prices ebooks in 99-cent increments, so you are encouraged to do the same.

ISBN. You need to get an ISBN for your ebook. Most aggregators have services that will automatically assign you one.

Get your books into the iBookstore

Now that you have your book edited, a cover created, your pricing set, and have had it checked for content, you are ready to use an aggregator and get your digital book into the iBookstore. (One important thing to know before you move forward: you retain all copyrights and intellectual property rights to your books.)

I’ll take Lulu as an example of the steps you’ll go through to get your digital book into the iBookstore. The steps are very similar for all aggregators.

1. ePub format. ePub is the format Apple accepts for ebooks. Lulu has a service that will run a special ePub checker and then convert your book into the proper format that is guaranteed to pass Apple’s strict guidelines. You can also submit the ePub file yourself using any number of ePub services as well as Apple’s own Pages program. If you want a speedy process, I would suggest using the aggregator’s services to avoid any technical holdups.
2. Cover image. You will need your cover image to upload along with your ebook in ePub format.
3. ISBN. Lulu will assign your book an ISBN as part of their regular service.
4. Upload. You can now upload all your files and supply all of the necessary information about your book.
5. Get Paid. Apple retains 30% of all revenue from sales on the iBookstore. The publisher (that’s you) receives 80% of the remaining revenue and Lulu receives 20%. Or you can pay Lulu a one-time fee and you won’t pay them any additional commissions.

That’s it. You now have your very own book in the Apple iBookstore for sale.

Now, of course, it’s time to market it. But that’s another post …

About the Author: Shane uses his Tablet Computer Geeks blog to deliver the latest and best iPad information, including accessory reviews, app reviews, and industry updates. Follow him on twitter at tc_geeks.

Copyblogger is about to go on our annual holiday hiatus. We’ll be taking a break from posting while we catch up, get rested, and get excited about what we’ve got in store for you in 2010.

You may be taking a little time off yourself. Or you may still be going into the office, but the last week of the year is often a time when routine tasks slow down or stop altogether.

So what’s the smartest, most productive use you could make of the next seven days?

Here are five ideas that will let you take what some people think of as “dead time” and use it to jump start your year in 2010. Doing any or all of these will get you energized and excited for the year to come.

1. Create a quick product

The biggest obstacle most bloggers face when they want to make money is they don’t have anything to sell.

And the biggest obstacle to creating something to sell is that it seems overwhelming. We feel like we’ve got to distill everything we know into a 400-page ebook or 30-hour marathon audio course.

That’s why I was so impressed by a recent post from Dave Navarro about creating a product over a weekend, and his follow up post on
how to know if it’s the right time to create a product.

If you’ve got even one or two slow days coming over the next week, take Dave’s advice and create a small, low-cost product. It doesn’t matter if you have four blog subscribers, three of whom are related to you.

A few people may buy it, and that’s great. They’ll tell others about it, and that will start attracting the targeted audience you need in the future (generating more sales).

More importantly, it will elevate you in people’s eyes as a solution producer and not just a blogger. Big difference.

2. Write a series

If the idea of creating a product is still too scary, put it on your calendar for January. And instead, every day for the next seven days, write a post for a series for your blog or email newsletter.

What should your series be about? It should be about the most compelling, thorny problem your audience regularly faces that you’re passionate about fixing.

Solve some problems worth solving. Don’t wimp or waffle around, and don’t sell yourself short. Give your audience real answers they can start using right away.

3. Reconnect with your favorite bloggers

Sometimes the “social” in social media threatens to eat every minute we’ve got to give.

If you find yourself with a little down time next week, spend a few minutes and reach out to some of your favorite bloggers in your topic. You know, the ones you haven’t had any time to read in the last six months.

Read through their last 4 or 5 posts. Look through their archives or popular posts. Make some intelligent comments. If something useful presents itself, link to them in your series.

4. Create some audacious goals

I know, I know, nothing is more boring than telling you to set goals around this time of year.

But here’s the thing. Wildly exciting goals lead to wildly exciting results. (Not always, or even often, the precise results you visualized. Don’t let that worry you.)

Some time before December 31st, take an hour and write down the most perfect imaginable day for yourself. Where you wake up (and with whom), what you see, what you have for breakfast, what you do and where you go and how you do it. How you feel about everything you’re doing and seeing. How you look. What you smell and hear.

Use every ounce of writing skill you’ve got to make this description vivid. Sell yourself on it.

And try not to be too “realistic.” Let your dreams soar a little.

Then set a reminder in your calendar to take a look at this “perfect day” once every three months in 2010. Each time you revisit it, re-copy what you’ve written, making any tweaks you want to.

I promise you, in December next year, you’ll be a little spooked by some of the “unrealistic” things you wrote down this year, and how much more realistic they’ve become.

5. Sign up for some high-quality (free) education

If you haven’t joined us yet for Copyblogger’s free Internet Marketing for Smart People e-newsletter, you should sign up for it now. It starts with a 20-part course on some of the most important building blocks to marketing your product or service online.

The newsletter will give you the marketing tips and techniques that work in the real world, including the smartest strategies for marketing with social media. And we do it without the annoying sleaze and hype you see from too many other “gurus.”

If you’re planning on putting one (or all) of these into action by December 31, let us know in the comments! (And then come back on January 1 and let us know how you did.)

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

We live in a world of free. If you’re trying to make money, especially online, you might think that would make things difficult.

Every day, someone releases a new eBook, video, or podcast that not only contains tremendous value, but gives away many of the “tricks of the trade” that we used to have to pay for.

You’d think that the paid content business would be shrinking in the face of all this free information, but it keeps getting stronger. How can that be?

For instance, there are a lot of free materials that teach people how to set up a WordPress blog or to use Twitter effectively. A quick search on YouTube will provide you with hundreds of videos that can teach you to do almost anything you want to know.

Yet, there are still people making plenty of cash selling products explaining how to do any and all of those things.

How do they do it?

Building relationships

People buy from those that they know and trust.

Sure, there are people in the yellow highlighter brigade who can sell ice to an Eskimo, but it isn’t easy to do. (And you may not even want to.)

Most of us can’t write the ultimate sales letter. We also can’t afford to hire a $20,000 copywriter. So how do we do it? We build relationships.

When you establish a “winning difference” or USP, you can start attracting the people who really dig what you do.

If your stuff is good, I guarantee you can find at least one evangelist to recruit others to come check you out. They’ll spread the word for you, which attracts more evangelists, and means that you will have ever more people stopping by.

Nurture relationships with your readers and evangelists and your small army will continue to grow.

The benefit of free

Content marketing is all about giving away some of your best stuff for free. Not just your “pretty good” content, but content that will improve and add value to the lives of your readers.

As they learn more, their game will improve and they’ll keep coming around for more. And they’ll want to reciprocate by either buying your paid products or spreading your message.

Most people won’t buy from you unless you’ve proven to them that you know what you’re talking about. Great content is one of the best ways you can do that. When you give content away for free, you earn trust and anchor your business in the mind of that reader. If they use your stuff, and it works, they’ll keep coming back for more.

They’ll pay for souvenirs

I first heard this idea from Seth Godin when he gave a speech about book marketing, but the concept applies to nearly every online business.

He said that people buy souvenirs, not products. In the music industry, Nine Inch Nails does this by selling collector’s editions of their albums. In the blogging industry, we can do it by selling a physical version of a product, limiting quantities of digital products, or by publishing a book.

If your blog creates a great experience, think about what kind of souvenirs you could offer that would let them hold onto that experience.

They’ll pay for access

Particularly if you’ve used your blog to build your reputation and authority, you can also sell different levels of access to you.

The people who truly love what you do want other ways to access your knowledge. Your raving fans will start by picking up every digital product you offer. From there, many will want more exclusive access, such as a consulting service, a mentoring or coaching program, or a monthly membership with exclusive access to you.

If you empower people to do what they most want to do, they’ll want to buy something in order to feel closer to you. (And, of course, it goes without saying that you’ll deliver value that’s in line with the prices you’re charging.)

JB Glossinger does a great job of this with his Coach Cast. Brian and Sonia do it with Teaching Sells.

You’d have to sell thousands of eBooks to make a living as a blogger, but it might take only a few hundred premium members to do the same job.

Free samples have been part of marketing and selling since long before the Internet. Give great value and follow a few proven models, and you’ll discover not only does “free” not hurt you, it can actually be a great boost for your online business.

About the Author: Nathan Hangen writes about web entrepreneurship at NathanHangen.com, and about how to use social media to fuel your brand at Making It Social. Follow him on Twitter @nhangen.

Are you familiar with the late comedian Mitch Hedberg? Very funny man, taken from us far too soon.

More on him in a minute.

But first I want to say that there are a lot of good internet marketers out there — people who have a ton of integrity and who produce excellent material. These people aren’t scammers.

They understand that if they produce questionable content, word will get around and they’ll be out of business. These people have put their hearts and souls into their products and give their very best to their customers.

Yet I know for a fact that the honest ones will tell you that their products will not make you rich. Hell, I have a course of my own, and I’ll tell you right on the sales page it’s not going to make you rich.

Someone has to say this. Someone has to write it down in black and white and repeat it enough times so that it sinks in — and when I say “sinks in,” I mean that it has to go down deep.

Like to your soul, or at least to that burrito you ate for lunch.

There’s Nothing That Will Make You Rich

No thing will make you rich.

There is not one thing out there that will turn you from rags to riches. There is not a single thing that you can pick up off a shelf and pay for that will perform internet alchemy on your behalf, turning online lead into gold.

If you’re looking for a magic bullet, it doesn’t exist. If you’ve just cashed in your 401k to buy XYZ SuperCourse and aren’t worried because XYZ SuperCourse is guaranteed to return 500% of what you paid within a week, then guess what? You may well be screwed.

I’m sorry to be so incredibly obvious. I wouldn’t do so if I felt I was saying something that everyone already knew, but statistics show that only around ten percent of people who buy a book read past the first chapter. Around the same percentage of people who purchase an internet marketing product or course actually use it.

Again, apologies for the obvious, but that means around 90 percent of people who buy a course apparently figured it was going to drop fairy dust onto them from where it was sitting on the shelf.

Internalize this fact all the way down to that burrito: Nothing will make you rich.

The Mitch Hedberg Guide to Real-World Success

The only force with the power to make you rich — or to even make you one red cent — is YOU.

• You will do what it takes or will not.
• You will develop the quality and personality and credibility and gusto needed to succeed or you won’t.
• You will want it badly enough and persevere enough and have acuity enough to figure out if you’re on the right path… or you won’t.

So right now, you’re reading this and probably thinking, “Great. This post is of zero help. It’s the Jehovah’s Witnesses of posts, where my success or failure is predetermined and nothing can change that.” But that’s not true.

Let’s get back to Mitch Hedberg.

Mitch has a joke that goes, “I bought a jump rope — but man, that thing’s just a rope. You have to do the jump part yourself.”

• Buying a jump rope and expecting it to make you fit is like buying an info product and expecting it to make you rich.
• Using that jump rope for a few minutes a day is like picking through an info product, reading it slowly, and doing a few things here and there, getting mixed results.
• Using that jump rope for hours on end every single day because you’re so incredibly determined to get really, really good at it? Using it doggedly, passionately — almost angrily — because you are so determined to master it?

Well, that’s how this happens.

You Have To Do The Jump Part Yourself

Maybe Buddy Lee, the guy jumping rope in that video, is an anomaly. In the same way, maybe Darren Rowse, who makes well over six figures blogging, is an anomaly.

Or maybe Buddy and Darren were just lucky (not).

Do you think that at the outset, Buddy Lee bought a really spectacular jump rope that allowed him to instantly do what he does? Do you think Darren Rowse started from nothing, bought a course, and suddenly started raking in a healthy six figures with Digital Photography School?

No. Because no thing made them successful.

I mentioned at the outset that I’ve created a course and that my online friends have created courses and products. None of these things are useless. Far from it, in fact. A carpenter who works hard can build a house, but one who has the right tools and knows how to use them can do it a hell of a lot faster.

• Will the things you learn in Naomi Dunford’s Online Business School improve your business? Yes, after you give it your all and refuse to quit.
• Will Dave Navarro’s ebook launch course help you to produce a blockbuster launch? Yes, if you’ve created a great enough product, culled a large and motivated enough following, and work it, work it, work it.
• Will my inappropriately-titled course help you set up your site, your mailing list, your cart, your affiliate program, and generally all of the nuts and bolts of your online business? Yes, if you take the time, do the work, and follow my instructions.

But will any of the above make you rich? No. Online business courses are like Mitch Hedberg’s rope. In the end, it’s ultimately up to you to jump it.

Now get jumping.

P.S. If you buy Naomi or Dave’s stuff, I’m donating the affiliate commissions to Copyblogger… I hear Brian’s hurting for money (not).

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is the creator of Make the Internet Your B*tch: A ridiculously simple guide to turning your online business from tech headache to profit center — which, by the way, will help you immensely but will not make you rich.

You need something to sell if you want to make money online. Writing an ebook is still one of the best ways to do it.

Most sites are disappointed by the nickels and dimes that come in from advertising. If your site gets massive amounts of traffic, it can work, but if not, you’ll want to find a much more profitable source of revenue.

But most of us find that it’s not all that easy to translate high-quality content from your blog into a high-quality ebook.

Four or five years ago, you could have slammed together an ebook over the weekend and created a decent income with it. But in the current environment, buyers are more careful with their money, and you’ve got an awful lot of competition.

The good news is, most of your competitors still think it’s 2003, and most of their products are astoundingly lame. And there are still lots of buyers who need to solve their most pressing problems.

So there are still plenty of opportunities to monetize with an ebook. But it has to be terrific.

So what makes a terrific ebook?

For an ebook to work in this climate, it needs to:

• Solidly address the problems, concerns, or desires of a well-defined target market. Vague, fluffy or irrelevant junk isn’t going to cut it.
• Be a meaningful extension of the relationship you’ve already created with your audience.
• Stake out a compelling position in the marketplace.
• Reflect the confidence of top-notch content.
• Provide an exceptional return on investment for buyers.
• Be supported by an intelligent marketing system that fuels your customers’ need to buy.

The enemy of the successful ebook

So to create an ebook that works today, you’ve got a few more steps to take.

First you’ve got to research your market. Then you need to build a list and drive buying readers to your blog. (There can be a big difference between fans and customers.) Then research, outline, and actually write the book. And then you’ve got to figure out the whole launch thing: creating buzz, recruiting and managing affiliates, writing a sales page.

We bloggers are pretty good at taking action. We can do any of these things individually. And to tell you the truth, none of them is all that hard.

But take them all together and we find ourselves overwhelmed.

Before we know it, it’s been six months or a year, and we’re still trying to make it happen. Not because it’s beyond our abilities, but because without a detailed map, it’s easy to get lost in the process.

How to get it done

When I first picked up How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook, I didn’t read it right away. I figured I knew everything that would be in there, and I had so much on my plate.

When I finally got around to taking a close look at it, I was surprised. This wasn’t a simple connect-the-dots guide for newbies. There was real meat here. A lot of which was, in fact, incredibly useful to me.

I know the course creators and I’ve been consistently impressed with them, so it’s not like I thought it was going to be garbage. But I was still surprised at how extensive the course turned out to be.

How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook was created by launch expert Dave Navarro and small business marketing rockstar Naomi Dunford.

(Don’t worry, it isn’t full of curse words despite Naomi’s involvement. In fact, I think the missing word is Heck, don’t you?)

In five concise modules, How to Launch covers the entire process of writing an ebook that sells.

• How to research your market in 30 minutes or less. (If you don’t get this part right, you’re dead before you begin.)
• The simple strategy to drive targeted buyers to your blog.
• What to do when you don’t have enough time to write, and dozens of techniques that will keep your momentum going.
• How to convince big names to review your ebook.
• How to create a sales process that works.
• How to pick the right affiliate program, and how to find affiliates once you’ve made your choice.

The course is quite comprehensive, so I won’t bog this post down with the entire table of contents. But the thing that impressed me most was that wherever you might happen to get stuck, they’ve got the information to get you moving again.

True confessions

• Naomi and Dave are both friends of mine, and Naomi and I do business together. I’ve been following their stuff for a couple of years now, and I think they do exceptional work.
• The links in this review are affiliate links. So Copyblogger will make something on the sale, although not nearly as much as you will if you implement the advice you get in the program.
• I may have received a free copy of this. I buy everything Naomi puts out, but if she catches me, she sends me a PayPal refund with the note “quit being an idiot, I’ll give you a free copy.” Except she uses a different word than idiot.

The worst confession is how long I’ve been sitting on this, because I’ve been meaning to review it for ages. But in light of the conversations Brian and I have been having about what kind of material we’ll be recommending from this point forward, I thought this was just about the perfect time.

Click here to get more details about How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

What a wild three-and-a-half years, huh?

Copyblogger started out as a way for me to demonstrate what I knew and could do in order to collaborate on new media projects with others.

Now it’s the hub of a business enterprise that supports three families, two single guys, one single mom, and a host of domesticated animals.

And we’re just getting started. Of course, that means having a clear picture of where we want to go is pretty essential.

Guidance from the Wise Bald One

I’m not going to pretend that Seth Godin and I are best buddies who hang out on weekends and major holidays. But if there’s anyone I’d point to as a mentor, it’s him.

For years that came solely from his books, which in many cases was more than enough. In the last couple of years, however, Seth has been very generous with his time and wisdom when I needed guidance.

A couple of months ago, an email from Seth arrived with some unsolicited advice. Actually, it wasn’t advice, but a question:

What kind of tribe are you building?

Over the last 8 months, we’ve been experimenting with stretching the bounds of what Copyblogger covered, reviewed, and recommended. I think Seth thought we had gone off track, or lost the path. In hindsight, maybe he was right.

At first, I was annoyed. Then, I started giving it a great deal of thought. Finally, Sonia and I started to talk about it . . . a lot.

The result was what’s become known as the Two Tribes post. And that turned out to be a defining moment.

The Intersection of Pragmatism and Progress

Sonia and I are both students of online marketing. Not any one particular kind of online marketing, mind you, other than marketing that works.

That doesn’t mean we adopt things as is. The key to effective marketing is to be context appropriate, regardless of the tactic or strategy. So we’re very good at creative adaptation when it comes to taking, for example, an effective tactic that is being used in a sleazy manner, and making it non-sleazy. Or seeing a touchy-feely social media concept that makes sense, and tweaking it so it can actually convert prospects into customers.

To put this in context, Copyblogger has always been extremely selective about what we recommend to you in terms of paid offers. We had to be convinced through our own direct experience with the product or service that it had value and worked.

Products or tools have needed to be extremely useful. We’ve only recommended products that made it easy to make your money back, within a realistic timeframe and with skills that we are confident you already possess.

We didn’t necessarily care how those products or tools were marketed. We figured you’d just creatively adapt the tactics or strategies in a context-appropriate way.

That’s not enough any more. From this point forward, we’re only going to recommend and promote products that truly embody what we stand for.

It’s all about the Third Tribe.

What Does the Third Tribe Stand For?

We seek to combine the practical, solid techniques of the Internet Marketing so-called “gurus” and the ethical, content-focused, high-quality approach of the blogging world. It’s what we call the Third Tribe, and you’re going to be hearing a lot more about it in the coming months.

In practical terms, it means you’ll be seeing many more Copyblogger products, and far fewer from other people. My greatest satisfaction comes from knowing that we strive to make our in-house projects like Teaching Sells and Thesis not just good enough . . . but as good as we possibly can (and that’s an ongoing process).

One of the best ways to ensure that standard is to do more product development ourselves. So that’s what we’ll do.

If we do make an outside recommendation, it will be for someone who “gets it.” They may not be household names . . . yet. But they’re creating solid tools that work for real people, without hype and nonsense.

Copyblogger products will be created for smart businesspeople (even if you’re not too sure of your business skills yet), not naive “business opportunity” seekers who are constantly looking for the newest magic pill.

They’ll be products for people who take action, not dreamers who think about making millions overnight. The money really does roll in while you sleep with the right online business model . . . but only after you put in the time and hard work to get to that point.

Anyone who tells you differently can’t be trusted.

Over the past few years, Copyblogger has grown thanks to a very high standard for the free content we produce, and that’s not going to change. It’s just that we feel that an even higher standard applies to things you pay for.

Thought you might like to know. Especially since without you, there’d be no reason for us.

Thanks for everything: past, present, and future.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

Imagine that your occupation involves doing what you truly love, regardless of money.

Now imagine you do actually make good money doing what you love.

Let’s face it, unless you’re a trust fund kid or the developer of a Web 2.0 site, money still matters.

That’s what lawyer-turned-blogger Jonathan Fields wants to talk about. And he gets the conversation started brilliantly with his new book, Career Renegade: How To Make A Living Doing What You Love.

I’m featured in the book because Jonathan found Teaching Sells to be a prime example of a career renegade path. People who have a passion to teach can also make good money and enjoy a wonderful lifestyle… but it’s a different way of approaching a vocation that many associate with low wages and meager living.

Jonathan explores plenty of other examples of renegade career paths in the book. I asked him a few questions so you can get a feel for his unique philosophy of work and life.

Brian: People often say that if you do what you love, the money will magically follow or you’ll be so happy the money won’t matter. What do you think about that?

Jonathan: It’s a lie. Flat-out B.S. Okay, well, at least it’s a lie for millions of people. If you’re one of the lucky few who love medicine, law or accounting, then, yes, there is a ready path to serious money. But, what if the thing that joneses you more than anything else is painting or collecting dolls or writing? Or, what if your mad passion is basketball, but you’re 5 feet tall, 50 years old, 50 pounds overweight and you’ve got an awful outside jumpshot?

If that’s you, there is no clear and easy, mainstream path to real money. It won’t just automatically follow. Now, I don’t know about anyone else, but I have to support a family in NYC, so I need to make a pretty serious living. And, while I would be willing to scale back a bit if that allowed me to do what I love, I am not willing to dramatically shrink my or my family’s lifestyle. Most people I know feel the same way.

So, they end up just turning their secret passion into a hobby. Thing is, that always struck more as more of a cop-out, a surrender to “conventional” wisdom than a solution. I don’t go down easily. At least, not without testing the assumptions. So, I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years figuring out “unconventional” ways to turn seemingly moneyless passions into not only serious money, but serious businesses…and MAKE the money follow. It’s not always easy, but it is nearly always possible.

Brian: Okay, so if there’s no “conventional” easy way to make money doing what you love, what are some of the “unconventional” things you can do?

Jonathan: This is where it gets fun, because you get to go renegade, get hyper-creative and often create opportunities that might not have even existed before you gave them life. I get into some very cool renegade paths that involve little or no technology in the book, but let me share a few of the more tech-oriented paths here.

One of the best renegade ways to leverage a passion into a living online is to find and exploit gaps in the culture surrounding your passion. In Career Renegade, I lay out five major exploits and detail how to tap them in the book:

• Information
• Education
• Products/merchandise
• Community, and
• Mode/delivery

Exploiting these gaps in the culture surrounding your passion keeps you close enough to the action to satisfy your passion jones, but opens “monetization” doors that most people never even see, let alone walk through.

Let’s take information/education gaps, for example.

One of the case-studies in Career Renegade shares how a thirty-something married father turned his obsession with playing the John Madden Football video games into a six-figure business. He knew nobody would pay him to sit on his couch and play games, but by repurposing his vast knowledge of game “cheats” into high-demand ebooks and info-products, he was able to do what he loved and leverage his expertise to create a thriving information business.

Now, take that information exploit, give it steroids and you’ve got education gaps that can be turned into very lucrative income streams. Actually, while I lay out a bunch of different ways to exploit education gaps in the book, your Teaching Sells training is a perfect example of this approach.

It shows you how to take knowledge you’ve built around a passion, test it to see if others are hungry for it, then leverage it to create online learning portals. Done right, as you already know, this model can be a real win-win. It allows you to mine your knowledge of an activity you’re passionate about, commoditize and distribute it, then turn it into a very real, ongoing stream of income. And, the success of Teaching Sells is a testament to the viability of this model.

These are just a few tech-driven examples. But, the point is, even passions that most people thought could never make money can often generate a lot of money, if you throw off the chains of convention and take a renegade approach. And, if you’re willing to swap time for money, you can often do it from anywhere, spending almost nothing.

Brian: So, if this is really so doable, why don’t more people do it?

Jonathan: Lots of reasons, but there are two biggies, from what I’ve seen. One, many of the tech-oriented renegade paths simply weren’t viable for the average person until the last three to five years. They were either too costly, required too much time to learn, required too much logistics and, often, too much risk.

Thankfully, with the explosion of broadband internet access, the blogosphere and high-quality communication tools, it’s no longer a matter of “whether” these things are possible, but rather, “how.” It’s gotten so fast and affordable, the greatest barrier is simply knowing these solutions exist.

One of the main reasons I wrote Career Renegade was to shine the light on a wide range of unconventional, renegade solutions, then deliver up a ton of resources to give readers something to immediately act upon.

The second challenge is really just decades of conditioning. We’ve spent so many years being told what we can’t do, sucking up to a job we hate and shelving what we really want to do, it’s become a deeply ingrained pattern.

Inertia is an astonishingly powerful force. Especially when we can’t see a clear way out, a different pattern that we believe has the ability to give us both meaning and money. And, again, one of my greatest desires is that Career Renegade delivers that “clear way out.” And, that the many case-studies serve as proof that it can be done.

Brian: Okay, last question. Can this really be done in this economy?

Jonathan: Absolutely. In fact, after so many people have been burned by the old rules that said, “give us your life, sacrifice what you love and we’ll give you your retirement,” we are about to see a rebound wave of homegrown, passion-driven entrepreneurship in the U.S. like never before.

Economic downturns often create once in a generation opportunities, your job is to look for the intersection between what makes you come alive and what the market is looking for.

For example, in a downturn, tons of people decide that instead of paying someone to do work for them, like painting or renovating a house, they’ll do it themselves. This creates a massive uptick in the do-it-yourself (DIY) market and the need for really high-value DIY information. If the information people are hungry for syncs with your passion-acquired knowledge, you could have a huge market to tap.

In fact, I recently saw an electrician who launched a website and blog and monetized it by offering DIY electrical advice for something like $27/10-minute call, chat or e-mail. That comes out to an hourly rate of $162. Not bad for kicking back on the couch and answering questions.

So, yes, you can still be a career renegade, even in this economy…bigtime.

Thanks Jonathan!

Career Renegade: How To Make A Living Doing What You Love is available online and at booksellers everywhere. Teaching Sells is opening for enrollment this week, so if that sounds like your renegade path, let’s get rolling!