As you know, I have been getting deeper into affiliate marketing for the last few months as a way of bringing in extra income and I am now making around $800 per month from affiliate marketing alone. I will report my stats in a few days.

I wanted to talk about the process of writing the eBook as I thought it was going to be easier than it was.

Picking a topic

This can be one of the most difficult decisions when writing an eBook. If you are writing to make money then you have to choose your topic well, if you are writing for enjoyment and not really bothered about the money side of it then this is not so important.

I choose the topic of ‘Making money from Clickbank’ as I had been making money promoting Clickbank products since November 2007. Therefore, it was something I knew about, was passionate about, and felt other people could benefit from.

Most people write eBooks on something they know about which, I feel, is the best place to start.

Writing an eBook when you don’t know the subject

However you can easily write an eBook on something you know nothing about by collecting quality information from the internet and putting it all in one eBook and package it well with graphics, videos, and bonuses. The purpose of this is to then sell the eBook on to other people.

You might think why would someone pay for a book when it’s available free on the internet, albeit scattered all over the web. Convenience, people will pay for convenience. It’s like saying why would people pay for a ready-made Lasagne meal when they could make it themselves. You can make a lot of money by collecting information and putting it all in one place.

Planning

This is an extremely important part of the writing of your book. I don’t mean plan it meticulously, just a basic plan which can be flexible enough should you think about anything else to add.

To plan an ebook you want to know what questions need to be answered. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. For example when I was writing ‘Your First Clickbank Sale’ I thought about what questions I had when first starting making money from Clickbank. The most obvious question would be; how do I make money? Fair enough, but this has to be broken down into parts; how do I get organised? How do I get in the right frame of mind? What free software will I need? How do I research? How do I create a landing page? And so on. Under those headings will be more questions.

You will quickly come to a question, which cannot be broken down with other questions, for example, what free software will I need? You would list and give information on the free software required. From there you would explain how to use it with videos or by writing; I choose videos, as it is a great way to communicate.

The writing process

The first draft

Once you have your plan and your questions sorted into the order in which you will write, it is time to open up Word and start writing.

The best thing to do is just start writing. You don’t want to make it word perfect just now, that comes later on. For now you want to write as quickly as possible and get the first draft completed.

The second draft

After you have completed your first draft, read over what you have written, preferably aloud, and mark the places where you need to do some additional work.

The second draft will be going through chapter by chapter making it as good as it can be. Remember to check links, spelling, grammar, image size etc.

The third draft

The third draft will come when you have completed everything and you think it is the best it can be. Now it is time to put the book away for a few days and have a total break from it. Don’t worry the world can wait on the information you have.

Waiting a few days allows your mind to switch off from the book and the writing process.

When you have taken a few days break it is time to return to your book and you will see it with fresh eyes and spot any mistakes or know what needs to be added to make it better.

Letting someone else in the field read it

This is the time to let others read the book and make any comments about it, which could make it better. If you are writing about how to train dogs there is no point in sending the book to someone who has no interest in the subject. Find someone who is interested in your topic and ask if they would review your book and make suggestions on how to make it better. A great place for this are forums. You will find a forum on every topic you can think of, so join, get to know the people and then offer your ebook out to the ones you have connected with in the forum.

Producing the eBook

You will now have a Word document ready to produce as an eBook. Now you need to convert the ebook into a downloadable format. Word would be okay for this but a Word document can be changed easily by other readers so I think the best format would be to convert it into a PDF document, which is easily read on every computer in the world.

To convert to PDF just download the free converter from www.pdf995.com/ and convert your Word file to PDF.

Promoting your eBook

If you are going to promote your eBook it might be best to create an eBook cover, like the one I have in the image above. There is a fantastic piece of software from www.3dcovers.com (I am an affiliate of this software) and it produces amazing eBook covers and CD covers.

You will need a website; a basic sales page will suffice with a paypal button to buy. Then start driving traffic to the website with Google Adwords and Yahoo search Advertising

Send a free copy to people you think could do a good job of promoting it and writing a review on it. This will drive more traffic to your site and rank you higher in the Google rankings, eventually.

Now promote you eBook on the forums relating to your eBook topic. In addition, you can write articles and submit them to article directories with your link to the eBook in your signature. Press releases, comments on blogs, banner advertising and eBook directories etc will also help with promoting your book.

Tweak and update

If you want to offer the best value to your readers it is best to update your eBook from time to time. So take care and try and make the eBook even better by going over it every few weeks and see what you can add. You will also get questions relating to your book from readers and this can be valuable to know how to update your book.

Time to start writing

I hope this short guide has been helpful in getting you started. Let me know if you have any questions.