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If you’re looking for ways to make money online, then it pays to think a little outside the box. Too often we focus only on building websites, on affiliate marketing or on selling services. But in fact there are countless other options, whether that means building an app for Android, or it means creating an ebook. And creating an ebook to sell on Kindle might just be that perfect business model you’re looking for. Read on and we’ll look at some of the ways in which this is an ideal way to make money online… It’s Easy Selling an ebook on Kindle is a business model that literally anyone can emulate. As long as you can write and you have a copy of Word (even that is somewhat optional) then you can create a book and upload it to the Kindle Store. There’s no fee for becoming a publisher and it can all be done in an evening. The only hard bit is writing the book – but you can easily outsource this or purchase the rights to a digital product if you prefer. It’s Efficient Selling on Kindle is ...

Making money from Kindle is in many ways just like making money from any other digital product. This is a form of internet marketing just like the rest and that means you’re going to need to some marketing. In turn, this means you need to think very carefully when choosing various elements of your book. It is not enough to write a great book and market it well: you need to ensure that the book you’ve created also has a clear audience that you’ll be able to market to.  This latter point is actually potentially the most important factor of all when it comes to profiting from an ebook. It’s not enough to write your book and then decide how you’re going to sell it: instead you need to have a clear plan for how to sell the book and who will buy it at the point when you come up with the concept. And this means picking the right niche… Market Size and Value Proposition There are two key things to consider here. One is the market size: people will generally want to gravitate toward larger ...

Pictures can add a great deal to a Kindle title and really help it to sell. Not only is the cover one of the most important features when it comes to grabbing attention and drawing people in but the images inside the book will also help to illustrate your points and also make the pages pop more. This is only even more true now that the Kindle Fire and other full color tablets are becoming more popular as many users’ preferred reading devices. But the question is: how do you take great quality pictures for your book? It’s not enough just to add images: they need to look fantastic if they’re going to help you sell. Of course you can use free stock images or you can buy images – but this will pale in comparison to the benefits that come from creating custom images that perfectly illustrate what the text is saying and that your readers aren’t going to accidentally find anywhere else! So here’s how you do it… Invest in a Good Camera A good starting point is to invest in a high quality camer...

SEO is ‘Search Engine Optimization’. This is the process of editing a website and building links in such a way that it will be optimized for Google. This means building links (which helps Google to find a site and is viewed as testimony) and it means ensuring the correct use of keywords on the pages.  When done correctly, SEO can drive a lot more traffic to a website by helping more visitors find it through Google.  But SEO isn’t just for websites and it isn’t just for Google. There are many more search engines out there and many of them we don’t necessarily think of as ‘search engines’. Of course you can probably guess where this is going: the Kindle store is also a search engine. In order to find books on Kindle, customers will need to search for the relevant topics and then sift through the top results. This means you can still perform SEO for a Kindle book, in order to increase your exposure through that search tool and thereby to help more customers find you. And in some ...

If you’ve gone to great lengths to create a Kindle book, then you need to make sure that you absolutely maximize the profit you’re going to get from that and that you promote it through as many channels as possible. This is why it’s important to recognize that a Kindle book doesn’t just have to be sold on the Kindle Store. Once you’ve created your PDF or Doc file, you’re free to distribute it in many different ways as long as you’re not part of the Kindle Select program. This is actually one of the big benefits of selling an ebook because it means you can re-use content – which isn’t the case when you write content for a website (due to Google’s policies toward duplicate content). So what else can you do to get your ebook out there for all to see? Here are some good options… Self-Publish One option is to self-publish your ebook. Once upon a time this was a bad idea because it meant using ‘vanity publishing’ which in turn meant spending a lot of money to invest in thousands of copies of...

If you’re going to make money from a book, then it needs to have a clear, concise and accurate writing style. You could have the very best premise and the very most valuable information in the world – but if you have a poor writing style that sounds amateurish then most people won’t get past the first few lines and you’re going to get bad reviews.  So the question then becomes: can you learn to be a good writer? And if so, how? Some people will argue that good writing is actually something you either ‘have or don’t have’ but it’s certainly true that at least learning some basic concepts can help a great deal. Let’s take a look… The Objective of Writing What exactly is ‘good writing’? While there are many answers, the one underlying truth is that good writing needs to communicate. That means that your audience needs to understand what you’re saying and get your point.  And it also follows that good writing should be efficient. So that means your aim is to convey the most inform...

If you’re going to make money from Kindle, then you’re going to have to do some writing. Specifically, you’re going to have to write some books and these are going to need to be engaging both in terms of their title and concept and in terms of their writing and style. Many marketers make the mistake of thinking that it’s okay to release a sub-par book as long as it has a great title. Their logic is that a book with a good enough title and subject will sell and at that point it will be too late for the buyer to change their mind… Apart from this being immoral, it also just plain doesn’t work. The problem with this approach is that selling an poorly written ebook will result in bad reviews (which will hurt subsequent sales of course) and a lot of people only reading the free sample and not investing in the whole book. It will also hurt your long-term profitability. So how do you go about writing a book that will be so stellar that it sells by word-of-mouth? Let’s take a look at some stra...

Reviews are very important on Kindle. Of course a good or bad rating can have a big impact when it comes to influencing the buying decisions of your readers – most of us are considerably more likely to buy a book if we think it sounds good according to the previous buyers. Likewise, if a book is often described negatively then we will often be put off. Actually though, this isn’t the biggest way that a review impacts sales. Ultimately, most of us will at least read the free sample of a book on Kindle if we are sufficiently interested in the topic. The bigger problem then, is that reviews can impact rankings. If your book has bad reviews, then it won’t rank as highly on the Kindle Store and this will mean that far fewer people are able to discover it and thus spend money on it. So the question becomes: how do you ensure you get the best reviews? Let’s take a look… Write a Great Book This should go without saying but it’s incredibly important to write a good book if you want to get the b...

When you sell a Kindle book, it will be much more than just the topic and writing style that dictates its success. Also integral to your success will be the length of the book, the way it is presented and the marketing. And here, presentation is far more important than most people realize. The right presentation will make your book look that much more professional and be that much more appealing to look at. It will instantly make it feel like a more premium product and will give more weight to whatever it is you’re saying. This colors the first impressions that your audience will have and it has a drastic impact on how likely your audience is to buy the full book once they’ve read the introduction. So how do you add that kind of polish and finesse that will really sell your title? Let’s take a look… Images One thing that can make a big difference to the success of your book is the inclusion of any images. If you include crisp, dynamic and professional looking photos in your book then i...

If you’re writing for Kindle as a marketer hoping to make money online, then the chances are that you will be thinking predominantly in terms of non-fiction. The assumption is that it’s easier to market and easier to sell something that serves a particular purpose or answers a particular question. So for example, people will very often search for things like ‘how to create wooden furniture’ or ‘how to make money online’ because they are things they want to learn. This makes them willing to pay (especially if they think they’ll earn money as a result) and it makes your book easier for the right people to find. But what if you want to write fiction? Writing fiction is certainly arguably more fun than writing non-fiction but how would you go about marketing it? How to Sell Fiction The thing to recognize is that when you write fiction, people aren’t going to be searching for it because they won’t know what it is. Call your book ‘Quest of the Giant Mammoths’ and no one is going to think to ...

In the process of getting to this point, we’ve already covered a lot of topics that should help your book to rank. You’re in Kindle Select, you chose your niche well, you have a great cover and description with some keyphrases in it… so far so good. At the same time, using strict adherence to the formatting guide above will also help. Now, what else can you do to get some exposure? While no one knows the exact ‘algorithm’ that Amazon uses to define the position of its books, there are a few things that we know factor in. These are: Reviews Ratings Downloads So if you have a great description and a good price, the next strategy needs to be getting as many downloads and positive reviews as you possibly can. Selling your books for a while using a low pricing is a very good way to do this, as is making sure that your books are very well written and that they’ll get good reviews. Don’t be afraid to ask your readers to review your book if they enjoyed it! Just as on an app, there’s nothing t...

Now you have your perfectly optimized book for Kindle, the next stage is to upload it for Kindle. Yep, that’s the bit you’ve probably been waiting for! To get started, you just need to head over to KDP.amazon.com ( http://kdp.amazon.com ). This stands for ‘Kindle Direct Publishing’ and is where you can upload and manage your different titles. Now you just need to sign up/log in. You can use your usual Amazon account for this and the great news is that it’s completely free. Amazon will take a commission for the sales of your book but there is no fee for setting up in the first place, which is great news if you don’t have a ton of cash to invest! Next, you just click ‘Create New Title’ From here, you then enter your title (duh) and a few extra pieces of information, such as: the book name subtitle series title volume number edition number language author publisher contributors ISBN (if you’ve purchased one) categories publishing rights (don’t check that your book is in the public domain ...

Okay, now you have your niche, you’ve written your book and you know who its aimed at. The next question is how you go about turning it into an actual Kindle book. The good news is that this process is quite simple – though there are some things you need to keep in mind. You need to ensure that your book is going to conform to industry standards, that it is going to look good on Kindle and that it’s going to behave the way that your audience expects it to. Kindle Format 8 Specifically, you should aim to stick to Amazon’s ‘Formatting Guide’. If you do this, then your book is going to be designed in a manner that Amazon refers to as ‘Kindle Format 8’. KindleeBook Manuscript Formatting Guide https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200645680 So the first thing you need to do is take your content and then dump it into a Word document (ideally, your content will already be in Microsoft Word). There are other ways to make a Kindle book but this is by far the simplest and the quickest. If you...

Now you have the niche, the next step is to start creating your book. This is where a lot of people will get put off but even if your English is terrible, I implore you to read on because there are ways around that. Here’s some bad news if your plan was to flood the Kindle store with low quality books: Kindle books need to be good if they’re going to do well. This is down to the fact that you want to try and get as many positive reviews as possible and as few negative ones. Likewise, it’s also down to the fact that readers can very often choose to read a ‘free sample’ of a book in order to get a taste for it. This means they’ll get to see what the quality of the writing is like, whether the subject matter is any interest to them and whether you appear to know what you’re talking about. And if your book is low quality? Then they won’t be very likely to order the full thing. Likewise, some textbooks allow students to rent the book for a while on a ‘7-Day free trial’. If you have created ...

This brings us on to the first big question you’ll need to ask when creating your Kindle book: what niche are you going to try and compete in? This is actually one of the most important decisions you’ll make in the entire process as it will determine the audience for your app, the marketing options available to you, the amount of competition and much more. If you don’t choose your niche carefully, then you’ll end up making a lot more work for yourself when it comes to promotion and in the worst case scenario, you may even limit the size of your potential audience to such an extent that it’s hard to make much money at all. Let’s take a look at how you can ensure you get this bit right… Why You Can’t Choose Any Niche If you have aspirations to be the next JK Rowling, then you might be tempted to make your book a fiction book. This is of course up to you, but you should know going in that you just made your life a lot harder. You can market your book yourself and we’ll look at how that wo...

Before we go any further, it would probably be a good idea to take a look at exactly what the Kindle is and what it’s all about. To that end, Kindle began life as a hardware device from Amazon – though it has grown beyond that now. Today, it is the most popular self-publishing platform for authors to put their books to the mass market quick and easy. History of the Kindle Hardware The Kindle name was originally the brainchild of branding consultants Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma, while the device itself came from Amazon’s Lab 126. The first device was released in 2007 and looked quite different to the ones we know today. Nevertheless, the original Kindle still set the tone for what we have come to expect from these devices. The main innovation with the Kindle is the ‘e-ink display’. This means that the display actually uses real ink, which is arranged on the screen as pixels, just in the same way that regular screens use pixels made of light. This gives the device a number of unique a...

There are a large number of different online methods for making money but publishing books to Kindle is one of the most under-utilized and potentially profitable. In fact, making money from Kindle is probably one of the best ways to live the ‘passive income’ dream shared by so many marketers. This is an opportunity to make money while you’re sleeping, while you’re on holiday, or while you’re busy with other tasks. And it’s a chance to sell to a huge audience that includes everyone from the tech savvy marketers you’re used to selling to, to silver-surfers, stay-at-home Moms, students and everyone in between. In 2010, Amazon announced that e-book sales had surpassed paperback sales on Amazon, which should tell you just what a gigantic market you have to tap into here. This is a far cry from selling a ‘make money’ ebook via a sales page on your website, which will only appeal to a relatively very small audience. How much profit can you make? It’s massive. Some people are making several hu...