I was also going to charge for it. If people were going to take my research and make money, then I was thrilled for them, but I couldn’t see why they should object to paying me for helping them make that money.
So I did it. I took the same approach to the book that I take with anything that I put up on my sites: I forgot about being literary and trying to talk like a newspaper, and wrote the way I speak. It seemed the easiest way to do it, and I couldn’t really see myself doing it any other way. I pretended that I was on the phone with one of my friends explaining the results of my AdSense testing—something I’d done many times.
What Google Never Told You about Making Money with AdSense came out in February 2005. It was about 60 pages long—short for a book, but plenty long for an e-book. Most important, it contained everything I had then learned about AdSense, so I wasn’t too concerned about the length. I knew that if readers implemented the strategies in the book, they’d make money. Those strategies had made money for me, and they’d made money for friends who had used them. I didn’t think that buyers would care that they had to read only 60 pages rather than 300 before they could improve their income.
I priced the e-book at $77.
For a book, that’s a giant amount of cash. The only books you’ll find for that sort of money in your local Borders will be double-sized, limited edition photo books with hard covers and glossy pictures. Most of that money will be spent on printing.
My e-book was digital. I didn’t have printing costs and I didn’t have distribution costs. I would have affiliate costs, though. Sellers could be taking as much as half of the cover price as a commission, but that would still leave me with almost 40 bucks for every sale, which seemed like a nice amount. For strategies that had improved my income from a buck a day to 1,000 bucks a day, it was a steal.
I had no idea what was going to happen when I started selling. My guesstimate was that I might make an extra $1,000 a month. For an e-book that was meant to help other people make money, that would always be fine by me.
Of course, I didn’t just put the e-book on a web site and tell my own web site users about it. I also got in touch with some big affiliate marketers and offered the book to them. One of the first to sign up was Paul Myers, whose TalkBiz.com web site had already made him famous as an affiliate marketer. Paul mentioned the book to his subscribers ... and sales, helped by this network of affiliate sellers, rocketed.
That $1,000 a month that I’d been expecting turned into $10,000 in just two days.
An e-book priced at $77 was flying off the servers. Not only was it clear that it was possible to price even short documents far higher than you could get in the stores, it was also clear that affiliate selling helped move them and that people were prepared to lay out real cash for a book that promised to return that money if its strategies were implemented.
It also proved to me that creating e-books really isn’t difficult. The book itself hadn’t taken me very long at all to write, placing it on the servers was a breeze, and best of all, once the setup was complete, the money rolled in by itself.
Since then, I’ve updated the e-book four times, adding more information, discussing more strategies, and extending those original 60 pages to more than 200. I even raised the price to $97 for the second and third editions! These days, having made tens of thousands of dollars from that e-book, and with much of the information contained in it now being shared among Internet marketers, I give it away for free. You can pick it up at www.adsense-secrets.com.
When I say “free,” I don’t mean entirely free. To download the e-book, you’ll need to supply your e-mail address. I don’t sell those addresses or let anyone else use them, but it does help me to build up a list of people interested in creating an online business. In return, I also send readers my weekly online business newsletter, another way to deliver value and to let entrepreneurs know about any other products I have to offer that might help them.
Creating an e-book is simple enough. The document should be in PDF format, which makes it easy to distribute while still offering plenty of formatting options, an attractive, booklike appearance, and a relatively small file size. While you can—and should—pack pictures, graphs, and images into your e-book to break up the text and make it inviting to flip through, remember that all of those extras will increase the book’s weight. That means that it will take up more space on the server and take longer to download. You really want to keep the weight below five megabytes. If you go over that, start looking for pictures to take out.
You can create the e-book using Adobe’s own Acrobat program. That’s probably the best way, and if you were to hire a designer to lay out the book for you, that’s probably how he or she would do it. But even the simplest version of the software costs about $300, and since you’re only going to be using a fraction of the features you’ll be buying, it might not be the best move. Instead, you can write up your document using Word (or even a free word processing program like Open Office if you’re really strapped for cash) then convert it to PDE Adobe itself lets you do that from its web
