How To Make Money At Home

It seems like my shameless pimping of the eBook at my Lazy Riches website at every opportunity is doing pretty well – I tallied up the revenue from that and it comes out to $1777.66 made in just over ten days. Not a bad number at all; the sales have been made exclusively on Digital Point forums, the SitePoint listing, this blog and of course the website – this is my most profitable eBook ever written both in terms of copies sold and of course revenue brought in. It’d not just me who can do it though, any of you can – all you have to do is find a topic, write about it and put it up for sale. I will confess – I didn’t spend much time writing this, as since I had a lot of the information pre-developed (I wrote an incomplete article on it before that I meant to put up on here) it took me maybe forty five minutes to compile the whole thing, and as for the amount spent on the site – it cost me $7.15 for the domain name and $5.49 to buy an activated Adwords campaign that I used to drive traffic to the site.

As little amount of time I have daily, which will decrease even further due to the exams – anyways, I’ve put up all rights to the eBook at SitePoint and the leading bid is currently at $1350. Something I’m pretty disappointed with considering it made that in five days, but you win some you lose some – that will take the total earnings from this eBook to over $3000; not bad at all. To market this, I’ve mainly used forums, and a buddy also made a somewhat amusing, if not strange video – you can take a look at that here. As for some tips on eBooks, read more about this post; first up, check out the SitePoint listing – and feel free to bid if you have the cash

Cool, heh? By the way, about that DP idiot – he went in again today to try and attack my sales thread – thanks to a mate, you can see what happened to him here. Now don’t irritate me, or else…

Alright, the eBook tips.

1) Be unique

Now, there’s nothing wrong with writing about a common topic – yeah, writing about affiliate marketing can bring you money, but no matter how well you write, there’s always the good chance that a) someone’s written about it before you, and better or b) the information is freely available on the internet or at a much more discounted price. Being unique is something that will help you sell more – not if your idea is crap, obviously, but the method doesn’t have to be unique; if the concept is, and it’s written well – you’ll get a lot more interested buyers (due to better reviews).

2) Don’t shift on your price – too much

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see most new eBook marketers make – putting up something for sale, and if sales don’t go well in the first couple of hours, they drop the price to something like $3.00. Now, this is a horrible tactic to use – I’ve picked up brilliant eBooks at $1.00, and the person who wrote it would be far better selling it with another zero added onto the end – be patient, and the money will flow. What’s better – selling one copy at $12, or selling twelve copies at $1? Apart from Paypal screwing you on the fees for small transactions, it is a lot more work if you sell products at $1 – you’ll have to deal with twelve buyers, and believe it or not – there are some people who ask for refunds, even at a buck.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t reduce your price, but keep it at a respectable level – $7.00 is now the lowest I’ll go on mine, and even that only for the first 5-10 buyers. You can slowly increase the price – I’ve usually gone from $9.00, to $12.00, to $14.00 and sometimes higher – as for reducing it, feel free – but never take it below that initial $7.00 startup price.

3) Review Copies

This is often one of the biggest annoyances – I know that a few others who have sold eBooks have had to deal with this too, and of course you can read yesterday’s post of mine to see a couple idiots who wanted them – now, the only time I will give review copies is at the beginning of a thread – a couple to DP member that are established; I may occasionally swap an eBook for a review from a reputable member or something of use (yesterday, for example I swapped one for a yearly PR3 link – let’s hope Google don’t read this part ); what I absolutely hate is total newbies asking for one, and saying idiotic stuff like ‘I give good review’ or even worse, the five year old idiots who ask for review copies in PMs – ‘reviewz plz’. Now, I don’t want good reviews, I want honest ones – I do give copies to a few people I’ve dealt with in the past before release so they can tell me if they think it is a load of shite or not, so after the thread has racked up even five reviews, I don’t see the point of asking for review copies. If someone asks you for one, and they don’t fit the right criteria, do the right thing and tell them to buzz (as politely as I would, of course )

4) People stealing your work

If you write a decent eBook (and sometimes, even if you don’t write a decent eBook), you will have the regular twit trying to steal and resell your work – I’ve had it happen quite a few times, and so, of course has my Irish amigo Mark. Those kinds of people are the worst around – luckily, there are a few decent people around who have alerted me to my work being resold, and after a bit of a group assault (which, remember are only good when they’re done for a valuable cause ) on the idiot in question, they usually don’t make much money of it, if any. Whilst I have great fun with these kinds of people (you may see a few LOLCats pop up in their threads) it does get irritating at times – the only thing you can do is feel sorry for them, and maybe even crack a few jokes at their expense.

Those are a few tips – just wait for my eBook marketers course, something that is going to cause an explosion in the webmaster world (hopefully, hehe ).

My latest project

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while – anyways, I’m not going to reveal the exact idea here (to prevent someone from jacking it before it’s ready) but the domain has already been bought – bookmark the website SIGGL.com in your favourites and check it out every so often – you may stumble across something pretty interesting. I picked up a 5L.com because I’ve always wanted something like that – this is a simple, yet unique website that I’m working on with a friend. It relates to blogging, so all of you that have blogs will find it useful – I’m currently getting the design worked on, so we’ll see how that goes. If it kicks off, I can see it doing well – ways to monetize the idea need to be thought of though.

Study time? How about the football?

Nope, I haven’t done any studying so far today – I will though, I promise after the football.

Today of course is the north London derby between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur – it kicks off in around two hours from now and with my dad being a Spurs fan, there’s plenty of fun to be had. Arsenal have done well against the scum in recent years – famously destroying them with our youth side in the Carling Cup last year, and as the game is at home – a decent result on the cards, hopefully. Star striker Robin Van Persie is back (for all of you that don’t know who the hell I’m talking about, ignore this paragraph ) and Arsenal need to win to stay on top of the league.

Last but not least, the prizes – I’ve emailed Max from Zedomax.com about the FiveDollarWiki pages; I also believe that the owner of WordHugger.com has gotten in contact with the winners. Just waiting for a couple others; I think 90% of everything is sorted out though. Once all the small prizes are done, it’s the small matter of an advertising spot on JohnCow.com and an eBook written by me for you – remember to subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog, as there is a good (and by good, I mean nailed-on) chance that the winner will be revealed through that.

I put in an early post today so that I could be prepared to start studying (finally!) after the football; feel free to leave any comments below.