Business Corner

You’ve got a great website and business is fair. You know it could be better, but you aren’t sure what to do to improve your traffic. One answer might be to write an ebook promoting your products!

Before you declare that you cannot write a book and think I’m crazy, let me explain how this works.

Ebooks are the easiest way to promote a specific product or help people solve a problem. Giving them away via your website, autoresponder or as a promotion is one of the simplest and best ways to market your other products. For example:

· Ebooks are generally fairly short-20-50 pages in length

· They are limited to one specific topic

· They give quality information people may not have the patience to find themselves

· They solve a problem for the reader

· They display the expertise available through your website or business

· They help to expand your contacts lists via email for future sales and promotions

These are niche specific mini-books, think of it that way. A home decorating business might offer a free ebook on how to install bathroom tile, or a scrapbooking shop may offer one on choosing a layout for a scrapbook page. An antiques shop may offer a free email course on preserving and repairing antique furniture. Each is short and devoted to its particular subject while generating interest in aspects of the business.

You don’t have to write a novel (unless that is what you plan to sell) to get your point across. Visitors to your website enjoy the idea of getting something for free and you get to expand your contacts list when they enter their email to receive the ebook or email course. Delivery can be done by autoresponder and most of your customers will have a PDF reader on their PC so format isn’t an issue.  Read more... (448 words, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)

Although Amazon will not confirm how many of their popular Kindle e-readers have been sold, the number is estimated to be in the millions. One testament to the Kindle’s popularity is that there are more than 950,000 ebook titles available for immediate download from Amazon’s Kindle store. Add to that all of the ways readers can buy Kindle ebooks even without owning a Kindle and you can believe Amazon’s claim that Kindle ebook sales have surpassed sales of print books.

All you need to buy ebooks from Amazon without a Kindle is one of the many free Kindle reading apps available. Start by going to Amazon.com. In the left navigation, click on Kindle, then Free Kindle Reading Apps. On that page you will find links to download the Kindle reading app for the Windows PC, Mac, iPhone and iPod Touch, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.

With the app installed you can download free and paid ebooks from the Kindle store and read them on your favorite device. (Because of a recent change in the terms of service for Apple apps, ebooks can not be downloaded via the Kindle apps running on an Apple device. However, ebooks can be purchased through a web browser and delivered to the Apple device.)

Even if you own a Kindle, you may want to use one or more of the Kindle reader apps. Using an app on a mobile device allows you to buy from anywhere, and read anywhere, even if you don’t have your Kindle with you. Most people have their phones with them wherever they go, so anytime you have a few spare minutes you can read a bit of that novel you are having a hard time putting down. Any of the Kindle ebooks already in your library can be transferred to other devices, and the ebooks can be accessed from more than one device. For example, I have some of my Kindle ebooks on my Kindle, my PC and my iPhone.  Read more... (514 words, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)

I often wondered how people were extremely successful marketing information products on the internet. I honestly thought the web was for the younger generation and the computer savvy ‘Gurus’. Boy was I wrong. My previous purchases and studies have educated me on that.

I am a self publisher of a few books and ‘a wanna be’ bestselling author. So I decided to seek out self published bestselling author’s websites to see what they were doing to earn their stripes. How come they had best sellers? What were they doing that I wasn’t doing. I read books just as good as theirs, and in some cases better on authonomy.com, where authors upload their manuscripts in the hopes of a publisher or agent discovering them.

I wanted to find out how they structured their websites so I could do the same and hopefully sell a few books via the internet without going library to library and bookstore to bookstore.

I purposely followed a trail of information websites and took relentless notes. My investigations took me deeper. Why were these writers on the best seller list? You probably already know this, but I certainly didn’t, I discovered that all kinds of people, both young and baby boomer era, from all walks of life, were creating wealthy lifestyles from a simple information ebook.

With a little insight into the internet and understanding how the web weaves, it is easy to see how the savvy internet marketers accomplish great successes. Basically, if a person can write well and use a computer they can take advantage of the world-wide-web, jump on board the digital era and make money with ebooks in a relatively short period of time.  Read more... (413 words, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)

Have a book you’re dying to share with the world? Sigil is an open source program available for free online that will allow you to quickly and easily convert your book to the.epub format for submission to Kindle ebooks and elsewhere.

Publishing options for ebooks abound, but if you’ve honed in on the opportunity to self-publish your ebook with Amazon – for the Kindle – or elsewhere and need an.epub format file, you probably need some words of encouragement, a pat on the back for writing a worthy and unique book, and a little help converting your book to the proper format for publication. I’m here for ya! I’ll walk you through the wonderful Sigil Program .epub formatting process.

Alright, the first thing you’re going to want to do is open your document in whatever program you’ve created it in and use the ‘Save As’ feature to save the document as HTML. Then go online and grab a free program called Sigil (see program download link in article resource box below) and install it on your computer. Open your .HTML document in Sigil and immediately use the ‘Save As’ feature to save your document with an .epub extension (It’s the only option available in the program.). Now you have a document that is in the correct file type for submission to Amazon’s Kindle ebooks, but don’t stop now; your book still needs to be properly formatted – this is where you’re going to fall in love with Sigil! **

Here are the 6 steps to follow to convert your document using Sigil:

1) Separate Your Book into Sections: Scroll down your document until you find the your first ‘Chapter’ break and use the Sigil squiggle button (fifteenth option from the left on the top panel of screen) to create a break in the document. Repeat this process throughout your document wherever you want a separation in the document. (Save your work.)  Read more... (947 words, estimated 3:47 mins reading time)

When reviewing various e-books, particularly on the subject of online businesses, my readers often ask me what is the point to buying an e-book when most everything discussed in these e-books can be found online. My one word answer: Time.

Time is money friend and a lot of time can be saved when purchasing the right kind of online business start-up or e-book. If the product is of good quality, not only will it have all the resources and links you need, but it often will already have entire websites, storefronts, and blogs ready to go “right out of the box!”

A good example of the time you can save for a few bucks comes from my own experiences when launching my first blog. I knew nothing about blogging and wasn’t about to buy the e-books when I knew I could find the information on my own. I had a bit of web-page design knowledge from tinkering around a couple years earlier but not much. All and all, It took me almost three months to get my first blog setup.

Rough draft of time spent:

3 weeks just reading and learning. Learning how to start my website, best software and host to use, all the basics of website design.

2 weeks just getting word press (the most common blogging software) installed and configured the way I wanted. I was on forums every day trying to figure out how to get a link to show here, or a picture to align in a certain way. To make good money, you need to host your own blog so setting up the web server and all the applications that go with it also took a lot of research before I could do it right.  Read more... (674 words, estimated 2:42 mins reading time)