To promote herself and her business, JL, one of my subscribers, wants to write a book.

But she isn’t quite sure about how to get her book published and into print.

“It feels like getting a book published is challenging,” she writes. “Would it not be easier to skip all the details and self-publish?”

Other Direct Response Letter subscribers with the desire to write a book and get it published have asked me the same question over the years.

“What’s better?” an interviewer on an Internet radio show asked me, “Self-publishing or traditional publishing?”

It’s the wrong question.

Self-publishing is not inherently better than mainstream publishing, nor is the reverse true.

Rather, there are 3 basic publishing options available to you: traditional publishing, self-publishing, and electronic publishing.

And the choice of which is right for you depends on your reasons for wanting to write and publish a book in the first place.

Option #1: Traditional publishing

Of the 3 publishing options, selling your book to a mainstream book publishing company is the most prestigious.

Therefore, when you want to write a book to help establish you as a recognized expert in your field, traditional publishing is often the best option.

In the financial publishing industry, most stock market newsletter editors write at least one book for a mainstream publishing house.

Reason: being an author adds to their credibility, helping them sell subscriptions to their advisory letters.

Option #2: Self-publishing a physical book

Self-publishing your book as a printed paperback or hardcover makes sense when you want to give away a lot of copies of your book as a marketing tool.

Professional speakers are a good example, because they typically send a free book, along with their sales materials, to every potential client.

Giving potential clients a copy of your book is an effective marketing tool. Information marketing pioneer Jeffrey Lant says “a book is a brochure that will never be thrown away.”

The more professionally written, designed, and printed your self-published book, the more impressed your prospects will be.

Ideally, your self-published book should look no different than hardcover or trade paperback books from major publishers.

With self-publishing, your cost per copy is much less than buying your own book at the 50% author’s discount you get from a regular publisher.

As a result, authors who give away a lot of copies of their books can save a lot of money with self-publishing.

If your goal is to sell copies of your book directly—whether through mail-order magazine ads, the Internet, or at the back of the room during speaking gigs—self-publishing gives you a higher profit margin.

Option #3: Publishing your book as an e-book

Publishing your book as a downloadable PDF file—known as an “e-book”—is the clear choice when you want to (a) sell your book on the Internet and (b) maximize your profits from its publication and sale.

Why are e-books so profitable? Two main reasons.

First, with an e-book, you can charge more money for less content than with a regular book.

Most traditionally published business books today are at least 200 pages—around 80,000 words—selling for at least $15 in trade paperback or $20 in hardcover.

For an e-book, you can charge anywhere from $29 to $49 per copy, more if the book is on a specialized topic.

And although length varies, a $29 e-book can be only 50 pages—about 15,000 words.

That means it costs as much or more as a hardcover or paperback book while containing only one-fifth the text.

So it takes less writing time to produce an e-book than a regular book.

With an e-book, you deliver it to the buyer over the Internet as an electronic PDF file.

You can also format your e-book so Amazon can sell a Kindle version. My latest book had Kindle sales of over $9,000 last year.

With an e-book, there is no printing, storage, fulfillment, or shipping costs, so your profit margin on each sale is extremely high.

By comparison, authors who publish with mainstream publishers get a royalty averaging 10% or less of the book’s cover price.

The margin in self-publishing physical books is usually 50% give or take 10%. But with e-books, the margin can be close to 100%.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

Selling and creating online or e-books is nothing new. E-books are a concept that many Internet marketers are still reluctant to embrace. They are often scared about what they should write, how they should write it and who or when to sell it to. You don’t need to worry about all of that stuff just yet, it’s most important to just get busy writing the e-book, and a high quality one too. Quality plays a major role when it comes to marketing e-books. Regardless of what business you are in the quality of the product is the one thing that cannot nor should not ever be compromised. We will talk about a few e-book writing tips that are unorthodox to help you in the long run.

The first step in the process, after you choose your subject, is to research your audience. This step comes even before you start to write your e-book. If you do this step your writing will be a lot more powerful. You can’t get your audience to relate to you if you don’t know much about them. So who are the people who are going to read your work? You need to know your audience’s demographic. Are these people already experts on the subject or are they beginners? How much money are they willing to spend for the information? This is how you create a loyal group of customers who will buy more of your stuff in the future.

An important part of your e-book is the title. What is the first thing that attracts you towards an e-book? Of course we all know it is the title that sets your e-book apart, after that is the remaining content. Optimizing your title is only half the battle. The English language is complicated, it’s important that you are comfortable with it in order to write effective titles.

You will not grab the attention of your target audience if your title is not effective. Carefully title your e-book with a title that attracts attention. Anyone with copywriting experience knows the value of an attention-grabbing title. You can come up with several ideas and jot them down before choosing the best one between them all. Seek the guidance of a friend who can offer suggestions. Once you know that your title is indeed apt and is getting you good results in your test rounds, then stick to it.

Now you can start writing your rough draft. So initially, you don’t even have to think a lot but simply start writing whatever comes to your mind. You should focus completely on writing; editing comes into play when you write your second draft. All you have to focus on is writing and nothing else. All of your ideas are fresh right now so don’t lose them by stopping to correct a misspelled word.

Lastly, don’t dismiss the power of owning your own product; this is how the majority of big marketers got to where they are now. Don’t underestimate the power of these techniques; they are proven techniques that work.

I frequently hire freelance writers to write e-books and other information products for my small online publishing business.

Recently RH, a potential author, was taken aback when I told him I wanted a 15,000-word e-book from him.

“How did you come up with 15,000 words as the desired length?” he asked me, hinting that it was unwise of me to demand such a huge number of words.

“In this age of hyper-information overloading, shouldn’t a document be more like the lady’s skirt—short enough to be interesting and just long enough to cover the subject?” he suggested.

RH’s question seems sensible enough on the surface.

But his conclusion that when it comes to writing and reading shorter is universally preferable to longer is not true.

May I explain why?

To begin with, RH is theoretically correct when he suggests that readers are busy, have too much to read, and not enough time to read it.

Despite this, however, people who buy information products—especially online—have a slightly different perspective than ordinary readers.

Info-products buyers do, to some extent, buy their information “buy the pound”.

If they pay a high price, they expect a lot for their money. Not just great content. But plenty of it.

We call this demand for quantity the “thud” factor. When a customer orders a $50 info-product, the material should make a nice “thud” when he drops it on his desk.

For e-books selling in the $19 to $49 range, I find that the customer is satisfied with a thicker, heftier e-book—at least 50 pages—when he prints it out and holds it in his hands.

With approximately 300 words per page, a 50-page e-book is 15,000 words, which is the word count requirement I gave RH.

RH, in turn, suggested that we could make a more valuable product by covering the topic in a single page, which he said he could do.

Well, let me warn you now. If you sell a $29 e-book, and deliver to your customers a one-page PDF document on the topic, your refund rate will be huge.

Those customers will feel ripped off and not buy from you again.

Even if that one page has great content, it is not enough. It does not meet the “thud factor” requirement.

The reason for RH’s erroneous assumptions on word length is that he is applying the same rule of modern writing—that brevity is the chief virtue of good writing—equally to information the reader wants as well as information he doesn’t want.

I agree with RH that in correspondence and other documents the prospect doesn’t really want or care about, you want to get to the point as quickly as possible—and keep it short and simple.

But when you sell a customer an e-book or special report, you are sending him writing that he actually wants to read.

Remember, he ordered it. He even paid you for it. He didn’t have to buy. But he did.

That means your customer is sufficiently interested in the topic to educate himself on it at his own expense.

He is reading your e-book for his own benefit. And perhaps for his own enjoyment. It is not a chore. Or if it is a chore, it is one he has volunteered for.

Strangely, RH didn’t complain to me that books he buys on Amazon.com or in Barnes & Noble have “too many words”.

Yet the average 200-page non-fiction trade paperback book contains 80,000 words—5 times the length of my average e-book!

Are you, like RH, afraid your copy—whether you are writing a salesletter, a landing page, an article, a special report, or a print or electronic book—is too long?

If so, the reason might be any of the following defects…all of which can and should be corrected:

1. Too much fluff: to meet the required word length, you have padded your copy, making it dull and flabby. You are wasting the reader’s time saying the same thing over and over in different ways.

2. Lack of content: you haven’t done your homework, so you don’t have a rich body of facts to illustrate your points and support your claims. Given the existence of the Internet and Google, there is no excuse for such inadequate research.

3. Lack of authority: you sound like you don’t really understand your subject in depth, and the reason is you probably don’t. You need to either become an expert or interview an expert (or two).

4. Boring copy: you don’t really care about the topic or the project, and it comes across in your copy. Solution: write only on subjects you are interested in and care about.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

There are a number of different business models for making money on the Internet.

Of these, my favorite—and the one I recommend to those who want to sell information products, dietary supplements, or just about any other product online today—is the “Agora Model”.

The Agora Model is an online marketing methodology pioneered by Agora Publishing.

In a nutshell, the Agora Model says you should offer a free e-newsletter and build up a large subscriber base.

Then, you make money by e-mailing promotions to your online subscriber list.

Agora and others are making hundreds of millions of dollars in sales online with the Agora Model.

Yet when I recommend it to marketers—both experienced and novice alike—they are immediately and strongly resistant to the idea.

Why?

One reason for their reluctance is that they have read an article by some so-called Internet marketing guru telling them that e-mail marketing is dead, passé, old hat.

And that they should be focusing instead on blogging, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, online video, mobile marketing, SEO, AdSense, or whatever the fad flavor of the month is.

The other reason marketers are reluctant to launch a new e-newsletter is a fear—reasonable but not true—that the e-zine “space” is too overcrowded.

“There are so many e-zines out there, and everyone I know says they already get too many,” an attendee at an Early to Rise Internet Marketing Conference told me. “It seems impossible that I could be successful by publishing yet another.”

If you believe this to be true, slap yourself—and listen to me as I tell you what really works in Internet marketing today…

The Agora Model really works. I use it myself to earn a 6-figure income online—”working” on my Internet
business only a couple of hours a week.

All the components of the Agora Model—e-newsletters, e-mail marketing, online ads—still work. Like gangbusters.

As an article in DM News reports: “While social media and mobile marketing continue to be hot topics, marketers are still finding e-mail newsletters relevant.”

One of the neatest things about the Agora Model is that e-newsletter subscribers are more loyal readers—because they choose to opt into your list—instead of you gathering their names and compiling your own e-list.

And despite the glut of e-mail in your prospect’s inbox, sending an e-mail is still an effective way to gain the reader’s attention:

>> A study at Loughorough University found that users take action, on average, in less than 2 minutes upon being notified that a new e-mail is waiting for them.

>> According to a report by Forrester Research, opt-in lists (such as e-newsletter subscriber lists) retain 49% of their subscribers over time—nearly double the retention rate of compiled e-lists.

>> A study from ClearContext, an e-mail management tools vendor, found that over half of users surveyed spend more than 2 hours a day in their e-mail inbox.

Another reason why marketers hesitate to launch an e-newsletter is the mistaken belief that it is time and labor-intensive to produce.

That’s not true either.

In fact, your e-newsletter doesn’t have to be elaborate, lengthy, complex, or fancy.

But it does have to deliver useful content to your subscribers—and do so on a consistent basis.

Publishing your own e-newsletter gives you 3 essential advantages when it comes to making money online…

>> First, the best way to get people to opt into your e-list is by offering them free content.

When you publish an e-newsletter, you always have new free content (your e-newsletter) to offer.

>> Second, a monthly e-newsletter ensures that your prospects hear from you—on a regular basis—at least 12 times a year.

Assuming they find your content valuable, this consistent communication helps build a relationship with your online
readers.

>> Third, when people subscribe to an online newsletter, they give you permission to e-mail them.

That means you can send them e-mail marketing messages—with product offers—whenever you wish, at minimal cost.

Repeated exposure to your e-newsletter and solo e-mail promotions gets subscribers to trust you enough to start buying products you sell or recommend.

And before you know it, you’re making money selling information or merchandise on the Internet!

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

Today I wanted to share a tip with you that can help multiply your efforts online in numerous ways.

The secret is to “repurpose” your content.

For example, you write an article or have one written for you…

Many people will only use that article for ONE purpose, such as posting it to their blog, or, submitting it to a top article directory (ezinearticles.com, etc.) along with a link to their website at the bottom for free traffic…

But why not do BOTH?

And better yet, why stop with just submitting it to your blog and top article directories?

Here are some additional ways that you can use to make a very small amount of content go a *long* way, saving you lots of time and money as you build your online business…

Meaning you ultimately make more MONEY, which is the point!

1. Turn your article into a PDF file (easily using a free program such as OpenOffice at OpenOffice.org), and submit it to top “doc” sharing sites like Scribd.com.

Search Google for “Top doc sharing sites” for more!

2. Take the same article (or several combined) to create a report or e-book so that you can submit it to the top e-book directories. Here’s a Warrior Forum post on some great e-book directories to submit to for FREE.

3. Turn each of your articles into *videos* and submit them to YouTube.com and other video sharing sites. The key here is to create a *channel* that you build up with videos over time. One video per day, for example, focusing on one niche topic such as making money online. That way you’ll get *subscribers* to your channel that will build over time, meaning more and more views and exposure with each new video you submit.

You can easily, easily turn any article into a video just by reading it on a web cam, or, by using a free screen capture program like CamStudio to scroll through the article while reading.

4. Create an *outline* BEFORE you begin writing articles on a particular topic, laying out 10-20 chapters. Have each article you write serve as one chapter of an e-book product. When you’re done, not only do you have your 10-20 articles. You *also* have a product that you can SELL to people! Don’t worry that the content may be free online in article form. 99.9% of people won’t ever see that content, and besides, you are providing a *convenience* to have your information neatly formatted and provided in e-book form.

5. Once again using several articles together to create a report or e-book, you could offer it with free “reprint/distribution rights” to other online newsletter and website owners…

They get valuable free content to give to their subscribers and visitors, and YOU get free traffic and exposure by including a link to your website or affiliate offer inside the report.

The point here again is to make your work (or money, in cases where you’re paying others to create content for you), go a LONG WAY.

And what’s cool is that most of these methods I’ve revealed are “set it and forget it”, meaning once your content is online, it will CONTINUE to bring you traffic and results, potentially for *years* to come, on auto-pilot! So this is definitely something you BUILD and not something you should expect thousands of visitors from overnight…Your thousands of visitors, and dollars, will come steadily over time. :)

Bryan Winters is the architect of the free list building website, 5iphon Hardcore, that gets you 5 *more* subscribers for every ONE you bring in.

“How long should I make my e-books?” a new Internet info-marketer asked me.

Answer: for an e-book selling in the $19 to $39 range, the PDF should be a minimum of 50 pages.

If it’s much shorter than 40 pages, your customers may think you are not giving them enough “meat.”

A typeset PDF page is around 300 words. So when you are writing your e-book, you know you have enough content when your Word document is around 15,000 words.

As we discussed in my last article, the best way to prevent customers from illegally copying and sharing your content is to create information products that give the buyer more than his money’s worth.

Creating great information products gives you several other advantages. For one thing, it minimizes refund requests.

It also creates loyal fans. These fans keep buying other information products from you and recommending your products to others.

However, many information product marketers make a serious mistake that results in less quality—and lower customer satisfaction. Let me explain…

What your customers want is solid how-to information that tells them how to do something, whether it’s saving money on a new car or becoming a freelance copywriter.

The mistake many info marketers make is that they have written a “what to” product instead of the “how-to” information product the buyer wants.

To live up to the customer’s expectation of getting great how-to information, your product really has to tell the customer how to do the thing you are writing about.

That means specific step-by-step instructions…recommended tools and resources…and strategies, tips, and techniques for doing the thing better and faster.

But too many info products I see tell the reader what to do—but not how to do it.

For instance, one small business advertising guide recommended advertising on billboards.

That’s advice on what to do, which is fine as far as it goes, but not enough.

When a reader buys your specialized information product, he also wants you to tell him how to advertise on billboards.

What are the dimensions of a typical billboard? What’s the most effective word length for billboard copy? The recommended size of the letters painted on the board for maximum readability?

How can I find the billboards in my area where I can advertise? Who do I contact about renting them? What’s a reasonable cost I can expect to pay? Can that be negotiated?

Why do so many information product writers produce “what-to-do” instead of “how to do it” e-books and reports?

It’s because “what-to-do” is easy to write, because you present only the big picture (what to do), and not the niggling details (how to do it).

But it cheats the reader. In most instances, the reader already has some idea of what to do.

He is buying your specialized information product on the Internet—often at a premium price compared to books available in bookstores on similar topics.

Why is he willing to pay you more? Because he expects you to go into depth he doesn’t get from “bookstore books”.

I hire a lot of freelance writers to write e-books and reports for my small online publishing business, CTC Publishing.

One of my pet peeves—and a classic example of what-to instead of how-to—is when I read in a first draft a sentence that says, “For more information on X, just search the keyword X on Google.”

I tell the writer: the reason the reader is paying for our e-book is because he expects us to have done the research and present the results.

Telling your reader “look it up on Google” is the sign of a lazy writer who has not done his homework—and a sin I will always ask my writers to correct.

One more point…

Even though information product buyers want “how-to” instead of “what to do”, you can often take the quality of your content to an even higher level.

You do this when, instead of (or in addition to) telling the reader what to do, you actually do it for him.

For instance, instead of saying “here are some points to keep in mind when writing a collection letter to a customer who owes you money,” you actually include sample collection letters in your product.

Listen: everyone is lazy. Me. You. Your customers. And your writers, editors, and authors.

But the information product buyer has paid us to provide him with shortcuts. As the customer, he has the right to be lazy.

As the seller in this transaction of information publishing, we—the information product marketers—give up the right to be lazy.

Our customer expects us to do the work, so he doesn’t have to.

If we don’t, we are of little value to him. And he will let us know this by asking for his money back.

Action step: read the latest information product you wrote or published…or even better, the one you are working on right now.

Ask yourself on every page: “Is this text telling the reader merely what to do, or am I actually showing him how to do it?”

If you are merely saying what to do instead of how to do it, rewrite to correct the oversight.

The result: top quality information products worth the premium price you charge.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

In this 3rd video, Eben Pagan explains exactly why written “content” and video is the new form of “cash” online, and how to use this information to make a lot of money.

This video many of the mysteries of why some products sell for high prices online while most don’t sell at all.

You’ll also see a “virtual live demonstration” of how easy it is to create valuable videos in minutes on your computer, then learn what to put INSIDE your videos so that people want to buy them.

But maybe the best part of this awesome video is that it actually shows you how to format information so that people will pay HIGH prices for it, including two free downloads that walk you through the process of making YOUR information so you can sell it for big bucks.

Just opt in to get this video and the free downloads.

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Go watch this video to learn how this guy grew his information product business to $100 million in sales, starting out at his computer in his bedroom…

At the end, he walks you through an exercise to target and identify the knowledge YOU have that you can turn into an “information product” to sell online (and if you own an info-business already, it will give you a new mindset that will really take your success to the next level).

There’s also a free PDF download of the exercise for you to print out, which is cool.

In the video, you’re going to learn:

> How a simple e-book that was written in a few weeks became an “empire” of almost $30 million in sales with a business that’s run FROM HOME

> Important new insider trends in the information publishing industry that you NEED TO KNOW if you want to succeed

> The mistake that most information marketers make that prevents their products from succeeding

> The key mindset shift that allows you to identify market and product opportunities…where there are buyers who NEED to buy information products but don’t have products to buy

And again, you’ll get a free PDF blueprint exercise (and step-by-step guidance through it) to target the knowledge you ALREADY HAVE that you can turn into an information product (or coaching) that you can sell for high prices online.

This is a SUPER-high value honest view into an online money-making machine that will blow your mind.

Just opt-in to watch the video. No obligation, and you don’t have to buy anything (in fact, there’s nothing for sale on the website).

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