When I wrote my first book in 1981, book publishing was pretty simple and straightforward: you sold your book to a publishing house, and they published your book.

Today, the array of publishing options available to authors is dazzling. Here’s a quick overview of the 5 basic categories of book publishing to help you choose the one that’s best for you:

1. Mainstream publishing

“Mainstream publishing” means selling your book to a traditional publishing house.

I have done this with all of my 80 books. My publishers include McGraw-Hill, Henry Holt & Company, John Wiley & Sons, HarperCollins, Prentice Hall, and Career Press.

One advantage of traditional publishing is that the money flows from the publisher to the author—as advances and royalties—rather than you paying them.

If you are writing a book for the prestige of being a published author—which can help establish you as a thought leader in your field—mainstream publishing is by far the most prestigious of the 5 publishing options listed here.

People are impressed when you show them a physical book that looks professionally produced—and when you tell them your publisher is Random House or John Wiley.

On the negative side, traditional publishing is a business in decline (it has been for decades) and these books have been selling fewer and fewer copies. Exceptions? Of course.

Despite this, I like mainstream publishing because someone else (the publisher) does most of the grunt work and I make money from the get-go.

2. Self-publishing

“Self publishing” means paying a printer to print your book. You are also responsible for marketing and distribution.

Instead of the 8% royalty a mainstream publisher would pay you, you can earn 40% or more of the cover price per unit sold, depending on method of distribution.

Because you have a higher profit margin, self-publishing is a great option for speakers who want to sell their books at the back of the room.

Bottom line: self-publishing can potentially be more lucrative than mainstream publishing, though frequently it is not.

As for prestige of being a published author, self-publishing is less prestigious than mainstream publishing but more so than e-book publishing (see #4 and 5 below).

I have never self-published a real book. Decades ago, I self-published a book-length work as a typewritten, bound manual for a course I taught—and a small publisher picked it up and published it as a traditional book.

3. Publishing services

There are companies that are not “real” publishers but rather offer “publishing services”. Examples include iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris.

Typically these publishing services produce and publish your book for an up-front fee, and then pay you a royalty per book sold. But deals vary.

I have no experience with this category of book publishing. It seems to be an option for people who are looking to self-publish but want someone else to handle all the details.

The prestige is equal to or maybe a little above traditional self-publishing as described in #2 above.

4. PDF e-books

You can produce your book as a PDF and set up a website where people can purchase and download it.

There is very little prestige in writing an e-book. But the profit margins are close to 100% and so you can make a lot of money with this option.

Writing and selling PDF e-books is a good publishing option for authors who either want to maximize their revenues or get their ideas into published format quickly.

I have made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling e-books that are either collections of my previously published writing (columns, articles) or updates of my out-of-print paperback books. It is very lucrative.

5. Kindle e-books

A variation of #4 is to publish e-books for Kindle and sell them on Amazon.

Although there are rare stories of fortunes being made self-publishing e-books for Kindle, many Kindle authors have
limited sales and do it more for vanity. I don’t think having a Kindle e-book on amazon.com is terribly prestigious.

I have never self-published a book for Kindle, though many of my regular publishers sell e-book versions of my paperback and hardcover books for that platform.

To summarize:

* If you are writing a book to become a recognized expert in your field, go with a mainstream publisher (option #1).

* If you want a physical book to sell at the back of the room when you speak, self-publish a paperback (option #2).

* If you want to make a lot of money from book sales, publish PDF e-books and sell them online (option #4).

* If you want your work to be available for purchase on Amazon.com and you don’t want to write or publish a traditional book, publish it as an e-book for Kindle (#5).

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”.

Roger C. Parker suggests using the following types of information for content marketing:

1. Information on buying: Example: “10 Things to Look for When Shopping for Floor Covering.”

2. Questions to ask: “6 Questions to Ask When Refinancing Your Home.”

3. Mistakes to avoid: “Top 10 Mistakes Made by First-Time Book Authors.”

4. Symptoms: “7 Signs of Job Burnout.”

5. Strategies: “6 Steps to Permanent Weight Loss.”

6. Definitions: “8 Important E-Commerce Terms.”

7. Best practices: “10 Keys to Sustained Growth.”

Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2/22/13.

Copyblogger.com offers these 10 suggestions for writing strong content that gets marketing results online:

1. Care deeply about the quality of your writing, and about your audience.

2. Go deep with original research.

3. Share a never-before-seen interview.

4. Avoid redundant, duplicated, or stolen content.

5. Build so much trust with your audience that people would be happy to hand over their credit card.

6. Build your authority and your site’s authority.

7. Write for humans, not machines.

8. Create something nobody has ever seen before.

9. Remain balanced and worthy of your audience’s trust.

10. Cover a topic comprehensively (don’t aim for an arbitrary word count and stop once you reach it).

According to Marketingprofs.com, some of the types of content Google likes include interviews, lists, surveys, polls, reviews, news, case studies, predictions, humor, and contests.

Source: www.copyblogger.com, 2/18/13.

The Google algorithm used to reward online marketers for posting lots of short, poorly written articles on their web site; “content mills” sprang up to meet the demand.

How bad are those content mill writers working for as little as $15 per article? I once made the mistake of hiring one to write an article on careers in chemistry for one of my websites.

I will never forget the laugh her first sentence gave me: “Chemistry is a good career for people who are fond of atoms.” She also wrote, “To have a career in chemistry, one should study chemistry in college.” Duh.

But things have changed. Lately Copyblogger.com and Marketingprofs.com have been writing about how Google now penalizes marketers for these sorry articles and rewards them for quality content with higher search engine rankings.

That’s good news for good content writers, whose ability to write original and engaging content will now be more valued by the marketplace. And it’s good news for online marketers that provide their visitors with value instead of junk in their articles.

How much quality content should you post on your website? The more good articles you have, the better.

The problem for Internet marketers is that creating a large volume of quality articles is a lot of work and takes a lot of time.

When I first put up my website, I had no articles, and I dreaded the labor ahead of me in coming up with articles.

Then I realized that I had written dozens of articles on marketing in the 1980s for Business Marketing, Direct Marketing, and other marketing publications…and these had never been posted on the web anywhere!

I immediately wondered whether I still had hard copies of the articles. I didn’t have electronic copies since I had changed from a CPM to an MS-DOS computer years ago.

I went downstairs to my basement archives. The originals of all the articles were in a bottom drawer in a file cabinet. But to my dismay, I found that Humphrey, our old cat who had a kidney problem, had peed all over the drawer. And the articles were covered with a foul-smelling yellow powder.

I put on dishwashing gloves, picked the articles out of the drawer with a tweezers, photocopied them, scanned the clean copies into Word, and posted the Word files on my website, where they now reside for your reading pleasure; of course there is no charge to read or download them.

Most visitors to my site who read these articles do not know they were once drenched in feline urine!

If you are just starting out and don’t have a library of cat-pee-covered articles already written, how do you ramp up the content on your website?

My suggestion is that you find a venue where you are required to produce articles on a regular basis.

Be sure to retain the rights to your articles so you can post them on your website without restriction. Type “First rights only” in the upper left corner of the first page of every article you submit.

Here are a few options for creating an article-generating machine:

1 – Write a blog and post an article a week on it—at least 300 words.

2 – Write a column for a trade magazine or newsletter. I write a regular column on B2B marketing for Target Marketing magazine, and post the articles on my site once Target has published them. My column runs 1,000 words.

3 – Write a weekly article for distribution to subscribers to your e-list. Then post those messages in an article archive on your site. Length typically ranges from 400 to 750 words.

Suggestions #1-3 above will force you to create content on a regular basis, with no slacking in your production. It will become a habit and in one year, you’ll have anywhere from a dozen to as many as 50 articles to post on your site.

On the other hand, I find that if you don’t have an outlet that requires regular articles from you, you will never get around to writing any or posting them on your site and your Google ranking will suffer as a result.

Don’t merely rewrite other people’s articles and post them on your site. Make your content original, based on your own activities and results.

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 is a major shift happening in the world of content marketing. But first, what’s “content marketing”? It’s what bloggers and marketers do when they put up content that they want the search engines to rank and readers to flock to in order to build a brand, make product or affiliate sales, and sell advertising. So, basically anyone who uses content to get free search engine traffic and have the ability to get real people linking to and buzzing about their site is a content marketer. Well, in the past few months a certain type of content marketing has started to get very popular. It’s called “curation” and it has many benefits over traditional content marketing models.

1. Curation allows content marketers to create a lot more content around a lot more keywords in the same amount of time they currently spend on content development.

2. This enables you to score for a lot more keyword rankings, leading to more daily traffic.

3. It also enables you to keep readers engaged and loyal to your source of information because you filter through all the information on a topic and present them with the best of the best info on the topic.

4. You write less original content yourself and, often, put together more valuable content to readers at the same time.

5. Enables one-writer-sites to look and feel like they have a small staff of writers.

6. Posting more often gives more opportunities for something to go viral on social networks. And gives readers more to “Like,” retweet, and +1 on Google+.

7. Increases your authority score with Google because of the increased social signals Google finds for your site.

Since everyone is buzzing about curation, I wanted to get clarification on the tactic from an expert. My good friend Jack Humphrey is going to explain what curation is and how he developed an amazing software which helps him to create pages which rank really high in the search engines.

Click here to learn more about Jack’s amazing software.

Content curation is now fast catching on as a method for creating authoritative and useful content. Creating quality curated content is an art and with any such activity there are things that you should and should not do.

Here are 9 content curation best practices that you should try to follow so that the content you create is nice to read, useful to readers and fair to the creators of original content.

1. Make use of your creative abilities

Many people think that a content curator is just a person who finds and arranges other people’s work in an interesting and useful way.

While that is essential, significant value addition is important in terms of opinions, recommendations and commentary. Curated content is actually an interesting and useful blend of collected content, original opinions and contributions from others.

2. Identify content that is related to your website, but interesting to the readers

Always keep the interest of your readers in mind. They are looking for something that is useful to them. Try to find content that will be very interesting to your readers, but is related to your website in some way. For example, if your website is promoting baby strollers, look for articles that the owners of baby strollers will find interesting.

For example, tips on using baby strollers, reviews of popular baby strollers, feedback left by buyers of specific strollers, advantages and disadvantages of stroller features, statistics reflecting the popularity of different type of strollers, etc.

Try to develop a collection of sites which regularly publish such material and bookmark them so that you can periodically check them for new content. You can also subscribe to their RSS feeds or follow them on social media so that you are alerted when useful content becomes available. Content curation tools such as Curationsoft are excellent for finding related content.

3. Regularly publish new articles or posts

Your readers will find your website or blog useful only when there is regular useful content coming in. While even one article a week is good enough, try to publish it on a particular day of the week so that your audience will know when to expect new content from you.

A great article is nice to attract attention of new readers, but regular content is what will make them regular visitors to your site and encourage them to bookmark it or share it with others.

4. Go where your audience is

Gone are the days when readers bookmark and visit sites. There is an information overload and scarcity of time. Most people have a few sites that they visit regularly including social media sites or YouTube. Find out where your audience is coming from and places that they visit regularly. Try to create content there and then gently bring the visitors to your site. You could do this by interacting or writing guest articles on popular blogs or social media
websites.

5. Use platforms judiciously

When using multiple platforms, it is important to understand that a major part of your audience could be using more than one of those platforms. So if you are using multiple platforms to inform your readers about some interesting piece of information try to space it out. Sending it out together could hit the same users multiple times at the same time, which is a bit of a nuisance. Spacing out your tweets or comments will also serve as a reminder even if the same reader gets it again.

6. Always give credit to the original content creator

Irrespective of the platform and irrespective of how little of the information you quote, always give credit to the original author. This is an essential courtesy and the author will appreciate the gesture. You are also making your article, post or comment more useful because readers will be able to click the link to get more information. When
we say original author, it is the first person who put that content in the public domain. So if your source is itself quoting someone else, you should find the original source and give credit to them.

7. Don’t create duplicate content

When you quote someone else, quote only the part of the article that is relevant to your discussion. Copying an entire article will most likely get you penalized by the search engines for creating duplicate content. Try not to quote more than 15 percent of the original article. Quoting an entire article could also be seen as copyright infringement unless you have the permission of the original source.

8. Be careful with graphics and videos

Many content creators who put up graphics on sites such as Pinterest appreciate your quoting them. However, creating graphics and videos involves a lot of work and not everyone will like you to copy their work to your site. Check the copyright notices carefully and when in doubt get the permission of the creator of the content.

9. Encourage discussions

Interactivity is a great advantage of the web and you must encourage reader interaction by allowing comments and responding to them. You should also interact and comment on the website or blog of the original author. This can also be done on social media such as Twitter, but be careful to read the linked content before you decide to re-tweet it.

Content curation is a nice strategy for content marketing and creating nice curated content is an art. Try to follow the nine content curation best practices discussed above and you will soon be creating valuable content which your readers will appreciate.

Peter Lenkefi is the creator of CurationSoft. Discover, review, and curate content from Wikipedia pages, Google Blog Search, Google News, Blekko Blog Search and Blekko News, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and ANY RSS feed you want!

1. Know your audience: Carefully consider the type of readers you’re targeting and/or trying to attract, and tailor your content to them.

2. Create a framework for future content needs: Map out potential blog ideas, stories, featured posts, etc. That way, you have something to work from each time content is needed.

3. Create a content schedule: If you find yourself not blogging enough, creating a schedule can be the perfect way to get focused and stay motivated.

4. Think Multimedia: Looks for ways to recycle the same content into different formats.

5. Always encourage reader feedback and welcome user-generated content as part of your publishing mix.

Productivity is the key profit-producing factor in any business is.

Simply put, if you are not producing new content and products to offer the marketplace, you’re not going to make any money.

In other words, products equal profits.

And the more original, high-quality content you can produce and bring to market, the more you will earn, PERIOD.

Sadly however, most entrepreneurs don’t have a system in place for doing this EFFECTIVELY.

Listen, if you’re not making the kind of profit from your business that you know you deserve, and you’ve been searching for solutions that will make building your business much easier, then what I’m about to share with you will revolutionize the way you run your business and dramatically INCREASE your profits, while DECREASING your workload.

Glen Hopkins just released a brand new course detailing exactly how he does this. It’s called the Content Leverage Blueprint.

The Content Leverage Blueprint is a 4-part training course walking you step-by-step through his proven system. A system that will massively leverage your time and efforts in 4 keys areas literally allowing you to work less and earn more.

Specifically, you’re going to get Glen’s simple, yet very powerful, blueprint revealing how to easily create, leverage and publish high-quality, original content.

And, how to get that content effortlessly published on thousands of targeted web properties which will position you as the go-to expert in your marketplace and drive hoards of pre-sold prospects back to your money pages.

And get this, once you’ve gone through the Content Leverage Blueprint and learn this incredibly powerful system, you’ll be able to create, repurpose and publish high-quality, original content in as little as 3 hours or less!

So here’s the deal: Glen plans on releasing this as a Clickbank product in the near future for $97 but right now during this Warrior Special Offer you can grab this entire package for only $27.

That’s a 72% savings! Read the details now.

I’ve read that Google changes its search algorithm hundreds of times a year, as incredible as that sounds.

As of late, they’ve made the search engine “fussier” about the content it ranks highly.

Specifically, Google is rejecting crappy articles stuffed with keywords and written by content mills.

So how do you write content that both Google and your readers will value?

There are 4 levels of writing how-to material, and the key is to write at the higher levels.

Level 1 is to merely write information or facts, not ideas or actionable strategies.

For instance, if you are writing a report on how to build websites, and you begin by telling the reader there are a billion pages on the web, that’s interesting but it’s not really that helpful.

Level 2 is “what to do” writing. It tells the reader what to do, but not how to do it.

An example is a real estate article that told landlords to evict problem tenants, but didn’t tell how to go about it.

Level 3 is where most good content writing should be: “how to” writing.

You not only tell the reader what to do, but also how to do it.

In the real estate example, the article might tell the reader the 5 points that must be included in an eviction letter.

Level 4 is what content writers call “done for you”.

The writing not only tells the reader what and how to do something, but actually does it for them.

Again in the real estate example, the article could include a sample eviction letter that the reader can just copy and send to his tenant.

Readers and Google like solid level 3 writing, and if you can provide level 4 content, so much the better.

Google may also rank level 1 and level 2 articles high if they are accurate and well written…but these are less valuable to your human readers.

Tip: when writing instructional material, ask yourself about every paragraph, “Am I telling the reader how to do something? Or am I just telling them what to do?” Make sure both objectives, not just the latter, are accomplished by your copy.

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”.

A new promotional item I absolutely love is the “MiniBük” or mini-book. This is a tiny paperback book of between 16 and 96 pages in a 3.5 X 5-inch trim size. You write the text and the MiniBük company publishes the mini-book for you.

To promote yourself, write your mini-book on your area of specialization. If you are a social media consultant, for example, write and publish a mini-book on Google Plus. You can also get a business card bound into the mini-book.

For more information on mini-books visit: MiniBük or call toll-free 800-900-2499.

If you have some extra time, turning your blog posts and articles into other forms of content can be a great way to get some extra traffic.

For example, you could read your content into a mic and turn it into podcast content. Submit this content to podcast directories.

Additionally, you could take that audio and sync it with a few slides to turn into a video and upload to multiple video sharing sites.

Suddenly, one piece of content and a little extra work turns into three times the potential views you started with!

If nothing else, you could upload the audio with your blog post for those who don’t care to read through everything.

In past issues, I’ve recommended that you have a “bait piece”—a special report, white paper, or other informational premium you give away to generate leads for your product or service.

But many marketers don’t produce info premiums because of the research and writing work involved.

An easy way to get around this is to visit the U.S. government’s Federal Citizen Information Center (FCIC) online. There are loads of how-to and information booklets on a wide range of topics such as money, health, travel, housing, nutrition, computers, small business, and more.

If you find one that would make a good info premium for your business, you can print or download the text, put your own cover on it, print copies, and use it as your own freebie—without paying Uncle Sam a dime!

How? Most of these publications are not copyrighted, so the U.S. government allows you to use them for your own purposes (they do appreciate if you credit them as the source).

Warning: Be sure to check the publication for copyright notices. If the booklet you selected is copyrighted, then you can’t use it.

1 – To keep your name in front of your clients and build relationships.

2 – To let your customers know about special offers that you are giving only to them.

3 – Because if people don’t hear from you, you don’t exist or no news is bad news.

4 – To get more business or get people to your web site or store. More communication means more business.

5 – A newsletter can give helpful information and fun, thus giving your customers the pleasant surprise of extra value.

Source: Colleen Wilhite.

Curation is HOT right now. You need to be generating content this way as it is algorithm change-proof.

It’s the only true white hat method of generating content and at least you can relax in the knowledge that you won’t wake up one day and discover your traffic gone.

Paul Clifford’s PageOne Curator is a sophisticated tool that finds content from authority sites and enables you to post to multiple blogs with one click of a button. Curating you blog empire has never been easier.

This is the way to build authority sites and best of all, they will outlive the search engine algorithm changes that plague us all.

You don’t even have to go through the tedious copying/spinning/writing routine of content creation. Why spend all your energy in all that?

Get PageOne Curator now. It’s the right solution everyone needs right now.

In The Writer magazine (6/12, p. 15), my favorite novelist, Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, South of Broad) writes that, “Good writing is the hardest form of thinking.”

He continues: “It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable.”

This sounds nice, but do you buy his claim that good writing is really the hardest form of thinking? I think for most people, the hardest form of thinking is mathematics.

My youngest son is a freshman at Carnegie-Mellon majoring in computer engineering. He took a course in “calculus in three dimensions” and another in matrix theory.

I would wager that calculus in three dimensions is more difficult for most students than English composition. And I think the computer engineering curriculum is more difficult than being an English major.

Of course, this is prejudice fueled by techie snobbism on my part.

Decades ago I was a chemical engineering major at the University of Rochester.

We engineers all thought we were smarter—and that our course of studies was harder—than liberal arts.

Recently, while looking at texts my oldest son is reading as part of his history major, I revised my thinking somewhat.

He was studying original historical documents from the revolutionary war, and it was all I could do to keep my head from exploding. Difficult stuff!

I wouldn’t argue with Conroy, however, about writing being a hard form of thinking.

Even in today’s keyboard era, lots of people have trouble with writing.

And in my experience, the most common causes of poor writing are as follows:

#1) The writing communicates no clear idea or theme.

Michael Masterson has said that good writing is a great idea clearly expressed.

Some people can clearly express themselves in writing.

But their writing suffers because it either doesn’t contain an interesting, important idea…or because the idea hasn’t been well thought out.

Kurt Vonnegut’s rule of thumb: if you can’t explain your idea to a 12-year-old in a few sentences, you don’t really understand it yourself.

And if you don’t have a clear picture of what you want to say, how will you communicate your ideas to others?

#2) The writer doesn’t know enough about his subject.

Many writers fail to do the research necessary to write compelling, content-rich copy—whether for an e-mail or a magazine article

Research once meant hunting through dusty library stacks in a desperate search for data that often just couldn’t be found.

Now Google makes research much faster and easier. There’s no excuse for not researching your topic so you can pack your copy full of interesting and persuasive supporting facts.

As Claude Hopkins once said: “Specifics sell. Generalities roll off the human understanding like water off a duck’s back.”

Aside from making sure you have a strong idea and lots of content, here are 3 simple ways to make your writing clear and easy to read:

** Use short words instead of long ones.

** Use short sentences.

** Use short paragraphs.

This last one is particularly vital: nothing turns off readers quicker than a long block of solid gray text.

Demetrius: “Short clauses should be used in forceful passages, for there is a greater force and vehemence when a lot of meaning is packed into a few words.”

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”.

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.