Giving away an ebook works great for three main reasons, the most important of which is that it can be used to gain opt-in subscribers.  The next most important is that it can also be used as a tool to gain a few affiliate sales, when I write an ebook I typically inject in a few affiliate links so I can make a couple bucks off it.  Lastly, I use ebooks as a way to show others that I am an authority within my own niche, which happens to be internet marketing (probably the best niche to write ebooks for).  Due to this combination of factors, writing ebooks is extremely profitable especially when done correctly.

So why exactly do I need to give away an ebook in order to see these benefits?  Well, you don’t necessarily, I have my own ClickBank ebook (you can see the advertisement for “The Seven Day Millionaire” to your right), but that doesn’t stop me from writing less in-depth ebooks to give out as well.  The main reason for giving it away is quite simply because you will make more money as a result of people reading your content then you would if you were to sell your product.  When I write a 10 page ebook, I am mostly trying to get people to join an automated follow-up series of emails with an occassional broadcast tossed in.

If you read my recent post about how “the money is in the list” you would be aware that there is a great deal

of money to be made by gaining opt-in subscribers through an autoresponder such as Aweber.  I have done it in the past with other websites, and the reason why I have decided to write this post is that I am at it again.  This time I have started writing an ebook on creating a blog, from the web hosting aspects to gaining traffic and links and monetizing it correctly.  The tentative title is “Blogging 101: Traffic and Link Development Tips”, for which I spent a couple minutes throwing together a quick image in Photoshop (I’m not an artist, but it works well enough for me).  I am hoping to finish writing it within 2 weeks and make it easily accessible from this website.

Actually creating an ebook is quite easy (excluding the content), I would recommend downloading Open Office and simply writing out your content in their equivalent to Microsoft Word.  In my opinion, Open Office Writer is a superior product to Word, and another great thing about it is that it allows you to convert your documents into a .PDF format with a click of a button, rather than paying a couple hundred dollars to do so with Adobe Professional.  Another Adobe product, Photoshop, is more or less essential for creating the graphics unless you want to pay out a good deal of money to a designer or for over priced software.  A little graphics skills will allow you to make a decent looking ebook relatively quickly.

As for the format of the ebook, I typically follow the format below:

• Title
• License (in which I allow people to redistribute my book, but not to modify it)
• Table of Contents
• Content
• Resource Section (important as this is how you make money off affiliate links)

Once you take these steps, simply stick your new ebook up on a couple forums in your signatures, threads, etc. as well as putting it prominently on your blog and you are all set to make money while increasing your reputation.  Go get them you esteemed author, you!

Squidoo is 100% free to use, in fact they actually pay you to use it.  The company is the creation of the guru internet marketer Seth Godin.  It is set up as a co-op, meaning that all profits made are split between the company, the users, and charity organizations.  50% of the profits from Google AdSense ads automatically generated on the pages is sent directly to the lensmasters, 5% goes to various charity organizations (the lensmasters can also opt to donate their proceeds), and 45% goes to the company.   The amount of money that a lens earns is determined by a ranking algorithm to divide up the AdSense earnings.  Money can also be earned via modules such as Ebay, Amazon, or others which each pay on the same scale based on the commission Squidoo earns except for these sales there is no ranking algorithm, just directly attributable sales as if it were your own affiliate link.

The main reason why I use Squidoo is not because of the AdSense/module earnings, but for 3rd party affiliate sales.  I have a couple of Squidoo lenses that pump out a couple thousand dollars a year in affiliate commissions.  The beauty of Squidoo is that it is nearly effortless to create a lens, I have one lens that has made me $1500 in the past 6 months and it took me 7 minutes to create it.  The internal linking system makes it so that all of the Squidoo pages typically have a high page rank, and as a result they are weighted highly in Google.  This means with minimal effort, you can have a high PR web page that is sharing profits that can dominate the search results for some keywords.  Using this PR, you can then build relevant high quality backlinks to your own site and drive traffic or just directly drive affiliate sales.  There is also a great community within Squidoo, and this makes it an ideal place for marketers or average joes to go to make a buck, build backlinks, or raise funds for charity.

If you would like to see my Squidoo lenses check out my bio page, Lensmaster Page.  If you would like to sign up and start building links and earning money from Squidoo you can Sign Up Here.

***My RSS feed is now working, sorry about that guys.  I saw a couple people signed up for feeds but then when I checked Feedburner it was empty, apparantly feedburner doesn’t play nice with WP Super Cache so I had to play around with the caching a bit.  Should work great now, I would appreciate it if somebody tests it out for me