21 Reasons why every serious blogger should write an e-book

Earlier this year I started blogging heavily. I quickly added e-book publishing to the mix and while I encountered a ton of roadblocks, I also had a decent success early on that stoked my flame about the profitability of an e-book empire.

Unless you’re raking in at least $10,000 a month in AdSense/advertising/affiliate income every month, there’s always room for an e-book, or two, or three, for that matter.

And even if you are making that much money, there’s space for one more egg in the basket. Especially if it’s a “do-it-once, profit forever” egg.

I present to you 21 reasons why you should get your fingers in motion and write that e-book.

1) You’re already an expert at writing. All you have to do is transfer you knowledge and skill into a different format. You can do that right? (Of course you can!)

2) You’ve already got an audience that loves you. This is one of main advantages bloggers have over traditional authors. You have a readership. You’re crazy to ignore that.

3) You already know what topics your readers love. There are certain articles on your blog that generate a ton of traffic. But don’t just take traffic into account. See which articles receive the most comments, tweets or diggs.

4) You’ll make money while you slack off. Yesterday my daughter and I sat by the river and went pretend fishing. We fed the ducks, watched two turtles nip at each other and then we went to lunch. I came home at 2pm to find $112 in e-book orders sitting in my PayPal account. AdSense doesn’t hand you cash on a daily basis. Advertisers don’t pay you on a daily basis. E-books can pay you on a daily basis.

5) They don’t cost anything to produce. Microsoft Word and Open Office (the free alternative to Word) both have PDF creation ability built in.

6) It could open the door to a publishing contract. If you ever want to pitch yourself to a publishing company, having an e-book under your belt could definitely help your cause.

7) Once you have a list of buyers you can continue selling to those people. If over the course of a year you accumulate a list of 500 buyers, that’s 500 people who may be willing to purchase another e-book — and another and another, for that matter.

8 ) Some readers really do want premium information. While blog articles are great for a quick shot of information, they don’t always quench the thirst for in-depth knowledge. You know what topics your visitors most often flock to, why not give them a lot more of that.

9) You can enlist affiliates to help you promote it. Before you get overly excited, do not make affiliates the crux of your marketing strategy. Even if thousands of affiliates agree to promote your e-book, only a small percentage of those people will generate any sales. On the other hand, free advertising is free advertising. Even if affiliates don’t generate sales they’re still building your brand.

10) Tara Gentile says it was the single best thing she did for her business in 2009. Publishing more e-books was the single best thing she did for her business in 2010. (See the last paragraph of this article to read the full story.) 

11) You can use an inexpensive e-book as a stepping stone to higher priced information products. A $10 e-book could lead to a $50 audio course, which could lead to a $150 video set.

12)  The title “author” carries a certain degree of credibility. Doesn’t matter if it’s a print book or an e-book — being able to call yourself an author is powerful.

13) Marcus Sheridan at Sales Lion said that writing an e-book creates ‘forced cognition.’ This means the more you write and talk about something the better you get at explaining it to others. I’ve always thought of it as the more you write the more YOU learn. I’m always picking up new ideas from myself whenever I write about Internet marketing.

14) You’ll stand out in a sea of experts. Most people don’t have the balls to create and sell an e-book. Call it laziness… call it fear… lack of time… whatever. You seriously boost your own blog image when you’ve authored an e-book.

15) Gives you something to sell off later on. I recently spoke to an author who sold off an e-book website that she’d had for 4 years. She sold it for $25,000. The e-book was still generating anywhere from $1,500 – $1,800 a month on fewer than 2,000 site visitors. So not only did it pay her bills for 4 years, she STILL got a big payday at the end of it all.

16) E-books have expanded beyond the PDF. Though it always makes sense to publish your e-book as a PDF, you should also consider publishing your title on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (Both of which accept self-published e-books.) This is an easy way to reach more potential customers beyond your blog.

17) You can promote your services/affiliate links in the e-book. This is true if you’re selling an e-book as a PDF, but not if you’re selling it through Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

18) Bestselling author Seth Godin says you should. 

19) Namoi Dunford at IttyBiz made $12,246 in one day selling her e-book. Says Namoi, “There’s money to be made in ebooks and unless you’re in internet marketing, the market is nowhere near saturated. With 1.4 billion people using the internet regularly, there’s a pretty good chance at least a few of them want to buy whatever crap you want to sell.”

I disagree with Naomi about Internet marketing. I don’t think the market is saturated because the industry changes so frequently. Newer, better experts are popping  all the time in Internet marketing and there’s nothing wrong with that.

20) You’ve got a greater incentive to continue blogging when you’re selling e-books. Which one do you think motivates you more, a blog that’s making money or a blog that’s NOT making money? Working day in and day out on a blog that’s not making money is a sure fire way to blogger burnout. It happens all the time.

An e-book gives you some insurance against blogger burnout. At least if you’re making some sales, (and those sales don’t require any additional work on your part), you have a diamond-studded reason to continue moving forward.

21) You have an encyclopedia of knowledge sitting two-seconds away from you. Meet my latest creation Impulse Buyer Magnet. I’ll show you how to create an e-book that attracts impulse buyers, no matter what niche you’re in. It’s 185 pages that’ll take you through every step of the process, and it works.

You’ve got no reason to say “no” to e-books. So what are you waiting for? Seriously… leave me a comment and tell me why you haven’t created an e-book yet.

More from Dahlia Valentine

• My Website Traffic Experiment with SlideShare
• Which should come first, the traffic or the ebook?
• Internet marketing as a retirement strategy

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