planning a course

Why You Shouldn’t Create a Course Before Considering This

For those who have written a business or life advice book, you may be starting to get excited about the idea of creating a course. You could capitalise on your new concepts. You could make 10x the profit of the book itself. But slow down there, the Lone Ranger is galloping off way too fast. The thing is, when offering a higher level product like a course, we need to think about getting multiple sales leads, systematically, and promoting the course.  Before you do a mini freak-out, let’s delve into what that might involve if you’re committed to NOT making Meta and Google any richer. Okay? Most businesses selling goods online advertise on Facebook or Google, then use retargeting ads relevant to the content the person was looking at. (These are ads that follow the web visitor around the Internet).…
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what kind of format to use for thought leadership

Which Kind of Format Will You Make – a Book, a Podcast, a Magazine, or an eBook?

If you’re looking at several choices to enhance your personal brand presence or generate leads or similar, then this article goes through the most popular ways to expand one’s thought leadership. The biggie: Do I write a paperback book? If writing is your preferred mode of communication—or you want it to be—then writing a full book could be your top choice. Tacked on my wall in 2002 was a tatty piece of paper with my goal written: “Write a book”. Sure, I had written many essays, but a book was a higher mountain to climb than that. I did not have a clue about it and only wrote a ‘booklet’, however… small steps lead to big goals. The mistakes I made earlier on, such as never writing an outline, help to inform my advice now as a book writing coach.…
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How to Publish an eBook on Amazon and Make Money

How to Publish an eBook on Amazon and Make Money

Firstly, I believe that publishing to KDP is not the only way to profit from ebook publishing. It is simply the most well-known and easiest. This is likely because Amazon store represents a huge slice of the market. The company controls about 50% of the book market in the UK and claims 67% of eBook Sales market share overall. This article will however focus on how to publish an ebook on Amazon and make money. Over 1.4 million self-published books are released through Kindle Direct Publishing every year (though these are not all exclusive to KDP). (WordsRated.com). The dominance of Amazon is unchallenged. About 91% of the US self-publishing market now uses Amazon print. As IngramSpark also feed to Amazon, as does Lulu, this number makes sense.    Five Ways that Kindle Publishing has Changed Increased Competition: The Kindle Publishing…
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Types of Interactive eBooks

eBook Formatting Service for Kindle

These days, once you get your file cleaned up and ready for upload to the Amazon Kindle platform (KDP), it often can go through straight up. But for specially designed, image-laden eBooks, there is a software to get your ebooks formatted. On this, I would not bother trying to get an eBook converted and designed in these ways: Calibre – absolutely the hardest way for novices, but it is a free option Kindle Create – free, but you have to start again if your charts/graphics don’t appear correctly and thus you lose ALL your changes. It outputs KPF – a Kindle Publishing only format. Oh, What to Do for my Ebook? If you want to do-it-yourself in designing ebooks more than just once, Atticus is the software for you, at US$147. It takes in your .RTF or .DOCX file and…
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find book audience

Find your Book’s Ideal Audience

Many of us want to write a good quality book for the right audience… but what kind of audience is right for us? The truth is, if we can narrow down our audience and understand the depth of the pain problems and desires, then we can write a book that resonates deeply with them. I like to give some support on these areas and so have a brief video in the Book Creation Success course on competitive research. Independently, you can go along to Amazon and with ‘Amazon Suggest’ you can see what types of keywords people are typing in to find your area. You need to have a competitive overview of your marketplace and the key bestsellers in your niche. Then you can do some further research on BuzzSumo (free account, 10 searches) or SparkToro (free account) to get…
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ways to use email marketing for publishers

Ways to use Email Marketing – for Publishers

With a focus on those publishing multiple ebooks or books, here are my top tips for using email marketing to engage readers. I’ve heard from several authors that they don’t enjoy receiving emails so don’t send many, only one every few months. But the sending of regular information is critical to building up a happy list of readers, so don’t be shy… just mix it up! 1. Always use an Email Marketing System that’s Easy Email marketing can easily get out of control with a manual system, like Outlook. To comply with anti-spam laws, unsubscribing must be easy. It is also useful to see open rates, click-through rates, and determine which content is the best performing. With most businesses choosing Mailchimp, a valid choice, my email marketing system is GetResponse – as it is just the most user-friendly and powerful…
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