Getting Started

The very first thing you need to do, before you get started online or with this step-by-step system, is to take some time alone and think about what you really want out of the internet. What do you want? Do you want to make an extra $500 per month for a car payment? Or do you want an extra $2000 per month for a mortgage? Or do you want to make $20,000 a month or more, and spend time traveling? Perhaps you wanted for a long time to work with inner-city kids or with children in Africa or teachers in China, but have never had the resources to do it.

You see, you will always get what you really want. If all you want is a new car (and that’s OK), that is all you will get. But if you genuinely have a burning desire to make a quarter of a million a year, you can have that too. It will require a lot more work than the new car, but the most important thing is your belief that you can do it. This book will only give you the directions, and tell you how to create the foundation, the framework. You will, through sweat and creativity and testing and late nights, make the big money happen. If you just want the car, you can probably do that in a few hours a week.

Step 1: Decide What to Sell:

The next thing you need to decide is what are you going to sell or to market? Unless you are getting into internet marketing for charity purposes, and if you are reading this I imagine that’s not the case, you will have to sell something. What are you interests? Now you may be thinking, well I just want to sell something that is going to make me a lot of money. That sounds really good right now, but when you are working late into the night and early in the morning on your web project, you will quickly tire if you aren’t personally excited about the product you are marketing. Choose a product area that excites you, that you can really get into selling, an area where you really believe there aren’t enough choices. The next thing you will do is go online and find a solid product in the same area of interest that you want to create a product (but not the same product) and become an affiliate of that product. In this way, while you are creating your new product, you will getting a feel for the people who purchase that product. You can communicate with them, finding out what they like about the current products on the market, and what they dislike about them. This will help you create a much better product than if you are not in touch with the market.

Step 2: Create Your Own Product:

First, take out a sheet of paper and write down 10 topics that you have some general knowledge about, for each of the areas of interest you have. Next, write at least 3 sub topics underneath each topic, so you will have at least 30 sub topics, or ideas. Once you have broken all of the different subjects about which you could write, into outlines, then you must decide which will be best. Take a look at all of them. Which appears to have more information? Which topics do you appear to have more first-hand knowledge in? Which topics appeal to you the most? Once you have chosen a topic, take each of the subtopics you created earlier and write out at least 5 things you can write about each of them—so you will have about 10 areas of knowledge, 30 sections of information (subtopics), and 150 individual ideas. Now look at your list. Do you think you can write a paragraph or two about each of the individual ideas you have marked? Of course you can! And if you write a full page about each individual idea, and you should be able to, you will have around 150 pages of content! Now, I will have to say this now. It is far more important that everything you write is useful information that will truly help convey from you to the reader (the purchaser or your book) your expertise, than to write a long book. It would be better to write a book that has 30 pages but is worth $100 to the reader than to write a 200 page treatise that is only worth $10, if that.

At this point, just start writing. Type all the topics, areas of knowledge, sections, and individual ideas into a word processing program such as Word. The reason you are going to type them all in now is so that you can start by writing about one particular idea at a time, and actually type it into the program.

Now, begin to write about the topics about which you already have the most information. Once these are finished, you may need to do some research on some of the remaining topics before you write about them. Once you have finished writing about all of the topics, take a look at the order in which you have placed the topics—you may need to rearrange that some.

The next step is going to be to proofread your book for spelling, grammar, and the continuity of ideas from the beginning to the end.

Next, you need to add a table of contents and number the pages.
Perhaps at this point you are realizing that writing this ebook is going to be more work than it looked like at first!

Step 3: Upload Ebook Product to PDF

Next, you need to make your book available in PDF form. PDF is a universal form that just about every computer can read, and it looks real professional (this is a PDF). The universal standard these days is Adobe Acrobat. They have a great trial program, where they give you 5 downloads for free, and then you can subscribe for something like $10 per month and get as many PDF conversions as you need.

Step 4: Write Your Sales Letter

The most important parts of your sales letter are going to be all the teaser points about everything you are teaching about in your book, and the headline, which gets them to read the letter in the first place.

Take every point—yes, every point, all 150 of them, if that is how many you have, and write a ‘bullet point‘for each one. Use words like discover, reveal, learn, how to, master, incredible, easy; for example, discover the easiest way to plant your garden ( or catch more fish, etc.)
Now that you have your list of bullet points, you are going to trim them down to a list of only the very best and create 2 to 3 sets of bulleted points with about 6-10 points in each list. So, for example, if you came up with 100 teaser points yesterday, read through them and discard about ½ of them right off the top. Then do the same with that list, and cut it back to about 15-20 ‘bullet points’.

Now you are going to write your sales letter:

Headline Greeting Bullet Points Exciting transition paragraph More Bullet Points An exciting testimonial or two or three about your book (you don’t need this today, but once your book is written, you need to have several friends or family members read it and then write you a testimonial.) More Bullet Points An incredible guarantee A free bonus if they buy your book today.

Take a look at some sales letter based web sites to get some ideas. Remember, you cannot copy anything word-for word or take sentences from others’ web sites. What you can do, however, is get ideas for making each of the sections of your web site come alive. Whatever you write today, will probably not be what you eventually publish on the web. When you wake up tomorrow and reread it, you will probably find some things you want to change in it. You may even want to re-write it. Often, when you have rewritten a sales page several times, you have a much better letter than the first one you write.

Perhaps at this point you are still struggling with making the sales letter come together. I’d like to recommend that you take a look at the product I used when I first started creating sales letters. Basically it is a huge bank of sales letter templates that you can use by just copy and pasting your particular bullet points and selling points, and what you end up with is a ready-to-use sales letter. Click here to read more about it:

Step 5: Create a Web Site

Visit this web site that keeps an up-to-date list of web hosts and ranks them according to several different sets of criteria, so you can choose the web hosting company that can give you the best service for your needs. You will be spending about $10 per month for the smallest, basic website. If you are an experienced programmer or are familiar with html, frontpage, or dream weaver, then creating your web site should be a cinch. If you are a beginner and have never built a web site before, I recommend that you start with a site-builder. They are included in most of the web hosting packages I have recommended, but be sure and double check before you sign up with one. Now you are ready to upload your sales letter page that you have written, to your web site. Simply follow the directions that come with your site-builder and you should be fine.

Step 6: Insert Payment Method

Decide on a payment method by which your customers can buy your product. I personally use and recommend PayPal. They are extremely easy to use, to receive your payment from, and they charge a reasonable price. If you use PayPal, they will give you specific instructions on how to make your sales page go to their payment system, and they will explain how to do all of it.

Step 7: Generate Visitors

So now you have a book to sell, a web page to sell it on, and now all you need is some visitors to come see your sales page. This is an area that will take some trial and error and testing before you will be extremely successful, generally speaking. Each product and sales page tends to react differently to different sources of traffic, so testing is paramount.

At this point, I will tell you that once you have the basics down and you are making some money, it doesn’t hurt to purchase an additional book or two here and there. Now, once you have the basic knowledge, a lot of what you read will be repetitive. But that is only because you have already been learning, so of course you are going to see some of the same topics reappear. But the real importance here is in seeing a different viewpoint on everything you do. It will help you think outside the box and come up with creative solutions to marketing problems. Keep this in mind too, when you spend $100 on a book and almost everything in it is familiar, if you just get one new technique from that book and the new technique makes you $500 or $1000 when you implement it, the book was well worth the cost. So look at the purchases from the perspective of how much more you can learn, not from how little they offer new. Sean Mize

Note: For creating stores on different websites like EBay and for further ideas you can check Books, KIT, Guides and training section on this website.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 11:19 am and is filed under Make Money Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.