This article has some ideas that entrepreneurs whose business is writing can easily use to keep their old articles busy making money for them. Personally, I have thousands of articles in my files. After seeing what can be done with previously written articles, I certainly do intend to see what I can put together; you may want to do the same.
Much of this article comes from information in How To Write & Sell Simple Information For Fun And Profit by Robert W. Bly. If you are into writing, I recommend that you read this book.
Now, let's look at some ways you can make money from your article file.
PUBLISHING E-BOOKS
To market e-books you will need a list to advertise your books to. There are other ways to do this as well, but a good list may be the best way. How to build a list is the subject of another article, so just keep in mind how important it is.
One concern about e-books is what to charge; another is how long must it be. I have tried to write one or two e-books in the past, and both of these problems arose. Bly answers both questions with very good reasons. He says $29 is the best price for an e-book.
The reason is his requirement to make $2,000 to $3,000 from each e-mail promotion sent to his list. This means he wants to sell 67 to 103 of his e-books with each promotion. You can set up any goal you wish for whatever promotion you choose. A price lower than $29 obviously will bring in less money. The price decision is yours, but $29 gives you an idea about where to start. The $29 price also seems to be at the point where buyer resistance falls off.
This brings up the question about how long the e-book must be. To charge $29, your book should be at least 50 pages long. This length depends on how you format your e-book; it may not be an MSWord document 50 pages. It does mean you need about 15,000 words, or 300 words per page.
You can find freelance people who will design your cover and your entire e-book on sites like eLance.com or Google. These services may cost as much as $200. In the beginning, you will probably want to do this yourself. You can use MSWord to type it, using 12-point Times New Roman in the body and double space. Chapter headings may be 14-point Ariel Bold, with subheadings in Times New Roman 14-point bold. When finished with your typing, convert the document to PDF.
Open the document with Adobe Acrobat and check the security settings. Make any required changes.
With your new e-book ready to go, how will you convince readers to buy from you, a completely unknown author? One proven way is to sell new customers a $9 special report or a $7 booklet. There are two reasons why this is likely to work. First, buyers are more likely to buy the lower priced writings of an unknown author. A more important reason that has nothing to do with being a new author is simply that, to maximize your income, every writer should deliver their work in a variety of lengths and prices. This is because you want to sell to the widest range of buyers.
In the mix you will have a number of price levels. The lowest one includes products you are willing to offer free of charge. These could be an online newsletter, blog, podcasts, and other information you want to use to build your subscriber list.
The next level is made up of low priced products that includes any product under $100. Using docents in this area, we can provide an easy way for readers of our free content to transition from free to paying for content. When you begin to make sales of $39 items, you can easily sell $19 e-books as well as $25 paperbacks. This is an example of how a mix of various priced goods can greatly increase your income, mostly from work you have already done.
One useful product in the low priced range is the booklet. Normally, these sell for $7 to $19 each. These are a useful way make money from material that is not long enough to make a book out of. Remember, an e-book requires 50 pages, something you may not have; all is not lost–just put what you have into a booklet.
There are many ways to self-publish booklets listed on Google. You may also be able to find a local printer which could save a little money on shipping costs. One of the best printers I found on Google was Colorwise Commercial Printing. A 20-page booklet with black and white printing costs about $290 for 100 copies. You should be able to sell your booklet for around $11 each. Add shipping and handling to this price.
One way to market booklets is to use press releases. If you are unfamiliar with press releases, one place you can go for a tutorial is "How to write a press release-Mini Tutorial." When you have your press release ready, you next project is to distribute it to 300 or so publications. One distribution system that will do the job for about $25 is "Wired PR News."
There are many Websites dealing with writing and distributing press releases on Google and other search engines. Try one or two and you should be able to sell some booklets. Remember, they are just one part of your marketing mix. If you have enough material, you should put together a number of various priced booklets, e-books, books, and other products that we will discuss.
PUBLISHING AN E-ZINE OR ONLINE NEWSLETTER
An online e-zine is a useful tool; it may provide income if you are able to sell subscriptions, or it can help you build your list by harvesting e-mail addresses. According to How to Write & sell Simple Information, here is what you need to do using MSWord to design a text-based e-zine:
- Set left margin at 20.
- Set right margin at 80.
- Set 60-character column width.
- Use a hard carriage return after every line.
- Dashed lines separate articles in the e-zine.
- Article titles are centered with asterisks on both ends (e.g., ***A Little Known Trick For Picking Effective Domain Names***).
- Save as a text file.
With the house list you have built, you can market various items to your list whenever you want by e-mail. There is almost no cost involved in this kind of e-mail marketing. This begs the question of how often should you mail to your list? Many people are like I am—we don't like a constant bombardment of e-mail sales proposals. However, some publishers get good results with as many as two e-mails per day. You can easily find out how many e-mails your list will tolerate—increase your mailings until you begin to get an abnormal number of opt-outs. This is the point where you are irritating your list, so you need to lower your mailing rate.
Another thing to do to build your list is to provide a pop-up for people who visit one of your product landing pages but do not buy. On the pop-up offer them a free report, or the opportunity to sign up for an e-zine. This means that, even though you sold nothing, you have collected a valuable new name for your list.
MEMBERSHIP SITES
Websites that charge monthly fees may be used for many different things. In the case of this article, they are a way to monetize your product mix on a regular basis. On your membership site you should provide access to constantly changing and improving articles, film clips, CDs, and other items in your mix. Some of these should be offered to non-paying visitors as a way to get them to subscribe. Your membership site should have a shopping cart so visitors can easily sign up for a membership. If someone tries to enter a members only area, there should be a button that takes them to the shopping cart; if they choose not to sign up, provide a way to at least retrieve their e-mail address for your list.
The basic idea for a membership site is to provide an enormous amount of useful information. For this reason, a membership site may not be the best thing for a new writer to try.
In order to properly operate a membership Website, you need membership management software. Two of the best packages are aMember Professional for $180, and MemberGate at a cost of $197 per month. There are some less expensive programs, even a few free ones. You need to compare the benefits of any that interest you before you make your choice.
CONSULTING
The idea of being a consultant appears glamorous to people who wish to be independent and get paid for their work. The dictionary defines a consultant as "a person who gives professional or expert advice." Because they may have done extensive research on various problems, people with writing experience may very well qualify as experts in their area of knowledge. This section shows how you may be able to monetize this part of your experience. Here are the main consulting categories:
Most consultants are advisors. They suggest possible actions for you to take, but they are not in a position to make you do what they recommend. To not have your advise followed is a frequent occurrence; consultants need to become accustomed to this. Another way to look at it is, what do you care if they do what you say, as long as you are paid?
A few consultants actually put in place recommendations they make, or in some cases the advice of others. An example is an accountant who may execute a company's tax policy based on his own recommendations. As a general rule, consultants who advise are paid much more than those who actually perform recommendations. This kind of consulting is limited by expense as well as by the fact there are only so many hours one can work in a day.
Consultants are often used for training of employees. Such training often improves employee productivity and helps them develop their career paths. For these reasons, training consultants who conduct the training at a company's facilities often make up to $4,000 a day.
Consultants gain a lot of expertise in their particular field, but, if they are paid $1,000 a day, that's all they will make—$1,000. Now, assume the consultant has enough material from his consulting to put together a publication or other product worth $1,000. What happens now? The consultant may be able to sell 5 products a day, or 20 products a day at $1,000 each. This means that, rather than being limited to just $1,000 a day consulting, the consultant may now be able too make $5,000, $20,000, or whatever the number of products you can sell in a day. Use your valuable expertise to your advantage. You can also sell a variety of products based on your consulting experience that may range in price from a $1 white paper on up to the $1,000 product. You can see how much more profitable it is to sell your past consulting expertise than it is to use your limited time only for actual consulting.
Some consultants deviate from classic consulting and become contract or temporary consultants. These people typically work full time at the client's premises for as long as the assignment takes. They often work together with the client's regular staff; this means a temporary consultant must speak to their accountant to be sure how they will be treated by the IRS for tax purposes.
AUDIO PRODUCTS
Many of us conduct conference calls that amount to teleseminars. These calls are made using some kind of conference calling program. Most of these programs also provide a recording service. Here is a very lucrative way for you to use these calls or seminars for a lot of money. How to do this?
It's pretty simple. After your conference call or teleseminar you can just download the audio of the call to your hard drive. Then, burn it onto a CD for an instant audio product you can sell. Because the conference call program can be used for an interview, this provides an excellent way to conduct several interviews and make a series of CDs which can be sold as an album. If you charged for your seminar, a price less than the seminar will be attractive to your customers. In any event, $29 to $49 should be a proper price for your individual CDs.
SOFTWARE
Your writing library can provide you with another income source. If you have some information that can be reduced to a software program you have another potential source of income. In today's world, software is no longer sold on CDs; instead, you simply download it from your host server. This is called SaaS, "software as a service."
It makes no difference that you are not a programmer. Today you can get one to do the work for very little money using one of the hiring services like eLance or oDesk. You should be able to price such software in the $49 to $100 range; more if it's a program that does a lot of work.
CONCLUSION
There are other products and services you might want to use in your mix of things related to your writing that you can sell. These include presentations (speaking), seminars, webinars, and other ways you can think of to profit from your past writing. To help you make more money, I recommend that you get Mr. Bly's book, How To Write & Sell Simple Information For Fun And Profit.
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