How You Make Money Online
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1) Determine your target audience. Who will you be writing for? Consider factors like gender, age, occupation, relationship status, skill level, and so on.
2) Consider your clients and customers. What would they want to read, watch, listen to? What are their most pressing problems?
3) Look at the bestseller lists at Amazon. If you click on a category at Amazon the bestsellers are the books that come up first. What's hot here?
4) Read books, magazines and blogs pertaining to your topic. What questions largely go unanswered? What pieces are missing?
5) Examine your favorite book in your desired niche. What do you believe the follow up book should be? Write it!
6) Look at blogs in your niche. Which articles receive the most comments? Can you turn that article into a full-fledged ebook?
7) Which pages on your own blog get the most traffic? Which pages are most often linked to? It could be a topic for your ebook.
8) See if the information you want to write about is freely available (in abundance) online. If so, you may want to go back to the drawing board.
9) Use Google's Keyword Planner. Just enter a keyword or a phrase and it'll give you a list of questions people have asked pertaining to that keyword. It pulls these queries from the search engines.
10) Have a look see at Ubersuggest. Enter your keyword and Ubersuggest extracts suggested terms from Google.
11) Use Google Trends to see breakout terms in your niche. These are keywords that are experiencing a huge influx of new searches. To find them, enter a keyword into Google Insights and see what you get.
12) Use the Google Keyword Planner. I like using random starter phrases like, "50 ways to," "100 ideas for," "10 ways to."
13) Check out the Occupational Outlook Handbook to see which jobs are going to have the most growth in the future. Can you help job seekers in these categories?
14) See what's hot on Reddit. It might just spark an idea.
15) Look at your websites analytics. What unusual keywords are people using to find your site? You just might have found your next ebook idea!
16) What's your passion? Do you love to build gaming computers? Make sculptures out of found items? Can you teach others how to do the same?
17) Look at recent difficulties you've overcome in your business. How did you do it? What tools did you use? Your story could be an ebook.
18) What new things have you recently learned through life? Have you figured out your own couponing technique? Bingo! there's an ebook topic.
Choosing a Title for Your eBook
19) Remember, the search engines are watching. Create titles that have keywords in them. It'll help make your ebook website rank well in the search engines.
20) Check out How to Choose a Bestselling eBook Title. They have some nice ideas there.
21) Think of your title as a headline. Read Copyblogger's Magnetic Headlines series for some juicy headline ideas.
Outlining Your eBook
22) Write interesting bullet points about your ebook for your sales copy first.Now create an outline to match your bullet points.
23) Create a mindmap. Right now I'm totally digging on Mindjet MindManager. It allows me to brainstorm and write the ebook in one interface.
24) Before you start a chapter, ask yourself, "What problem will I solve in this section?" Make sure you answer this question clearly.
25) Before you start a chapter, ask yourself, "What steps will the reader to take in order to solve this problem?" Write it all down.
26) Write out chapter titles and sub-titles. This way you know exactly what you need to cover.
27) Include suggested images, graphics, charts, diagrams and mindmaps in the outline. Can the search/creation mission on these items be outsourced? Do it!
28) Write down a list of stories and anecdotes you want to include in each section.
29) Use David Seah's Fast Book Outliner. It's an excellent tool for outlining in print and it's FREE.
30) Use the index card method as outlined by Jan over at the Blue Inkwell blog.
31) Though you might be tempted, don't start writing until the outline is 100% complete. Ebooks, and most major writing projects for that matter, are so much easier to write when you're working from a complete outline.
Researching Content for Your eBook
32) Get Google Alerts for more ideas. Google Alerts sends you links to blogs and websites that cover your specific topic based on keywords you choose. Just select a phrase (dog training, for example) and you'll start getting emails the same day.
33) Use Google Advanced Search functions. I promise once you start using them YOU WILL see a difference in the results you get.
34) Subscribe to Research Buzz. Research Buzz will give you the inside scoop on the most fantastic research sources you've never heard of. There's a big world outside of Google.
35) Find groups on LinkedIn where you can ask groups of expert's specific questions about your topic.
36) Ask questions on sites like Yahoo Answers and Quora. Yahoo Answers covers a lot of different topics. Quora has a more professional audience.
37) Ask questions in targeted forums. You can find forums in your niche at Board Reader.
38) Use Evernote to organize your ideas. It's cool because you can access it from any computer and pull up your notes.
39) Read LOTS of other books in the niche you're writing about. This is the second best way to gain a greater perspective about your topic. (The best way is through real experience.)
40) Interview people. Send your requests for experts to HARO (Help a Reporter Out). This is a list of 100K+ experts and authorities on a wide range of topics.
Writing an eBook
41) Improve your typing speed. If you're a hunt and pecker, get a free typing tutorial and master your positions. If you can go from 25 words per minute to 50, you'll have cut your writing time in half. That's HUGE!
42) Turn off distractions. This means no cell phones or televisions.
43) Use distraction free writing software. Try DarkRoom for Windows, so you can type without being tempted by your web browser tab or anything else on the screen.
44) Load up on caffeine. This may not be for everyone, but I love writing when I have a slight caffeine buzz.
45) Create a style guide. What size font will your chapter titles be? What about sub-titles? Regular text? Which font will you be using?
46) Find your peak writing time. Many writers are early risers. I get more writing done after 9pm. Find that time when you can get into a groove and only write during those hours.
47) Commit to writing at least 1,000 words a day. I sell a $20 PDF ebook that's around 10,000 words. I wrote a little more than 3K words a day, so it took me only 3 days to complete.
48) Use what you already have. Do you have any articles, blog posts or videos that you can build upon?
49) Complete your first draft without editing. Editing as you go along can slow you down tremendously. Get that first draft out then go back and make corrections.
50) Chapter hop. In most cases you probably don't have to go in order. Do the chapters you feel most excited about first.
51) Go short. If you're helping readers solve a specific problem, only focus on solving that one problem. They'll appreciate you getting right to the point. That's part of what makes ebooks so desirable.
52) Write like you talk. It's okay to be conversational. I believe it helps you better connect to your readers.
53) Use Windows Speech Recognition. It allows you to speak your entire book directly into the word processor of your choice. It's a super, mega time saver, and it's accurate! (I use it.)
54) Write as you type. I use this one too when I don't feel like using Dragon Naturally Speaking. I simply talk and type the words out as I'm going. A very simple hack I am sometimes.
55) Use the Pomodoro Technique. This would consist of 25 minutes of writing and 5 minutes of rest.
56) Save your work in Google Docs. This way you'll have a copy of your work off of your laptop -- just in case you spill a cup of chamomile tea on your computer, like I did a couple of years ago!