Have you thought about writing your own book and offering electronically as an ebook or self-publishing and printing copies to sell either online or offline? At first blush, book writing may seem to be beyond your ability or take too much time. Not true, and here’s why.

Hundreds of thousands of people have made the transition from other forms of employment to writing their own information-based “how to” book, ebook or packaged the information into more advanced forms of infoproducts such as videos, audios, coaching programs, membership sites, paid newsletters and more.

In fact, many first-time authors started by publishing a small report or ebook and quickly found themselves in powerful, yet scary position of being asked for more information, more expertise and more time. The savvy information publishing entrepreneur will see the opportunity and quickly turn their expertise into higher priced information products building their own infoproduct publishing enterprise.

Perhaps the best part of producing your own information products is that you invest a few days or weeks to create the product and then leverage those hours into months and years of income. Even better, you can tap into a massive online army of web publishers who are looking to augment their income by selling other people’s products - for a commission you can suddenly have hundreds or thousands of high-value, authority sites bringing you traffic and sales.

With the formula you are about to discover, your book writing project is just the beginning of an automated money machine that you will not be able to turn off - even if you try.

While the thought of a large, self-spreading information publishing empire is very appealing, it all starts with writing your first book.

‘HOW TO’ BOOK DEMAND

When we speak about ‘how to’ books we are talking about any ebook, book, course, video, or other formatted product that is intended to deliver information to their clients.

Books that typically fall into this category are…

• Business building books (how to start a business, how to sell, leadership tips, etc…)
• Weight loss, exercise and diet books
• Self-help, psychology and health titles
• Home repair and decorating books
• Relationship and parenting topics
• Financial advice and planning tips
• Hobby related topics such as crafts, music, etc…
• Alternative health, yoga, and so on…

You are looking at a small, partial list of potential book writing topics and yet look at how this list alone accounts for the vast majority of published titles making money today. Not only are these hot selling information products you see in bookstores, there are a massive number of self-published titles sold online by entrepreneurs who have taken the plunge into self-employment.

WHAT YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT BOOK WRITING IN THE ‘HOW TO’ FIELD

Let’s start by making a few important points:

1. Despite what you may believe today, there are fortunes to be made with ‘how to’ books in hundreds upon hundreds of markets - do not limit yourself to business or health because you think these are the only top selling markets.

2. You should start by looking at your own strengths, skills, knowledge and access to information before you begin to poll the market to narrow the search for your book writing topic. You want your book writing exercise to lead to a fast-growth information publishing career which means you want to produce additional products and market your advice - so starting with something you know or are passionate about learning is the right way to go.

3. Even though your topic area may not look promising at first-blush, you can usually uncover an angle within your topic area that is more promising, so don’t give up until you investigate using the formula below.

4. Don’t worry about being able to write. This business is not about writing, it is about identifying hot demand for answers within a given marketspace, quickly offering a researched solution, packaging the solution for maximum profit and getting your message heard by your market.

YOUR BOOK WRITING FORMULA - ENTERING THE INFORMATION PUBLISHING BUSINESS

Follow these 4 steps to turning your desire for book writing on ‘how to’ topics into reality.

Step 1. UNCOVERING DEMAND. Finding evidence of demand and proven buying activity is fast and simple online. Though we use dozens of methods, here are two of the most powerful:

- First, we look for evidence of demand by studying the keywords people use with your topic. A great tool to use is the keyword tracking tool by Wordtracker, you can start by typing in keywords that represent your topic here: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

- Second, you want to visit sites like http://www.amazon.com and closely look at what is being offered and sold on Amazon. For example, with Amazon, you will find a “sales rank” against each item sold that gives you a relative idea of buying activity. The lower the sales rank, the more sales against that book

Step 2. SETUP TEST SITES. It’s almost guaranteed most unsuccessful book writers and online publishing entrepreneurs are missing this step. The idea is to setup a content site (a 5-page site in html or a Wordpress or Google blog are best) where you begin to attract search engines and traffic to your site. On your site you place a few things…

- An opt-in form with a giveaway to begin building a list of subscribers

- At least 5-10 pages of content, simple articles optimized for keywords you found in step 1

- Some affiliate product links of other people’s ebooks around your topic to “test” demand for different topics within your niche market

- A survey asking your visitors to submit their most compelling question about your topic

You can do this for multiple markets to decide between topics for markets - it’s a great tool for deciding on a topic and beginning to build your business

Step 3. IT’S BOOK WRITING TIME. Once you have assessed your niche market test sites (give it 1-2 weeks ideally), you then will have a much better sense for what the market wants and why. At this point, you need to outline the chapters and questions you will answer as part of your ebook, book, report or training infoproduct. Once you have the outline, you have completed the most important part of your product. To fill in the content use a combination of these methods…

- your own knowledge and experiences

- interviews with others

- research (either online or offline)

- ‘for hire’ from freelancing sites

- private label rights material (though don’t rely on this entirely)

- public domain material

In our case, we like to mix multiple methods making our actual product development much quicker and less painful.

Step 4. BEYOND YOUR EBOOK OR BOOK. Understand that your initial book writing project should be your entry into the market, not your only product. EBooks, reports and the like are best viewed as an entry into the product funnel rather than a single, final product in themselves. So, ideally you want to have higher end products, membership sites, etc… to drive your ebook customers into - without experience and insight into a market, these higher end products are almost impossible.

By following this proven 4-step formula for ‘how to book’ writing you will find the entire idea of packaging your knowledge, experience and research into products to be both extremely fun and highly rewarding. This time next year you could find yourself the owner of a million dollar information publishing business joining many others who have started with absolutely zero writing experience.