Getting your message across

Writing articles and publishing them on the Internet is exciting and rewarding. You get to reach whole new audiences all over the world with your ideas and passions. Getting paid to do this is even better.

Let's assume that you have already covered the ground 'What should I write about?'. You have your field and your niche subjects. The next fundamental question is 'What format?' Blog or e-book? Why not both?

Setting up a blog is easy and cheap: using a hosted solution like blogger or wordpress is free ... but you can't always say what you want (Wordpress can be pernickety about political views) and you can't always place ads on the blog. But hosting a wordpress platform on your own server is not expensive and lets you do what you like regarding ads and views.

Writing an e-book is also easy and, apart from the hours spent researching it and actually writing it,  free. If you're using Open Office software you can transform your text into pdf format with the click of a mouse. Other free software is available to do the same for other formats. An e-book is essentially a pdf document which can be easily down-loaded by the reader. There was a time when it had to a book lookalike with pages that flipped like a real book but the technology was so cumbersome that it fell out of fashion.

Now lets talk money. A good blog can, over time, build up quite a following. The way to turn this readership into money is to:

1. put ads on the blog
2. put a 'donation' button on the blog
3. sell something

Ads are all very well but regular visitors very often become immune to them. Donation buttons only work where your audience is made up of guilty, ecological or faith-based passionaria who just LOVE what you're saying.

Nope, the only really effective way to make money is to sell something ... and that something should be your e-book. The trick is to sell it cheap; not so cheap as to be 'cheap' but inexpensive enough so that the buyer won't miss the money. Say between 5 and 10 dollars. You'll make the money in the volume, selling the same product over and over again. And when sales dip you just write another one. And so on.

Of course there's more to it than this: e-book details such as length and covers must be addressed. How to get affilliates to help you with the marketing, how to find those niche markets and so on. Luckily there's an e-book which tells you all this and more: it's a real mine of essential information. Check it out MONEY-MAKING - make money from writing e-books