The Biggest Mistake My Friend Made When Publishing His Ebook and How You Can Learn From It

Imagine publishing an ebook only to learn that you’re making no sales, no traffic to your website and no profits. How depressing will that be…

A while ago my friend, Peter Vincent just finished writing and
publishing his new ebook called “How To Be A Good Retail Worker”. He has no problems with writing an ebook. He knew how to write, he knew how to organize his work into a structured way. But he had one problem - He couldn’t sell it in the end!

Why? Because he failed to see how big the demand was for information on Retail working work. He didn’t research before he published his finished ebook. He lost hope and didn’t have any confidence anymore. He was assuming people will buy his book and he was hoping that a lot of people were looking for information about this subject. He failed miserably!

To be frank, without doing your “research” you’ll go no where with your ebook venture. You’ll be brain dead and you’ll be like a blind man going no where but the wall in front of him. Without researching before hand you’ll:

- Waste a lot of your time (and time = money).
- End up having no hope and momentum.
- Wonder if you’re ebook will ever sell or not.
- You’ll need to guess and hope a lot. Hope, hope & hope.

Most people fail to do their research FIRST before they write their ebook because they think that it will sell good. They hope in wonders that it’ll sell like the best ebook anyone has seen. They think that they’ll “get rich overnight”. Listen, just because you’ve got good knowledge about a certain topic, it doesn’t mean that it will sell! (Sorry if you studied ten years on that subject).

To check and see how many people are actually looking for that topic, search that topic in your favourite search engine such as Yahoo.com. Just for an example you can search a topic about “How to make money”. You’ll literally get over 3.7 billion results. Do you think that this “product” will even sell? Look at the competition it has. The business sector makes up most of the population of all subjects. So my point here is that you need to create a product that either no one has or create a product better than your competitors. You can create an ebook based on a niche market.

If you do your research on the topic of your ebook, you’ll benefit immensely because:
- You’ll know your competition & how large it is before hand.
- You’ll know if people will even buy your ebook.
- You’ll know how much to sell it for because you can compare prices with your competitors.
- It’ll save you a massive amount of time.
- You’ll have more confidence in writing the ebook because you’re absolutely certain that it will be a “winning product”.

There are many tools and resources that offer you to research hot markets. Three tools I personally use to find hot markets include: Keyword suggestion tools – Such as Overture’s keyword suggestion tool. Hidden tools that not many people make use of. If you want to find very niche markets try looking at Ebay’s categories such as Books & Comics > Business > Ebooks. One other “hidden” tool that not many people use is eBay’s “Pulse”. This tool will show you the top 10 keywords searched on ebay. You will find this tool on the homepage, called “eBay Pulse”.

- Forums – Take a look at the forum that relates to your topic. If your subject has something to do with weight loss then search “weight loss forums” in your search engine. You’ll find a lot of people posting their questions and problems. - Surveys & Questionaries - If you have an opt-in list why don’t you survey your list about the topic? Ask them what is the biggest problem in __________.

The biggest tip I can give you is to take baby steps. Get those “small ideas” that you had a long time ago and work on that first. So then you can make “achievable goals” not a huge project which would take a lot of time and money.

So if you really want to learn how to sell and profit from your ebooks and I’m stressing this out – It is highly imperative, important & crucial that you do your research of your market FIRST before you even type/write a single letter or word on your text editor/notepad. You’ll then cut the guess work.