While e-books most likely won't make you rich, they are a great way to dip into the world of online marketing, since they don't require much money and everyone can publish ebooks on Amazon nowadays.
Five months ago I published my first e-book on Amazon. Total cost of production: 20$ for the book cover + 40 hours of my time.
I also threw up a website with plenty of content (most of the content is already in the book) in the same niche, including a few articles that contain affiliate links. Total cost of production: 60$ for a professional theme + ~60 hours of my time
The website doesn't get much traffic (I totally underestimated my competition in terms of SEO) but book sales + affiliate sales is making me about 150$ per month. That's almost 100% passive income and I needed to invest about 100 hours of work for the whole thing.
What's much more valuable though, are the skills I learned during the process. Before I started the whole thing, I only had theoretical knowledge about typical online marketing skills. All my knowledge came from books, podcasts and blogposts but I never really applied anything. Now, almost 5 months later, I am actually charging small companies for my services. I charge them to:
- build professionally looking websites with online shops and monitor them
- run ad campaigns in the 4-figure per month range on Facebook and Google
- build their e-mail lists and manage their newsletters
- automate and grow their Instagram/Facebook to raise brand awareness
- arrange and manage partnerships with social influencers on Youtube and Instagram
- do anything else I can to improve their businesses and increase sales
Am I an expert in those skills after 5 months of applying them? Not really. Will I be an expert one day? I hope so. But for now it doesn't really matter. As long as I can help my clients make more money, I can also charge them accordingly.
Five months ago I published my first e-book on Amazon. Total cost of production: 20$ for the book cover + 40 hours of my time.
I also threw up a website with plenty of content (most of the content is already in the book) in the same niche, including a few articles that contain affiliate links. Total cost of production: 60$ for a professional theme + ~60 hours of my time
The website doesn't get much traffic (I totally underestimated my competition in terms of SEO) but book sales + affiliate sales is making me about 150$ per month. That's almost 100% passive income and I needed to invest about 100 hours of work for the whole thing.
What's much more valuable though, are the skills I learned during the process. Before I started the whole thing, I only had theoretical knowledge about typical online marketing skills. All my knowledge came from books, podcasts and blogposts but I never really applied anything. Now, almost 5 months later, I am actually charging small companies for my services. I charge them to:
- build professionally looking websites with online shops and monitor them
- run ad campaigns in the 4-figure per month range on Facebook and Google
- build their e-mail lists and manage their newsletters
- automate and grow their Instagram/Facebook to raise brand awareness
- arrange and manage partnerships with social influencers on Youtube and Instagram
- do anything else I can to improve their businesses and increase sales
Am I an expert in those skills after 5 months of applying them? Not really. Will I be an expert one day? I hope so. But for now it doesn't really matter. As long as I can help my clients make more money, I can also charge them accordingly.