Forum Moderators: phranque
I'm wondering if I could basically turn this guide into a website and montize it using adsense of the like. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
Do you guys have any other specific suggestions for how to make the site? Should I just throw the entire guide on there at once? Should I put up a couple pages a week? Some other strategy?
What is the money making potential of a "set it and forget it" site like this? I thought I heard somewhere that search engines respond positively to new information, so you should constantly be putting new content on your site. I wouldn't be adding new content to the site after I put up the guide, so does that mean I'm screwed as far as search engine ranking goes? And if I'm screwed in the search engine rankings, that means I get no traffic, which means I make no money from adsense, right?
the money making potential of a "set it and forget it" site is vary and mainly will depend on SEO
If you are not going to take care of the website,a better option is to sell those how tos
Lots of the paper books out there are written under pseudonyms.
But the problem with selling the guide is that I'd also have to sell my credibility. I'm not an expert in the field, although I have studied the stuff for years. I'm just some random guy who wrote a guide, and I don't imagine that would sell very well on the net. Whereas if I just made a website, it'd be more of a general informational innocuous thing not requiring my biography.
That's an interesting point. I've written a number of specific, in-depth how-to guides without any formal training or credentials in the subject matter, and they're linked to and quoted all over the net. There's no way for the reader to easily verify its veracity, but everyone takes it as gospel anyway. I've seen many a debate on messageboards settled by a link to my site as The One True Answer. Now, my info really is accurate, but how are these people supposed to know that? To many people, if it's on the Internet, it must be true. You make a very attractive page and write as though you know what you're talking about, people will trust you.
Ask yourself, does it pass "The Borders Test" - if this book were printed and bound and on the shelf at Borders for $19.95, would *anyone* buy it? For 99.99% of ebooks, nobody would ever buy it at the asking price. If you want this to be a long-term thing for you with a followup book, set the price to pass the Borders Test.
I know someone who started a business as just a young kid (about 19 or 20) selling rock climbing e-book guidebooks. This is now his full-time gig because his ebooks were better than the existing print guides. Once he established himself, though, he switched to mostly selling print books because he found that every ebook download ended up getting sent around to lots of people, so he just had to go to a format that was harder to copy. He did not use affiliates to sell his books, so he didn't need super high markups just to make $10 off each one, but it took some time for sales to take off. A few years into it he was only making $10K per year. Now he has pretty good sales of print books, a thriving and busy forum on the net and still has downloads available, which at this point are just pure profit. Of course, this guy now has something like 15 short e-books (under 100 pages) and about 5 hefty print books. It all started with one downloadable ebook of 50 routes though. But it was the best available info on those fifty routes.
I'm not proceeding right now because I've never ever built or owned a website before. If I made the guide into a website, I'd have to pay someone to do it. Okay, rather, I wouldn't technically have to pay someone, but I don't want to learn how to build a website myself. That being the case, I'm trying to weigh the cost/benefit of turning the guide into a website. Since I have no web experience, I have no idea what the financial reward, if any, would be of making the website, and therefore I'm having a hard time weighing that against the cost of making the site.
Throw in the complication of some saying I should scrap the website and make an ebook instead, some saying I should buy a preexisting URL, and then some copyright issues I have from screenshots I used of a program and quotes...and I've got quite a bit of homework to do before proceeding.
When I first started writing I didn't know much about making pages, and they looked awful. Over the years I've learned how to make them look better, and you will too. Making a website is a process, not an event. You can always sign up for a free blog on Blogger or Blogspot or somewhere else and put your articles there to start with, it's pretty easy.
Yes, I make my living off my writing, for the most part, but I think it's important to point out that that wasn't my goal. I started writing because I wanted to share information organized and communicated in really useful ways, which didn't exist on the net in that format before I put it there. My articles happened to become popular and then I started selling some advertising alongside them and that's how I make most of my income. A friend of mine did the same thing, starting a website just to share good information, it got popular, he put me in charge of ad sales, and he's making a killing.
You can monetize your work by selling it directly (e.g., e-Book) or giving it away for free and selling advertising. Me, I greatly prefer the latter. Not because it makes more money -- you could make more or less money with either method depending on the product, the market, and how well you promote it. What I like about making the money from advertising is that (1) It lets me focus on my *content*, rather than focusing on *selling* it. All I have to do is write more articles and improve existing ones. My work gives me a good feeling of accomplishment. (2) I'm sharing with lots of people. If both methods broke even for you, but in the former 100 read your work while in the latter 100,000 read your work, which would you prefer?
I'm not saying you shouldn't sell your work if that's the route you want to go, but I *am* saying you don't have to go that route. And I am saying you should stop worrying about the best way to go and jump in and start publishing. Good luck!
Thanks. You're right. I am over thinking this. If I wanted to be 100% sure I knew all the ins and outs of the internet before I took action, I'd never do anything. I'm just gonna throw the thing up there as soon as I resolve some copyright issues, and then hopefully learn a thing or two. :)
