Important Questions to Help Your eBooks Themselves

Here are some important questions for you to answer from the outset as you begin.

• What are you an expert at?
• What do you have passion about?
• What do you love to do?
• What jobs have you worked at and enjoyed?
• What recreational activities do you enjoy?
• What skill set(s) do you have?

When you stop to think about it, you are an expert at something. What you are an expert at could become your first eBook. What you need to compose is right on you fingertips! Remember, composing eBooks can be fun. So let's get started.

Gathering Information for Composing Your eBook.

Open your word processor or get some paper and your favorite beverage and begin to scribe everything that you can think of that answer the questions above. By the way, you have now started the process of composing eBooks. Don't worry about the degree of passion or how the jobs worked out, just scribe everything that you can possibly think of that would apply. You will be able to compose your ebook from this information. You might want to produce each question on a separate sheet of paper or list them on your word processor and give yourself some space to scribe under each question. When you lay your fingers to the keyboard you are beginning the process of composing an eBook.

Just let your mind flow. If you are a leftbrained person and want to stop every few minutes and organize or analyze, resist the temptation. Just let your fingers do the keying or your pen do the scribing. The process of composing an eBook is a matter of inspiration and perspiration. Organization of your eBook will come later.

Can you remember what your first job was? Mine was dressing up as an elephant in a grocery store that was introducing redeemable stamps (Oops, I'm showing my age!). "What?" you say, "I have never worked outside of the home." Then produce all the things that you do around your home. Just continue to compose! You are in the first phase of gathering information from which you can begin to compose your eBook.

Lots of folks don't believe that they have a specific skill set, but they do. Scribe all the skills that you have developed over the years. I'm sure that you have professional, emotional, and recreational skills, as well as others. Do you volunteer for a not for profit organization? What skills do you use when volunteering. Could you produce content from this information?

Let your mind free flow between the questions. Remember, don't organize. That desire will cut down on your creative juices to choose an idea or anything else. Spend as much time as you can on answering the questions. The answer to "what should I write about" might well lay within those pages you have composed. By the way: in doing this you have started the process to writing. Congratulations!

Input from others is always helpful. Sometimes as hard as we might try, we can't see the forest for the trees. Ask your significant other or co-laborer to add some ideas to your list. Let them tell you as much as they will about the answer to the questions above. You don't need to tell them what you are doing at this moment; you might inadvertently get negative input that would not be helpful.

Make Your Knowledge Sell: A Guide to Help Your eBooks Write Themsleves

Yes, you really can write eBooks based on your knowledge. Ken Evoy tells you how with an easy "how-to-guide, Making Your Knowledge Sell. There's an eBook inside you and it is based on what you know. I never thought that I would write eBooks when I was dressed in that elephant costume.

Ken Evoy provides you with serious information to help you find your niche. From time to time you might face the dreaded "writer's block," Ken delivers firsthand information about overcoming this dreaded disease. With practical examples, Ken teaches you how to convert the knowledge you have from past experiences into an InfoProduct eBook. He also supplies some web marketing tips to help you promote your eBook.

Time to Organize for Writing Your eBook

Now it's time to organize. Go back through each question and begin to rank or give a priority number to each answer. Do this for each question. If you have trouble giving a priority rank, it's okay to have several number ones and twos, you can go back and resort them later.

Next take the questions and rewrite or cut and paste them into the numbered order. When you have finished this task take a look at each of the questions and see if there are any similarities in the top priorities. Write notes that will be helpful to remember these similarities.

When you have completed this task, take the top three to five priorities from each question and write them out again or cut and paste them with room under each priority to write more information.

As an illustration: you are passionate about solving people problems, playing tennis, and mentoring others. Take a few moments and answer the question "why." Why am I passionate about solving people problems? Why am I passionate about playing tennis? Why am I passionate about mentoring others? You get the idea. Remember, you are still gathering information to help solve your customers problems.

Maybe under the first question you answer something like: I love to live surrounded by harmony. Harmony produces less friction in the work place and makes folks appreciate others who have different gifts and talents.

Do this little exercise for each priority. Spend time pondering over these answers; you might be surprised at the results.

By this time you should have some interesting information on your list. The key to discovering what you should write about most likely is in the answers that you have provided from the prioritized items.

At this point you need to do a bit of research to discover if your ideas are what others are looking for on the Net.

Here are some helps:

Overture: Pay Per Click For Targeted Customers

Look at your list and think of three to five words, let's call them key words, that might be used to search for your idea/topic on the Net. Key these key words in as well. Next, go to Overture and find out if anyone is searching for those words.

Here's how:

• First go to Overture.
• On this page click "Term Suggestion Tool."
• A small window will pop up with an entry box to key in your search term.
• Enter one of your search terms.

Overture will provide you with a list using the term you entered. You will be able to see how many folks searched for that term during the previous month.

As an illustration: I searched for the term "belts" and there were over 100 variations of this term with well over 100,000 searches during the previous month. Somebody must want to know something about belts! This bit of information is invaluable in helping you determine who is looking for what on the Net. Someone could expound on the subject of belts, or maybe they already have.

Watch out, this little exercise can become addictive, but it helps you discover how many people may have searched for your possible eBook idea/topic in the past month. You might want to cut and paste the information that you found and store it away for later use. A word of caution: Don't let the number of hits that you see, if it is small, lead you to conclude that you do not have a great idea or set of ideas at this phase.

Good Key Words: Find The Best Key Words For Your Web Pages

Another place to work with key words is Good Key Words. Presently this is a free Windows software (sorry MAC folks) for helping you discover and find the right key words for your website. Go ahead and download it.

Wordtracker: The Ultimate Tool To Increase Your Website Traffic

Wordtracker compiles a database of terms that people search for. You enter some keywords, and Wordtracker tells you how often people search for them, and also tells you how many competing sites use those keywords. There is a free (restricted) service and you can sign up to receive the top 500 words on a weekly basis.

Now is the time to begin to purge your list. Zero in on one topic and then start the process of naming your eBook. Don't get too "hard nosed" here and think that the first name you come up with is the "golden egg." It may be, but leave yourself some breathing space. Just write as many titles as you can think of. A title needs to say what you are writing about and draw the intended reader into the journey on which the eBook will take her or him. Some research says that up to eighty percent of the books that are sold are sold based on the title. Don't get bogged down here. Let your mind be creative.

A brief outline of your eBook is now in order. What are the major sections? What chapters will be in each section? As you are in this process, remember that you are trying to inform your reader, or maybe educate or entertain her or him. Be creative!

eBooks Write

Several drafts of this process will probably occur, but you will end up with a document from which you can write your eBook.

While you have been writing in the process of brainstorming, writing now becomes the focus. Here are some simple guidelines to remember:

• Think about your best friend and write as if you were sitting across the table from him or her and having a conversation.
• Tell your reading audience a story, i.e., write your eBook as if you were telling your best friend a story about your topic.
• Provide an outline of strategies to use to solve problems raised in the reader's mind.
• Provide as many examples as you can, both failures and successes.

So get busy and write eBooks of which one may be the next "best seller."

Speaking of best sellers, here's a useful eBook to get you on your way. It is written by two guys, Jimmy D. Brown and Ryan Deiss, who write and publish eBooks with ease and confidence and make money doin' it. These guys don't just want you to write a nominal run of the mill eBook. They intend to provide you with the information to help you write a bestselling eBook. It's called How to Create Best-Sellers Online.

Here's another recommendation for writing eBooks. Jim Edwards and Joe Vitale, two eBook frontline experts, wrote this eBook called How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook... in as Little as 7 Days.They will help you step-by-step in the process of writing and publishing your eBook. This eBook will help you choose a subject (if you don't have one), provide ideas, and suggest how to publish eBooks, provide some tips on marketing your eBook. You can't go wrong here.