Introducing the Ebook Project

Hi Caroline,

Sounds great! Are you taking pre-publication orders?

Jeff

Hey, just read this:

“I’m writing a free ebook to give away on this blog. The purpose of the project is to discuss the creation and more importantly, marketing of that ebook.”

Now I’m as big a cheapskate penny pincher as they come … but I’d expect you to sell the eBook, hopefuly for a reasonable price … I know the work will be worth your price!

C’mon make a buck!

Jeff

With the quality of your articles and posts, I don’t think people will refrain themselves from buying your book. I might buy without questioning as well since you are covering a topic that I am tapping into.

Don’t procrastinate that much and start to write hard and smart, you have a bunch of faithful readers waiting. :lol:

One thing to add on, the best for us will be giving the book away free of charge! ;-) Just kidding, good things need a value.

Way to go Caroline!

Sounds like this will be a free (or $.01) ebook that is monetized with affiliate links. Am I right? And congrats on keeping your big projects to just two. I’m in envy. My list is less than double digits (for a change) but way more than two.

Wow, well done, congratulations and best wishes with that!

One point of clarification–I went with TypePad for my own blog specifically because WordPress.com was so hostile to commercialization, at least in their TOS. Will your eBook touch on that, and is your recommendation to host WP on your own box to avoid that issue?

I think I might pay just to find out how to type 13 pages in a day. Evidently it was a mistake not to persevere with Mavis Beacon :)

Good luck with it!

Good luck on your Ebook project, Caroline. I’m sure once the Ebook is released, it’ll be great!

-Mike

Niche Marketing and WordPress, My Way
by Caroline Middlebrook

How to Create a Revenue-Generating Niche Site with Wordpress

Historically the words, “How to” have a magical connotation and might help push you to your 1 million sales before the end of 2008.

Good Luck. I gotta tell you, creating something like this in a week sounds ambitious. I am envious. How many pages are you targeting for this book? And another question if I may, how do you pick a price point for eBooks?

Thank you for all the hard work you do so we can learn.

Hi Caroline, I’ve been reading your blog for a while now and following you with interest from afar and this is my first comment. I thought about the title and I think you need something snappy! How about “Niche Site Success: Money-making Niche Strategy With WordPress” By Caroline Middlebrook. It’s search-friendly (I checked “niche sites” onAdwords to see some keyword suggestions) and to the point. My ecommerce blog is only 3 months old and our audience is growing, but slowly. I’m amazed and inspired by your successes so far. Thanks for sharing all of your efforts!

I become ever more impressed each time I read your posts. I’ll be watching with interest your progress towards completing this ebook and will no doubt buy it when you publish it. I’m not too creative when it comes to titles either but I like Vanessa’s contribution. Watch out for that procrastination though – it plays tough!!

I’d use the 3rd of your ideas with a twist to shorten it:

Make Money with Wordpress Niche Sites

It’s clean, simple, search friendly, gets attention with the first two words and if it is followed with: by Caroline Middlebrook, you have a winner!

Also…a smidge of unsolicited advice from one who’s trekked through book-writing territory: 1) when I wrote my book, I used a working title to get started. When I’d written the last word and the final manuscript was done, I looked at what I’d created and found a phrase within it that absolutely sang to me. It became the title and t he rest is history.

2) I also found that any time while writing the book that I got distracted, focused or hung up on what should be the “best title”, I was really wasting precious time I needed for t he good stuff — the writing.

Hope that is useful.

Write on! We need this info!

Hi Caroline, sorry, for offtopic (and before i have read your article), but everytime I come to you blog via the google RSS-Reader (I have subscribed to your feed), I end up with a message, that I am appearently new, and should subscribe to your feed … well … as I mentioned I am already .. and that starts to be a tiny little bit annoying … just wandering if that is on purpose?

greetz, keep going
Jacky *who is going to read your post now* ;)

I like the previous suggestion “Make Money with Wordpress Niche Sites”, or maybe you could use “How to…” in front, as also previously suggested.

Anyway, whatever you decide, I look forward to reading it, I would like to set up a Wordpress site myself, but have so far resisted the temptation because I expected a great deal of time wasting trial and error would be required. So far I have limited myself to the likes of Blogger, Googlepages and Squidoo, but I feel I should really have my own domain name operating soon.

Hey Caroline!
Hows it going. Ebooks are popular methods for monetizing websites, and doing all sorts of other viral forms of markeing. As much as I love your blog and you genuine-ness, open ended approach to what you’re doing. I wouldnt buy a making money on the internet product from you, or anyone for that matter until I had some sort of social proof that you or the person selling it has made mone on the internet, know what I mean.
That being said. I can totally see the direction you’re going here though, you’ve built an enormous following in a veryshort period of time and now its time to monetize that traffic and your readers and well you should !!. On the flip I have visited many smaller blogs who have make money products on them in an attempt to monetize some of their traffic and osme of the means and methods they have come up with are just GREAT. So Im sure actually dead certain that if you came up with something it would go off with a bang

@Jeff, I do hope to make a buck – from the affiliate sales rather than an actual price tag. It’s a little easier to do a free ebook as I don’t have to deal with sales, lists, autoresponders and all that stuff.

@Doug, yes spot on.

@Sonia, exactly – this is about setting up your OWN hosted domain with Wordpress and NOT a free blog. As such I’ll be plugging my hosting provider and doing tutorials for setup from them. That’s where I’m hoping to make the sales.

@Lucy, I can write for England when I put my mind to it! But there’s also a lot of screenshots. Mind you, they take some time to do as well.

@Kexster, can’t believe I forgot a ‘how to’ title. Thanks, I’ll add that to my shortlist. I can do this quick because I know exactly what I’m talking about so I don’t need to do any research. Basically I am walking through the steps of setting up a site, documenting as I go and it will remain live for people to see the results.

Price point = free so not an issue to deal with on this book.

@Vanessa, nice title, added to my shortlist :)

@Heather, I’m absolutely determined to get this finished this weekend, I can always refine it later and release an update if its not perfect first time around.

@Erica, ahh yes that’s good. I kind of like the ‘make money’ in the title because it’s appealing I think but I don’t like overly long titles.

And thanks also for the productivity tips – I’m not allowing myself to get bogged down by titles, graphics, templates or any of that stuff. I didn’t even think about the title until I started writing the blog post heh!

@Jacky, hmm that’s interesting – you should only get that message once but I’m not sure I really like that plugin so I think I’m going to get rid of it.

@Martyn, my book will be for you :D Everything is laid out exactly step-by-step with lots of screenshots, and I’m thinking of doing some videos too.

@Make Money Blogging – it’s not really about the ‘making money’ – it’s about the setting up of Wordpress, Adsense etc. But I absolutely agree with your point – there is no way in the world I would release a product supposedly teaching people how to make money until I had done it with success myself.

I’m looking forward to seeing the finished product!

Ever so prolific, Caroline :)

I would go with ‘How to Make Money with Wordpress Niche Sites’. You’ve got the keywords in and ‘how-to’ always pushes most people’s buttons when they are looking for solutions.

All the best for the eBook and if you ever need help with anything, just ask. :)

Descriptive titles do it for me. The punchier the better I think – great suggestions in previous posts.

Avoid tricksy and cute like the plague as far as I (at least) am concerned: they are an immediate turn off for me.

And I agree with the comment above about having made money. The first question I ask of those putting out books about making money is how much they have made.

I’m enjoying your blog very much. I like that you are personal and real and your posts have substance.

Creating free ebooks is a great way to build a reputation, make a little money and drive traffic. There’s no doubt in my mind that yours will do all of those things. Good luck with it.

Be sure to add it to the “free ebook forum” of the Warrior Forum. You’ll get alot of exposure there if the community likes it, as it will continue to get bumped to the top.

Hi Caroline -

All the suggestions for a title are good.

A proven open for a title is YOU.

i.e YOU CAN MAKE MONEY ETC.

Good luck. Please make it easy for us newbies!

Corinne Edwards

I like Kexster’s title myself. I have done this both ways – as a freebie and as a paying ebook. Didn’t try using affiliates and I should have! But the freebie was more a lesson I needed to learn about SEO…I know, that sounds weird, but I wanted to see if I could get my freebie ebook into the #1 position in all the search engines for my key search words. In 24 hours, it happened. Thinking it was a lark, I tried it again a couple months later with another freebie ebook and the same thing happened – 24 hours it was #1 in the search engines beating out everyone else. I knew I was on to something so I put what I learned and how I did it in an ebook that I sold off (and still do) my website for $20 a crack. People love to learn secrets. If you have a niche that you have conquered, I don’t know why you don’t sell your ebook instead of giving it away unless of course it’s intended to be a giveaway. In that case, I’d keep it short. My “paid for” ebook went into more detail, only I kept out the fluff because people hate to read for a long time over the Internet. That I can understand. But if you have figured out a way to make money with your Wordpress blog and it’s something that no one else has thought about or you can add a different slant on it, that ebook can bring you in added income. I’m enjoying the hell out of your blog, Caroline…discovered it the other day and now I get your feed in my mail because I don’t want to miss a thing!

Hi Caroline!

YESSSS…anxiously waiting for a Tutorial for WordPress.
This is what I’m dealing with at the moment…how to host WordPress and get it up and running.

Good work…and good luck!

Big hugs always,
Mudd a.k.a. Oza
xoxo

Cool. I’d like to get one for free. You know, for review and all that. :P

@Josh, thanks for the suggestion, didn’t know about that one!

@Dorothy, wow that’s impressive results! I’m looking to distribute the actual PDF quite widely so it’s not so much an SEO effort though of course I will have a landing page for it on the blog too which I shall publicize.

Caroline, the way you’re going about this project is uncannily similar to the outline I shared in “The Smart Way To Write A Book”.

Here’s a monetization plan for you – take people ‘behind the scenes’ to see EXACTLY how you’re doing it.

What steps do you take daily? What tools do you use? How do you build buzz? Whom do you approach for JV deals? Share sample letters and emails, display process maps and workflow charts, if you use any. In other words, make the creative process itself a product other ebook authors can learn from – and then SELL IT!

Think it won’t work? I just did it with a 2 week challenge about social media marketing – and I’m sure everyone learned something of value from the process. I even surprised myself! :)

Will be watching the progress as you share it on your blog.

All success
Dr.Mani

Caroline go with the “How to Make Money with Wordpress Niche Sites” title

I called my ebook “How you can make a monthly income from the stockmarket” It is used as a freebie, to get people to sign up for my monthly newsletter.

Like a few of the others have said, I think you have a lot of followers, who would buy from you as they trust what they get from you for free, something that I am working on myself to achieve.

as always a pleasure reading your blog

Mark.

sorry I forgot to put in “YOU Can” instead of “to”