730 – Very high profits: Tom talks Ebook Empire

Episode 730 – Ebook Empire
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 730 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to tell you about building an e-book empire. Wow. Digital products at 97% profit. I love it. Hey, I've got a special download for you that you've not heard about before from our podcast here. And if you go to screwthecommute.com/greatwebsite, a 20 year colleague of mine Christina Hills and I've known her and never heard a bad word about her. Everybody loves her created a checklist so that you can evaluate your website and so you can go grab a copy of it at screwthecommute.com/greatwebsite. Make sure you grab a copy and it'll let you look through your website to see, Oh, did I do this, did I do that. And she's she's really puts out good stuff so check it out at great Excuse me. Screw the commute.com/great website. All right. Make sure you follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire. And also episode 729 is about a five minute episode about what you can learn from making your own dog food even if you don't have a dog. All right. So and it's definitely a business entrepreneurial idea.

[00:01:47] All right. Let's see what we got here. Let's get to the main event. So there's a site called Medium where you can put up articles and you can make money when people read them. And the more people that read them, the more money you make. And since I'm a member of that site, every day I get an email suggesting articles to me that they think would be of interest.

[00:02:11] And this morning I got an article titled How I'm Building a Content Empire with eBooks by a lady named Jen Leach. Well, I like that title, and especially the word empire. I mean, one of the definitions of Empire is a large commercial organization owned or controlled by one person or group. Great. I guess. I guess I have an empire. Of course, the word is relative to the industry because I'm certainly not Microsoft or some massive company like that, but I guess I have my own little empire that's made me a lot of money. And and I'm certain if you consistently take the steps in this episode, you could have your own little empire bringing in lots of money for you at 97% profit. Now, let me talk a little bit about that 97% figure that I've been touting for many years. Well, that's the gross profit margin. If if you have a computer and word processor and Internet connection and you create your own digital products. Now the profit margin is a little less. If you get a professional shopping cart system and you outsource some or all of the work creating and promoting your digital products. Mostly we're going to talk about ebooks today. But so what? When you start with 97% gross profit, which I might say of being in business as long as I have, is unheard of in most businesses.

[00:03:47] That can barely start with 30% gross profit. I mean, with 97%, you can make a lot of mistakes and still make money. And I did did make a lot of mistakes. Of course I still do. For right from the beginning 29 years ago when I started on online. So with that kind of profit margin, you can you can have a low risk, high return empire, we'll call it, for this episode. All right. Plus, the start up costs are virtually zero. Everybody has a computer or can have access to one. And the software to create digital products is pretty much free. All right. Now let's talk about ways to start your e-book empire. Well, you can simply purchase PLR products, adapt them and put them out. And in some cases, this can only take a matter of hours. Now, I covered PLR products in episode, but I'll briefly cover it here if you if you didn't hear that episode. So what PLR stands for private label rights. So this means you purchase the rights to a pre-written e-book. You could simply put your name on it and sell it, but I don't recommend that. You should go through the book, throw out what you don't like, and then put in your own stories and your own research to make the book your own. Now I've gone from start to finish on books like this in as little as four hours, and I think the most I ever spent was about eight hours.

[00:05:23] So this can be an easy start to your book Empire. Now make sure you carefully review that episode 381 that tells you all the details about stuff. Next, you can write your book from scratch. Now, if you like to write, just start writing. But I caution you and this caution even comes with many people on here knowing that I don't advocate putting out low quality or non-substantial stuff. But I caution you not to write 300 plus page ebooks. I mean, I've had some and years ago I had one that was 1042 pages. Right. Well, that doesn't work today, folks. Now, you can write shorter books and just create more of them and you can even make them in a series. Now, I like to use a tennis example. So if I were going to write a book on tennis, I wouldn't write it. I'd write a series of books on the main aspects of tennis, forehand, backhand, serve, volley, court movement, all that stuff equipment, rackets, whatever. And they would all be separate ebooks that can sell individually. And I can also then put them in a series or bundle them together where people could buy the whole series. Now, the especially nice part about this is you can get your book out to market faster. Now, in this case, if I was going to do this tennis thing as as soon as I did the first book, let's let's say on forehands, I'd put them out for sale while I'm working on the Backhand book.

[00:07:07] And then when I finished it, then I'd put them both out for sale, bundle them together while I'm working on the serve book and so on. See, So it's fairly easy to create the ebooks, either writing them yourself or buying PLR. And also there's one other method you could do is hire ghostwriters. I've done this. I only paid 275 bucks for my wedding toast book that ended up grossing $72,000 a year for nine years straight. All right. So don't go for a $30,000 ghostwriter for this stuff. All right. There's plenty of people on places like Upwork and Fiverr and other freelance places that have writers. And just don't overpay. And then also have a work for hire agreement in place. Make sure it's approved by your attorney so that the writer can't claim any rights to your book. You know, they write it, they get paid. That's the end of it. They don't get any royalties or anything like that. All right. And then another thing you could add to your empire is be an affiliate for other people's ebooks. Now, I've got one, two, three, four episodes that cover affiliate marketing. If you don't know about that, this is a great way to make money where the other person has to fulfill the product and you just get a commission for referring it. So that's episodes. Now remember, any time you want to go to a back episode, you go to screw the commute.com/and then the episode number.

[00:08:44] So and these will all be in the show notes episodes 52 to 60 8 to 71 and 5 to 18 are all on affiliate stuff. That's and I make a lot of money and it's a big part of my business affiliate marketing. Okay, now, next thing. What about selling the books? Well, I'm going to suggest you only do how to books because they are way easier to write and they sell way easier than fiction. And I'm also going to suggest you keep the books, at least in the beginning, along the same topic lines. Well, why is that? You know, you might have lots of different interests and lots of potential books that you could write. I get that. But here's why that I suggest you in the beginning start in the same topic line. And it's really simple. See, if I buy a book on tennis and I like it, I'm already lined up to buy your next book on tennis. You don't have to recruit me or advertise to get me. You've already got me because of the first book. So all the books you sell me after that are an easier sell. And it doesn't cost you anything to advertise to me or find me. So if you do a tennis book and then a book on how to make money selling at flea markets. All right. Both of those. I like those topics. All right. I happen to like those topics.

[00:10:15] That's probably how I came up with those examples. But those are two different people that are going to that you have to go find and recruit and spend money to find them. Two completely different buyers. So this is costly and reduces your profit and increases your time to make a sale because you're trying to find two different buyers instead of one. All right. So keep things on the same topic until you get big enough where you can expand and have another product line and another. I'm all for that, but not in the beginning and not all at once. All right. Now, here's one last point on your empire. Yes, you can do it with just eBooks. See, when I teach any kind of eBook creation, I always teach my students that the book should lead to bigger sales, like coaching, consulting, speaking engagements, affiliate sales or whatever. You can get the reader to love the book so much that they want to spend money on other things that the book recommends. And this is where the big money is for your empire. Now you say, Well, where do I sell these things? Well, you have you can make a website very inexpensively, high quality. We have plenty of info on that. You can convert it to Amazon Kindle and have Amazon's hundreds of millions of visitors a day. Potentially seeing your book, you can have affiliates selling your book if you get affiliate traffic tracking software.

[00:11:46] Kickstart cart is what we use and so there's lots of ways to sell them too. But there's two parts to it. You've got to create them strategically so that you can sell more to the same person and then you have to sell them. You have to go find that person. You can use pay per click, which is really cheap on Amazon. Have your own website, you know, get drive traffic to it, so forth. So folks, I mean, I've been living this life since I put out my first book 23 years ago. And and I'm just going to thank Ms. Leach, the young Ms. Leach, for reminding me to tell you about it. All right. Now, if you really like the fast track for this, I have a really top notch book mastermind course. It's a 12 week course, and the dates haven't really been chosen for this year, but you can buy the recordings from the last class and go as fast as you want. It doesn't have to take you 12 weeks. If you go at, you know, lightning pace and you watch the videos, you still have me to ask questions of, you know, So it's really good. Check it out at screwthecommute.com/ebookmasterminds. There we go. So let's let's see how your empire goes. I'm enjoying mine today, so I want you to enjoy yours, too. All right? That's my story. I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.