Hey Everyone
Hope you are well today. As stated last week, this week will be the continuation on the theme on how you can write your own money making report.
More specifically, we’ll be discussing about “How do you determine the subject that’s best for you to use for your first report?”
After all, you don’t want to wasting your time researching and writing reports that nobody would read or that very few would. That is unless, your niche is so specific that it commands a considerable amount of money, that it makes it worth the while.
However, before we even reach that stage, we need to first get your mind and brain into gear to channel your thinking, your thought processes and creative juices along these lines: For example, if you have a penchant for the love to fish, then it would be highly suggestible that you could probably put together a money-making report on “How To Catch The Big Ones.” If you enjoy sewing, you could probably write a report on “Tips For Beautiful Sewing”. If you have experience in advertising, you could write a report on “How To Write Ad that pulls;” or if you have experience in the printing industry, you could write a report on “How To Prepare Copy and Layout For Best Printing Results”. Should none of those tickles your fancy, or if you are like me, who has experience in running your own home business using eBay or Amazon, then you could create and write a report about them, or even better entitled along the lines “Better eBay / Amazon Business Operating Techniques”, or “Become a Powerseller / eBay Pro in less than 30 days!”
Basically, to cut to the chase, it’s worth repeating the following concept: Whatever you decide to write or research about, make it something you know about, and are especially interested in. There is absolutely no point researching and then writing a report on something that you have no knowledge, experience or passion about.
For example: my friend Gary Simpson is a Martial Art / Self- Help motivational author – expert and teacher. Cue: he has written and continues to write numerous articles, books and various other publications about motivation, self-help, and more recently, because he has entered the internet marketing niche and has made a success; he now also writes about hot topics with regards to the internet marketing world, of which include “Ad swapping, Twitter, Time management, Understanding the internet marketing mentality, etc….
Then there is Dr. Edward De Bono, an author who I highly respect, and is also a physician, inventor, and consultant. Of which, who is also regarded by many to be… the leading authority in the world in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. Dr. Edward De Bono has during the past 30+ years has written 80+ books with translations into 40+ languages and has been invited to lecture in 50+ countries.
He also coined the term “Lateral Thinking,” and is regarded as the originator of lateral thinking which treats creativity as the behaviour of information in a self-organising information system – such as the neural networks in the brain. The key point is that he has sold millions of books worldwide, all on subjects he enjoys, is passionate about and has experience in.
I could go on and on – naming more regarded and respected experts and friends, and tell you how they have taken a subject they were interested in, found out everything about it they could, and parlayed it into a fortune by starting with the writing of a “How-To” / “Self-Help” report.
However… rather than go on with these stories upon stories of how others have done it, and are doing it, let’s get on with the task of showing you how you can write your own “How-To” report and parlay it into a personal wealth vehicle of your own!
As we have established previously prior to the above examples, is that once you have decided on the subject, you will or are going to write about. The next step is conducting thorough research, gathering information, not to bulk out your guide or report that you will write, but in fact to help support and provide it with information that is of relevancy and accuracy. So why not visit your public library and “top up” on your subject.
Obviously, if you already have knowledge or experience in the subject then you may or may not need to visit your library, but in my own opinion, it pays to visit it at lease once, because you may be surprise to find out additional information that may be of great benefit to your report, guide or book that your will be writing. For those on the other had who may not have as much experience or knowledge, but are passionate about the subject, then it might be useful to read as much about it as you can find – newspapers, magazines, books – online journals, information websites, to put bluntly… everything!
You may even want to start collecting clippings, talk to your neighbours, your friends and relatives, and take notes on all information you gather from reading and personal discussion.
When you’ve spent a good four to six weeks intensively researching your subject, gathering notes and discussing it as often as you can with as many different people as possible, you should be ready for the next step – the sorting, compiling and assembly of your notes. Simply read through all the notes and clippings you have accumulated, discarding those that are repetitious, and organizing those you’re going to use according to your “subject coverage” outline.
Whatever you do, don’t let the outline part of your project become an obstacle. Why? Because an outline is simply listing the order in which you want to write about or discuss each aspect of your subject. Everything that’s written should have a natural beginning, a body and an ending.
When you outline your subject, and your “subject coverage,” which can be likened to a table of contents, you’ll find it easier to say what you want to say. You’ll be able to say everything you want to say. You won’t have to worry about forgetting or leaving out an important point you want to make. The coverage of your subject will be more complete, and your writing will be much smoother.
Once you’ve completed your research, organized your notes, and have your “subject coverage” outline set, you are now ready to write the money-making report that just might make you rich! Start writing or typing which ever your prefer and remember that you must write as though you were talking to someone, because writing, after everything has been analyzed, taken apart, studied, improved upon, decoded and reassembled together, is still nothing more or less than a written conversation between two people.
So…write your how-to report as though you were instructing a high school graduate in how to do something on his/her first day on the job. It makes no difference whether you write it all out longhand or pound away at the computer. The main objective here is “Just get it all written!
Once you’ve got your material organized, start writing and don’t stop until you’re finished! Well obviously life doesn’t always happen like that, their will obiovusly be interruptions such as the phone will unexpectedly ring, the postman or postwomen would knock on your door that the packet was too large to fit through the letterbox, or that you may feel a bit peckish etc…
So the alternative is to try and get as much done as possible, if time is of priority or unavailable for such as long period, then it might be worth while, writing your report, guide or book in sections, allocate at least 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour etc… to it instead.
Try to maintain the momentum and don’t write a chapter and then leave it aside until a week or a month later. By that time, you would have forgotten most things. That is unless you have a superb memory which can remember details like a camera taking a picture and storing it on a memory card or on a roll of film. And even they have a limit of some sort. Now when you have finished, be proud of yourself! Take a break, go out to dinner, enjoy a night on the town!
In other words, now is the time to put this first draft of your report aside for a few days and allow your brain, your body, and your creative juices to rejuvenate themselves.
After a couple of days off, take up your report, guide or book and go through it with a sharp pencil (if you have written it out or your mouse if your using the computer) just as you imagine an professional editor would do. Strike out, delete, rewrite, re-type and simply just polish each paragraph for clarity, accuracy and flow. It might be also worthwhile reading it out aloud to yourself.
Time spent during this re-editing process to make sure what you’ve written is easy to read, easy to understand, and each sentence follows the one previously, is just as surely as spring always follows winter. The smoother the conversation or the writing of your report, guide or book flows, the easier it will be to read, and of course, the easier it is to read, the more copies you will sell.
Yes I know the previous sentence may have sounded rather daft, but you’ll be surprised to know that despite lots of reports that get published each day, only a select few will really make it.
Why?
Many reports fail not at the first hurdle, which is to provide top quality, fresh new content but at the second one, which is the way they are presented, delivered, written and how the ideas were explained. To put bluntly, which would you prefer to read and would recommend to others? A report, guide or book which contained great content but due to the way it was written, it meant that you had to grab your dictionary every fifth word, or that you had to decode the pages, sentence by sentence, word by word…
Or would you prefer to read a report, guide or book, which was easy to understand, the content and concepts were explained clearly and it didn’t involve you having to fetch your dictionary every fifth word because they used a scientific analogy or term. I know which one I would prefer to read and would recommend. Do you?
Referring back to the main topic of this email, now that you have a money-making report that has the potential of making a great deal of money for you. If you have written it out via pen and paper, now is a good time to transfer your masterpiece creation onto a computer, for those who had already previously typed it up, it’s now time to turn it into an eBook format. The most commonly used format is the Adobe PDF format.
There are many free online convertors which can turn your word document into the so-called PDF format. The one that I use most often can be found at www.freepdfconvert.com You simply visit the website, select the browse button, locate your report, guide, or book, click on it, press open, and voila the file path should appear on screen. Next to it, there is a button to press upload. Click on it, sit back and wait.
Now, depending on your file size, the process can take between 30 seconds to a good 10 minutes. Hence you have the option of inserting your email address, so that the website can notify you when the transitional process has been completed. Oh and don’t worry, the online convertor will not destroy or delete your original word file. It simply makes a copy of it, except rather than being in word format which anyone can edit it; it will now be also in the Adobe PDF format.
The next job is to get it out there and sell it. To sell it, there are various way to approach this. Of course you could sell it online website such as Amazon.com, Lulu.com etc… or if you want, you could also sell it on Ebay, however, you must make sure you clearly state in the auction listing that the item will be sent on a CD and that you do also send out a CD to your buyer. The last thing you want is the hassle of having your account suspended because you breached on of their policy rules.
Obviously, you could also post your eBook on various forums of which some have threads which allow forum members and user to list, sell and exchange goods etc… For this it’s advisable that you have your own website with at least: a sales page of some sort, a payment processor such as PayPal and a download page where the buyer will download their guide. If you want to get fancy, then you could have additional pages to offer your buyers additional products.
However for the purpose of this postl – I shan’t go into detail about it. Maybe I will cover it in a subsequent ezine or in a future guide. But the clear advantage of having your own website is that it’s like your own store with your own product, except you don’t have to guard and lock it up at the end of each day like a brick and mortar store would have you doing.
Instead, you can simply set it up once, and forget about it. You won’t even have to touch and pack the product as everything is done online. Obviously, it may be beneficial to have additional version available as there will be some who will still prefer the actual physical bound copy and the sense of occasion of something arriving through the post and physically tearing open the packaging.
Anyway, I shall not dabble any further, and thank you for your time in reading this post which I first wrote for my email ezine. I hope it has been of great use to you.
Now just before I dash off – I have a question to ask you – that is: what would you like to see more of? By that I mean what types of subjects, topics, areas that you would like to me cover or help you with? I can’t guarantee that I will be able to answer every possible question, but I will try my best and if I don’t know, I may know of an expert who can help.
Until next time – Best wishes!
Nigel
