Like the sounds of selling a digital product but don’t like the sounds of building a landing page and advertising? Then Kindle publishing might be for you! Or how about creating your own mobile app?
Introducing Kindle Publishing
The Kindle is of course the gadget from Amazon that allows people to download ePub format books and then read them on the go. It uses an e-ink display to minimize eyestrain and has a permanent, free connection to Amazon. The great news is that anyone can create a book and start selling it on Kindle. The even better news is that you can do this simply by taking your PDF or Word Doc and uploading it. It costs nothing and it requires absolutely no technical skill.
What Kindle provides though is a platform for selling your products and a way to reach a massive captive audience. People will be browsing Amazon’s store for books all the time and being in that store makes it incredibly simple for people to discover your content, buy it and download it. That means you don’t need to create your own sales page, you don’t need to create your own checkout process and you don’t need to create your own marketing plan. In this case, the Kindle Store is your route to market!
How to Make a Book That Will Sell
As with other forms of selling digital products, selling on Kindle means that you don’t have any overheads and you can sell as many books as you like without having to worry about printing costs, storage or delivery. That means this is another great ‘set and forget’ form of business – but of course you do need to invest a little time and/or money upfront in order to create the book in the first place.
To make your book, you can either write it yourself, or you can hire someone to write it for you. It does need to be good. Not only because that’s the moral thing to do, but also because readers can read excerpts of books before choosing to buy them or not. What’s more is that a good book will have lots of high star ratings and this will help it to rank higher.
Try to think of the Kindle Store/Amazon Store like a search engine. To get to the top of the search results, your book needs to choose the right niche that isn’t too crowded but that does get a lot of hits. At the same time, it needs to be designed with an outstanding cover and the name/description should have keywords in them that people are going to search for.
Think about what’s hot right now, what’s up and coming and what the world needs more of. Think about how you can anticipate an upcoming trend and make a splash with a great book before anyone else does! Again, if you make a book on ‘Building Muscle’, you are going to have an almost impossible task rising to the top of the heap. Conversely though, if you write a book on ‘Building Muscle for Students’, then it might be a little easier.
Especially if you can combine that title and niche with a great cover image, a great sales pitch in the description and some good reviews. Try dropping your price occasionally too to help your product climb up the ladder by getting plenty of downloads! The great thing is that even if you only make a few sales a week of your book, there’s nothing to stop you making hundreds of books over the course of a couple of years. A few sales of hundreds of books is going to mean a lot of money! And especially seeing as one or two of them is bound to take off.
Creating and Selling a Mobile App
Or you can create and sell a mobile app. Once again, this will allow you to create a steady income stream without any overheads and this can sustain you for a long time to come. The mistake so many people make here is to try and change the world with ‘the next Facebook’ or some other life-changing app. The most successful apps often aren’t the ones that aim to change people’s lives though but rather the throwaway games or the handy tools.
Again, it’s about knowing what’s people right now and what people will search for.Try and make an app that has a social element, or that requires the involvement of third parties, or that is highly technical and you have given yourself an almost impossible up-hill struggle.
But if you try and make an app that is simple to make and has a single purpose, you’ll be able to do it in a few weeks and start making a small amount of income.Use the ‘fail fast’ approach – that means building things quickly to see if they’re profitable, rather than spending months and years on a project that might never take off! Of course there are plenty of tolls that can help you with the code (Basic4Android, Unity) or you can hire someone to do that for you.