Hey guys, my name is Ryan McLean and I am going to be a contributor here on The University Kid. I know that I am no Jason, but I know quite a bit about the IM niche. So if you want to find out more ways to make money online then you should read what I have to write.

Jason has talked a lot about how to market and sell your own products. You can view what he has written here and here. These are the perfect guides to get you making money from your products.

But what if you do not have a product? What if you are struggling to write your own ebook. Well I am going to show you how to create an ebook in just one day and start making money from it. 

1. Have an Idea

In order to begin writing your ebook you need to have an idea of what you want to make. You should be educated in the niche you are writing in (or know how to research well) and it helps if you have had some success in that area. For example if you are writing an ebook about making money online you should already be making money online.

2. Remove Distractions

In order to write the full ebook you need to remove distractions. This means you might need to turn the TV off or even turn the internet off so you are not tempted to browse the internet. Get yourself in a quiet room where you can focus and write as quickly and easily as possible 

3. Plan

Planning is one of the hardest things to do because often you will just want to get writing but it is necessary in order to write a good ebook. I find the best way to plan a book is to write down everything you want to write and then order it the way you want to write it out.

It helps if you write subtitles and then you can just expand on them when you write your book.

4. Write

Now it is time to write. Set a goal of how much you want to write and aim to reach that goal. Take regular breaks so you can keep your mind active. Do something that gets you out of the house. Go for a walk or do some exercise, go out for lunch etc.

When writing try to stay as focused as possible. It is really easy for your mind to drift off. When you are focused you should be able to write anywhere between 600-2000 words per hour. Your ebook does not need to be that long, maybe 10-20 pages, which is 3,000-6,000 words. Make sure your content is solid and you don’t talk a lot of fluff.

5. Edit

This is one thing many people fail to do (me included.) Editing is a must as it is almost certain that you have made a lot of grammatical errors. Go through the book reading it out aloud and fix up any errors that you come across. Then get someone else to read it and check it for you. Get a family member or a friend to check it or you can get someone on Digital Point Forums to check it (though you will have to pay them). This means your book will be easy to read and people will not be turned off by your grammatical errors.

6. Create Cover

Selling your ebook will be much easier if you have a cover created for it. You don’t NEED a cover but it does help to get people over the line and create more sales. You can get an ebook cover designed for $15-$100 online at forums such as digital point.

7. Sell

Now you have created your ebook in one day you can now sell it before you go to sleep. Use Jason’s tip for selling your product. The best thing about selling ebooks is that they can sell while you are asleep. Hopefully you will wake up in the morning with some sales and some extra money in your pocket.

Write an Ebook in 1 Hour

Alternatively, if you don’t want to write the ebook yourself, you can outsource it and get someone else to write it. You can spend less than 1 hour working on it and make a fair amount of money if it is a good book. You are looking at spending anywhere between $0.01-$0.04 per word for the writing of your ebook. So for 5,000 words you will need to spend between $50-$200. Make a couple of sales on a $27 ebook and you will be laughing.

Have you made an ebook in a day or less? Any tips to add? Let us know below

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Sorry for putting out another seemingly promotional post in a row, but there are lessons to be learned from this one I assure you.

A couple months ago Stephane Grenier contacted me, wanting some buzz for his new blogging book (an actual physical book) and asked if I’d review it if he sent me a copy. It looked a decent product, so I agreed.

Anyways - I got the book a week or so ago - you can see a picture of it below. Camera quality is a bit shit, but hey, it arrived which is a bonus considering the postal system here.

Anyways… first, let me talk about the book.

The book consists of interviews with forty top marketers - not just bloggers, but also those that make money online through product sales, real business deals and other things. Some of the interviewees that you guys probably will have heard of are Aaron Wall (SEOBook), Seth Godin, Yaro Starak (Entrepreneur’s Journey), Trent Hamm (The Simple Dollar) and Stephane Grenier himself. You can see the rest of all that were interviewed over here.

I haven’t had the time to read the book too indepth (been busy with exams), but from what I’ve read it looks to be a solid product and definitely worth the small amount asked ($16.95 for a paperback). The book consists of forty interviews, all asking the same questions of forty top marketers, and you will learn a lot from it.

Some of the questions asked…

What is the common pitfall most new bloggers fall into?

If you knew what you know now when you started, what’s one biggest tip you’d give yourself today?

How long does it take to become a successful blogger?

What makes a blog successful according to you?

Remember, these are tips from those that have been there, done that. There are around twenty questions asked of each person, all related to blogging in some way.

You can buy the book here. (also available as an eBook but I’d recommend you get it in paperback).

Now… for the marketing lessons.

First one - it is awesomely easy to put together your own product.

I have no doubt that Stephane worked hard on this - you can see it in the final product, it’s quality. In fact, creating a ‘real’, tangible product is infinitely harder than creating a simple virtual one.

However, you can use the ideas in this to help you create your own digital product.

Stephane has used the leverage of others to create something of immense value - you can do the same.

Even if you have no clue of internet marketing, you can interview others that do and use that information to create a product of your own.

All you have to do is pitch your idea, plan effectively and you can create a simple product that you can easily sell in the $7-$17 price range.

Want something of greater value? How about audio interviews, or even a video one?

Here’s an idea for all of you.

Ask 5-10 marketers for ways to make money online. You can cover the basics, but ask politely and most will be happy enough to share specific tidbits of knowledge that they know work.

Get ONE (you’ll have to be persuasive!) marketer to agree to a one hour live session on Ustream.tv. You now have a high quality product as well as an online SEMINAR that you can easily sell for $50 if not more. You can even pay the marketer - $100 or $200, or just promise to promote it a lot. If you can get even 50 people interested in watching, that’s enough for most mid level marketers.

If you show the value that the marketer, and your customers will get, they’ll happily agree.The marketer can promote his stuff to eager customers; the customers get an hour to ask specific questions that they’re having problems with. Win / win.

Second one - physical stuff is easier to gain leverage with than digital stuff.

See, had Stephane created this only as an eBook, not to be harsh but I probably would have ignored the email… I get around twenty to thirty requests to promote eBooks weekly, and although some of them are decent, I don’t have the time to read all and then pick and choose.

A physical product on the other hand, if you physically mail something to a marketer… they’ll be a lot more likely to help you out. It’s not about the money… I could buy this book, as it’s cheap enough, but it’s sort of a novelty getting things for free in the mail. Way cool.

As you can see from the reviews page, there have been quite a few reviews of the product, lots of them on established blogs. Heck, take into account this blog alone - a paid review costs around $100, the product with shipping included can’t have cost more than $25 to send.

If you want some stuff (physical) of yours reviewed, the address is PO Box 450207, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I’ll be waiting…

This is the last post you’ll see on here from me for a while now - I’m off on vacation to Hong Kong. The blog will remain in good hands - Ryan McLean will be a hired poster on here for the next month or so, and I have a few friends looking after this to make sure nothing happens while I’m gone.

If any of you stay in Hong Kong and want to meet up for a drink, send me an email to my Gmail address. Happy New Year, and all the best in your efforts to ramp up your internet business for 2009.

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This is a paid plug of a unique website that I have personally looked over and liked the idea behind it. If you are interested in ordering a paid plug, please check out the Advertise page.

When 99% of blogs fail to stand out, discovering a unique blog is rare and refreshing.

RantBlogger is a good example of this. They pay their readers to write rants on whatever topics piss them off and then publish the best ones. They call it Cash for Rants and here are the details:

• Submit rants about whatever you want
• Humorous and serious rants are accepted
• No minimum or maximum length
• Wait about 1-3 days for rants to be reviewed
• PayPal payments of $5-$10 per published rant

The rants are read by a small review panel and then voted on to make sure only the best rants are paid for and published. Humorous rants are especially favored. Although a lot of the rants on
RantBlogger are great (e.g. the douchebag husband rant and the thong rant), there’s definitely room for more variety. Plenty of topics are still left to be ranted about.

And while the pay is by no means enough to live off of, who’s going to complain about getting paid to complain? More than anything, RantBlogger is a place to kickback, read some heated articles by angry people, and occasionally join in on the ranting.

OK, so this sounds like a lot of fun, but where do the owners get the money to pay for this and how are they going to monetize it?

Here’s the story: RantBlogger was started by 18-year-old Harvard freshman, Ahmed Belal, after Harvard reimbursed him for extra scholarship money that he had earned. With a couple thousand dollars and the help of a few colleagues, RantBlogger was born. Since its launch in September, RantBlogger has received over 500 rants from disgruntled users all across the web.

And the business plan behind the site? Top secret, at least for now. The RantBlogger team is building a new Web 2.0 site (not a blog) called WriteBite that they say is going to take the “get paid to write rants” concept to a whole new level. A better design, 5X bigger payouts, and a more community-driven rant site is on the horizon, with a beta scheduled to launch in the next 4-6 weeks.

Oh, and as for RantBlogger, they’re currently running a $100 comment and email subscription contest for the holidays. There’s no excuse not to check this site out.

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A few of you saw that the auction ended with the highest bid at $5,000, which was around $2.5k short of the reserve. Although there are a few tentative buyers, as of today the blog has not been sold and it doesn’t look like it will either.

I listed it twice, once under established sites for sale, once under premium. As is the usual case with these kinds of sites, most discussion was private… I had quite a few buyers contacting me via PM on Sitepoint, some via instant messenger and some via email. As some have asked what the process was like, I thought it would be better if I covered it here.

The market is rubbish right now.

You still CAN sell sites, I have done without problems for most of mine and there are sites selling. However, if you look at Sitepoint, at Digital Point, on eBay, and the other standard website selling places, you’ll notice that less sites of the same quality are selling than before.

Why?

Partly because the market is getting a tad saturated… cookie cutter sites with no revenue will sell for less than they were a few months ago, although they will sell if the auction is good… but mainly because it’s the Christmas season. It’s difficult for people to spend $100, $200, $500 on a site when they’ve just blown a lot of money on presents, vacations etc. Try doing stuff after around the 10th of January and you should see a lot more success.

If you DO want to sell sites now, make them stand out, add something unique to them… it doesn’t even have to be unique, it just has to make your site better than 95% of the sites on sale out there. Add a forum, add a unique product, add a video section, play around with having scripts developed for you that do unique things or do existing things better. Think out of the box.

Proof that uniqueness can help you destroy in the site flipping game.

I’m a member of a few general topic forums, including a big Arsenal one just to hang around… anyways, there are topics on there in the general chat section about games, news and so on.

There was a big-ish news story about a journalist that threw a shoe at much loved old US President George Bush… a smart marketer thought out of the box and created a game, which spread virally. I actually played this game before I found out about this, which you can find at SockAndAwe.com.

How much would it cost to develop the game? Around $500 - $1,000 if you hired a programmer. Think that’s too much? Think again.

The website was created on the 14th of December.

The website sold on the 18th of December (four days later) for £5,215

See the auction here.

My knowledge conversion rates are a bit shit, but that’s around $7,000 USD or a bit higher I believe. For a four day old site with little revenue!

Again, think out of the box, like they did, and you can earn HUGE.

Some of the bids I got for TUK (this blog).

Although this isn’t a massive site, it is still fairly large… I didn’t want to undersell too much, even though the reserve was lower than what I would have originally wanted, I didn’t mind selling it for that price as long as it went to the right person.

Unfortunately the bid amounts received *were* of the types I wanted, but most of them were installment based offers.

The auction bids are all included of course - $4,000, $4,500 and $5,000, from three different bidders; then there were a few private ones.

Some of the private ones…

$6,000 in cash - turned down because it didn’t meet the reserve.

$7,500 in cash - turned down because the bidder wanted BP included.

$12,000 in cash - turned down because he wanted to pay it over 10 months.

$13,500 in cash - turned down because he wanted to pay it over 10 months.

$15,000 in cash - turned down because he wanted to pay it at $400 per month until it was met. Lol.

I would have taken $7,500 up front over $15,000 in installments simply because i’d prefer not dealing with the hassle. Being that I live in the UAE, were I to get screwed on any transfer, it would be a lot of work fighting it - far more than the extra money brought in.

What if the buyer ran it into the ground for a month (promoting a different product every day, pissing off subscribers etc and then just stopped paying? I’d be screwed. I would have taken installments *if* the buyer was someone I knew and if it was over a shorter period of time - say three months, but both of those conditions weren’t met at the same time.

Unless I get someone willing to pay the reserve before I take off on vacation, this site will be kept; there are a couple of writers on hand that are decent and should produce stuff that you like. I’ll work on it a bit, get it to $2,000 per month in revenue and sell it some time in the new year for double my reserve if not more. Unfortunately I’ll not be around from the 1st - 22nd of January, so will not be able on MSN or Email to help you guys out.

What I Thought of The Slyvisions Sale

Another thing I’ve been asked about a lot is the sale of Slyvisions for $9,500. It was sold in less than three days, and stats were around half of this one. I’ve had people asking me why his sold and TUK didn’t, whether I thought it was worth the price, was I jealous, how did it sell… thought answering those questions here would be easier than answering like 15,000 IMs.

First rule - your site is worth what people are willing to pay for it.

If someone pays you $15,000,000 legit for a one day old site, your site (for you, at the very least) is worth $15,000,000. Sure, you may never sell a site again for that amount, and the new owner may find out that in reality the site is worth $15, but for you, whatever amount your site sells for is its worth to you. Remember this is you selling a website legitimately, as most sites are done, with everything represented honestly.

Second rule - the 90/10 quality/luck factor.

90% of this game is down to skills… your knowledge, your innovation, your ability. Site flipping is no different. You can create slick sites, unique ones, sites worth a lot of money with a lot of potential, and 90% of any sale is this. The other 10% is down to luck. As selling to humans is involved, there is always the luck factor.

The luck factor was involved in the sale of Flipnoobs, which sold in less than two hours for $4,000. When I started out, I had a similar product site that made $2,500 in sales which only sold for $1,500 after something like three weeks on auction.

On another day, the buyer may not have seen that auction and thus not bought it. Likewise with Slyvisions, or any other site sale.

Of course, the more valuable you build up something to be, the more ‘chance’ you have of getting lucky. If you have a valuable commodity, people will be interested in it.

Tips for the new owner of Slyvisions

I’ve visited Slyvisions a couple times, just to check what was up… did not have the time to stick around for long, but from what I can tell the new owner has developed his income from online stuff, blogging being one of them.

When you sell a social site… a blog like this one or Slyvisions, you only have a small window of opportunity to catch readers as they most likely read the blog due to the old owner.

Yes, it is possible that you may be liked more than the old owner - this has happened on a few sites, John Cow being one of them (now has like 10k subscribers I think); I’d love it if you guys thought any new owner of this site kicked my butt because that would mean s/he’d be providing you with half decent stuff.

However, any new owner has to take advantage of this window of opportunity; it is a small one.

Most of the blogs sold over the last few months have gone to shit because the new owner has not done the work s/he should have or taken enough advantage of the window of opportunity. Tw3o, One Mans Goal, Cash Quests, Bloggin-Ads… now, it’s almost impossible to replicate the old owner’s personality and posts, so you have to better them.

One Mans Goal was bought by a newbie that had nothing to teach about marketing online, whereas the old owner was experienced, so visitors had no reason to come back. The whole “watch me try to get rich online” thing has been overdone way too many times.

Cash Quests was bought by a company that did jack all with it, which is why it nosedived… how often have you heard about it in the last few months? Same with TW3O. They just didn’t post enough.

I think Site Flip U / BlogFlippingBlueprint will go the same way, because rather than taking advantage of the window of opportunity (it sold for $35,000, so people are definitely going to be interested), they put up a ‘be back soon’ page which is a moronic business decision to make.

Bloggin-Ads has nosedived because most of the posts are generic content that you can find on 90% of blogs out there. Unfortunately, from it’s start, Slyvisions new owner seems to be going the same way, unless changes are made.

If you have the ability to spend $5,000+ on a single site, especially if that income was developed online, as a tenative reader of you I want to get unique content that will educate me on how I can become like you.

Not to be harsh, but I don’t want to read standard, generic shit about how I can build backlinks, why blogging is a good way to make friends, what hosting to use, what is Twitter, stuff about Wordpress 2.7. These are some of the posts recently posted up on Bloggin-Ads / Slyvisions.

If you have the ability to spend $5,000+ on a single blog, I want to know how you did it.

Being able to spend $5,000 on an online blog is more than 95% of people that have tried their hand at IM can afford.

If you buy a blog of that level, you have to start off with a bang, start with content that will blow your readers’ minds, for free. You have to stun them, that’s the only reason they will stick around.

See, soon after a blog at that level is sold, you will see a jump… other bloggers talking about the sale and old readers giving the new one a chance to see what s/he can do. It is up to you to use that jump to your advantage, not blog generic shit about how Twitter makes you happy at night.

Examples of blogs that have done this, and done this well?

John Cow, for one. John Cow was bought by the guys that run Deal Dot Com, guys that are successful marketers making a decent monthly income. Instead of talking about generic rubbish you can find anywhere else, they started off with tons of content that laid out the blog developing process to beginners, as well as worked on viral elements that continued to grow the site like producing a 130+ page eBook for free and things like JohnCowTV.

Another example?

Blogging Experiment. Max Davis is a real site developer… at a far higher level than standard ones (me included). He made something like $700,000 in two years selling websites, came in with a bang and let his readers know strategies on how they could do this from the start. He also went in with a hard sell with a website flipping course promoted to an established audience… I believe he made back the $18,000 or so he spent on the site in three months.

At the rate they’re going, it’s unlikely that Slyvisions and Bloggin-Ads, along with the other blogs that have taken a dive will ever make their spend back.

So my tip would be to milk the window as much as possible, and use this window to explode your blog. $9,500 on a website could seem like nothing if it makes back its cost in two months… and it is capable of doing this.

Everyone (myself included) wants to learn from professionals… those that are making obscene amounts of money, and if you can teach people how to do this, you’ll add a lot more to your monthly income.

Even if it’s not obscene income (for example, the $10k per month I earn), if you can provide people with knowledge that they don’t get anywhere else, they’ll not just come to your site, they’ll spread the word for you!

Anyways… a few of my thoughts. Sorry for the way too long post, but hadn’t done anything on here for some time and it is an interesting topic. No doubt this post will piss off a few people as well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and will be looking at the comments (I got today off - woo!) and replying… so let me know what you think!

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T3Leads is a relatively new affiliate network but have started growing in popularity as more and more people find out about them.

Unlike most affiliate networks out there, T3Leads have decided to go “niche”… namely the finance niche and stuff related to it (credit cards, pay day loans, insurance and debt are some of the offers they have). This means that although you may not find some offers that you like, if you do want to try and attack the finance niche (which is hot right now, because of the recession) you have plenty of variety all in one place.

Another thing that is different about the T3Leads affiliate network is that the leads that you generate do not have a fixed payment amount, but vary between a range depending on how well you do promoting the offer and how high quality the leads you generate are. Depending on how you promote your offers, this could be a huge positive or negative for you.

You can see the range of payment amounts on their leads pricing page - for some offers, the range is quite large (the payday loan offer can pay anywhere between $5.34 to $45.45) on others, not so much.

The offers are not taken from other networks (like a few other affiliate networks get them) but by directly contacting and communicating with various high quality banks and finance related institutions.

After registering at their website (which was instant) I logged in to check out a few of their offers. Each offer has a wide variety of banners (which you can use on your blog / website to promote them) in all sizes and you get a similar affiliate link for all offers which is very easy to use. However, the interface is slightly confusing - offers are under a section called ‘Websites’ (something like Campaigns would be easier) and banners are in another location.

T3Leads claims to have some of the highest conversion ratios in the industry - I have not personally tested this as I don’t work in the finance niche anymore, but their leads pricing page lists a few offers that have a conversion ratio of 1:12 all the way to 1:4 (which is very high for targeted traffic). I’m not sure how accurate this but you could run tests with banner advertising on similar blogs or even pay per click.

One of the BEST things about T3Leads is that they have the option of paying out through Paypal (minimum payment $100). Personally, I dislike affiliate networks that pay through cheque… mainly because over here the postal system is utter shit and it’s difficult to receive mail, especially from the US (my first Google Adsense cheque of around $500 took eight months to arrive from the day it was sent). Other than Paypal, they can also do bank transfer, ePassporte, Web Money and company cheques.

They also have a forum that is pretty easy to use should you need help with your affiliate marketing efforts and they reward top performing affiliates with pretty slick prizes - I’m not sure how much they needed to earn to receive them, but bonus prizes already given out range from a Sony Vaio and Cybershot camera to music players and high quality sound systems.

In conclusion… I’d suggest you check them out, as they look a reasonable enough network to me and some of the payouts on their offers are quite high and they do have a wide variety of promo tools to work with. I have a decent idea of how to promote them that I will be trying out (buying advertising for dirt cheap on high traffic finance blogs… I will update on this when I have time).

If you have any questions about T3Leads, feel free to ask them… or you can sign up!

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