A common dream within the digital sector is the idea that you can formulate a website and business, create content and products for that business, and watch as your phone or computer’s banking application generates more and more passive income with each refresh of the page.

For many people, that dream is just that — a dream.

It’s something that people will get to someday when the stars align and everything comes together in a deity-inspired culmination of the cosmos.

For others, it’s an idea, a plan, and a goal that is just a few actionable strategic processes away.

This article is for the latter group.

This article is about how, at the lowest level, you can imagine, create, and sell your first digital product and have it be automatically sold once the proper systems are in place.

Now before we get into the nitty-gritty, I have experienced a lot of flack and feedback for the promises of passive income, and it not being something real or attainable.

Below are a few of the responses I’ve received from individuals who think this goal isn’t achievable:

“Hi Jon. The concept of passive income is unattractive or even repugnant for some people. I would even argue that the passive income is strongly against the human nature […]”

“[…] As for passive income. There is no such thing. There is serious work involved in any honest endeavor. Just because you are getting paid after the work is done doesn’t make it passive. It makes it delayed.”

“Nothing about passive income. I was expecting something like ETF’s, real estate or funds, or at least a copy of all other Medium versions that mentions a personal blog, selling [a] book idea just to close it without ending.”

And I have plenty more feedback like this, but I won’t belabor the point for you.

I also have scores of positive feedback on the subject — again, I’m not going to include it here, because if you’re a person who believes in this idea and more importantly, yourself, it doesn’t matter to you. What matters to you is doing the work. You just also need the strategy.

This article is the strategy.

Now, I want to be clear: in order to achieve passive income through one’s blog and online business, there is a lot of active work that needs to take place upfront. Once those systems are in place, you will be receiving visitors to your site, collecting a visitor’s email address to convert them into a subscriber, and simultaneously automatically pitching them your first product.

In this article, we’ll go over how to market your eBook so you can create either your first or another revenue stream to your side hustle, which leads you closer to a 9–5 quitting life.

So let’s dive in.

The eBook Industry at a Glance

There are scores of methods for making side-hustle money on the internet. So many writers and entrepreneurs create content involving a multitude of methods including:

• Paid advertisements
• Affiliate marketing
• Sponsored posts

We’re not going to talk about any of these, for a few reasons. One, I’m not educated in any of these fields. Second, none of the aforementioned methods involve ownership of the revenue sources.

We’re going to specifically talk about eBook sales and marketing. Why? Well first, when you write and create an eBook, you own the product. Additionally, we’re going to focus on the eBook space because of its relative ease in creation, promotion, and sale. This route, while work-intensive, is accessible enough for the vast majority of side-hustlers to commit to and actualize. Finally, it’s a growing industry and space that is ripe with opportunity.

According to Statista, revenue in the eBooks segment amounts to $14,367M in 2020. That’s a 3.2% YoY increase. Furthermore, the people purchasing and using eBooks as a source of information and entertainment keeps increasing 7.8% year over year. And finally, the average revenue accounted per user stands at $14.20.

Now for many of you reading this, the last statistic might seem depleting. You are reading this because you want all the riches in the world. It’s important, depending on your current status and situation within the online blogging/entrepreneurship space, to temper your expectations and to start at a lower-hanging and more accessible level for generating money.

No one is going to make $125,000 monthly starting out — even though there are scores of bloggers claiming to have already done so. They sell this dream that you’ll be making money hand over fist, essentially transforming a blog into an ATM machine. Perhaps that’s possible down the road.

It’s part of my mission to educate you on how to start making money with your blog. Once you can make $.01 with your mind and efforts, you’ve won — anything else is gravy on top of it.

So many people in this space have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees.

We’ve briefly outlined the industry at large. We can see that there is an opportunity for you and your blog to start making money through your own industrious efforts, now it’s time for us to get into the strategy involved in doing so.

How to Effectively Market Your eBook (to Help Generate More Revenue)

In this article, we’re going to focus on the marketing of your eBook, rather than the creation.

Creation is relatively simple. Like alluded to earlier, many budding internet entrepreneurs and content makers get caught up in the weeds when creating their eBook. Really, the creation of the eBook is pretty simple, at least after you have the content in which you’re going to educate your audience.

Your content should contain value that can be difficult for the average user to obtain.

• Do you know a new workout method that will help a user get six-pack abs faster?
• Do you know a charisma hack that will help elevate a user to being the “life of the party”?
• Do you know SEO strategies that will help a user generate tens of thousands of video view traffic with their YouTube channel?

These are all things to consider. I always try and include in my articles the idea that your readers, whether reading a post or purchasing an eBook/product, are always thinking to themselves:

“What’s in it for me?”

Your key is to always deliver on this promise.

Now that you have the eBook created and you know you’re going to try and sell it, let’s get into how you should market it to maximize your revenue efforts.

1.1 eBook Marketing and Content Creation

The most important part of marketing your eBook is the creation of content.

Content is — and will be for the foreseeable future — KING.

According to Hubspot, bloggers who prioritize blogging are 13X more likely to see a positive ROI. Furthermore, 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Content is going to be your main driving marketing strategy to get people introduced to, clicking on, and purchasing your eBook.

It’s also important that you create content in the most effective and actionable manner. This article isn’t about that; however, here’s another article that goes into constructing the most effective and optimal content that drives readership, traffic, and revenue.

It’s also important that you use the Big Three organic and free promotional tools to help syndicate your content across the highest possible viewership.

The Big Three promotional tools are:

• Medium.com
• Quora.com
• Pinterest.com

These three utilities allow for a wide range of syndication of your content. Furthermore, it’s leagues easier to get eyes on the content when syndicating on these sites than it is to have your site with posted content and hope you’ve utilized SEO effectively enough to get on Google’s SERP #1.

If you were to combine the unique monthly users from each of the Big Three sites, you would get a combined user amount of roughly 700 million users monthly (Pinterest source, Medium source, Quora source).

Plus, these users are using the platform specifically because they are looking for content relative to the content you are producing.

So put your content in front of the people looking for it!

1.2 How to Comprise the Content

If you’re entering into the entrepreneurial blogging space, before you make any type of content, you should consider how the reader is going to absorb it.

You are no longer making content for yourself — if you are, then that is okay, but you aren’t going to get very far with generating revenue. This is because, like alluded to above, your reader is always thinking to themselves, “what’s in it for me?”

This is especially true when you are going to ask for a financial exchange (money) when selling your eBook.

This is very important: monetary exchange primarily comes when people are expecting to elevate to a higher status in their life after the purchase.

Think about it…

• When people buy new shoes, it’s because they’ll look better or they’ll run better or they’ll be more accepted.
• When people purchase education, it’s because they’ll have a better skillset/understanding in a given discipline.
• When people buy food, it’s for satiation or status.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to belabor the point too much.

With your content, your goal isn’t to sell anything — not yet, at least.

You are gearing up for the education of your audience. You want to give them anything and everything you can think of within your space that will elevate their life status. You want to become a leader and an educator, and a way to do that is to educate!

Build trust with your audience. You want to share and share the new information that you’re discovering or already know.

You have to do this in order to get something back later.

“There is no such thing as something for nothing.”

—Napoleon Hill

Your main intent when creating and promoting your content is to simply give.

• Give new tools in the marketplace.
• Give new insight into performing an act.
• Give a new strategy in solving a problem.
• Give criticism of an old way that doesn’t work well anymore.

Always keep this mindset at the forefront of your mind when creating and promoting your content. You will begin to see benefits by doing so when you start to get engagement with the posts (comments, likes, claps, reposts, repins, reshares etc.).

All of this content is being created with branding efforts in mind. You aren’t going to sell anything on these sites. Again, it’s important that we understand that all of this is an effort to market your brand.

When you can put out enough content on a regular basis (ten articles spread out over the first 30 days, and at least 5 thereafter on a monthly basis), you can now start to leverage that content in order to sell your eBook.

How to Passively Sell Your eBook

The most important facet of effectively selling your eBook passively is through email address collection.

You need to be collecting email addresses in order to do so.

Why?

Because it is the most direct means of communication you will have with your audience. In Russell Brunson’s book DOTCOM Secrets, he outlines why owned traffic is the most important foundational tool in your online entrepreneurship arsenal.

Picture it like this: you can never have an impact on if a reader reads your article or not. I guess you can increase the chances with a good headline/title, but the reader has free domain over the content they consume when it’s on the World Wide Web. When you have access to direct communication through an audience member’s email address, you open a wider opportunity to have a direct line connection and conversation with that user.

Now, many of you might be thinking that you’ll collect emails and start “pitching” your eBook through adjunct broadcasts, blasts, or campaigns; that’s not where I’m headed with this…

With every platform that you syndicate content on (Pinterest, Medium, Quora etc.), you should have a well-defined and optimized profile bio. That bio should always point towards your site.

The page on your site could be any of the following types of pages:

• Splash/landing page
• Homepage
• Blog post

What is important is that any type of page you select, you should have an email address offer and opt-in form.

Once the audience member opts-in, you should configure in your email service provider’s settings for a “page redirect” after the successful opt-in.

The page you redirect them too should be constructed as a sales page for your eBook. This page will propagate automatically whenever someone opts-in to your email list.

Now there is no guarantee that the newly subscribed member will actually purchase your eBook or not.

Well, let me rephrase that — you won’t have a 100% conversion rate with the page redirect. No one ever in the history of online email marketing/entrepreneurship has had a 100% conversion rate.

According to Impactbnd.com, the average conversion rate hovers around 2.35%, with the top ten percent actualizing a conversion rate of around 11.45%.

To put another way, out of every 100 audience members that subscribe to your list, just over two of them will convert into a paying customer of your eBook.

That may not seem like anything to call home about, and maybe you’re right.

But if we go back to the beginning of this article, our objective here was to actualize on making at least $.01 of revenue generated by our own entrepreneurial efforts in order to “break the ice” of this online business space.

So no, once you start passively selling your eBook to your audience, you won’t be quitting your 9–5 the next day.

And while that is a realistic goal and within reach as long as you have the right strategy, that is reserved for another article entirely, and this one doesn’t contain the bandwidth to go over that.

But this is where you need to start. Once you can start making even just a penny through your own entrepreneurial endeavors (outside of affiliate marketing, ad space etc.) you’ve entered into a new and wide arena full of possibility.

That is my desire for you going forward.

I believe we’re living in a time where a widespread epidemic is plaguing the lives of millions of people in the workforce: an epidemic of people working jobs they hate, for people they don’t respect, selling products and services they don’t care about.

Imagine what that life does to the individual…

• What type of relationship does that build between spouses?
• Between parent and child?
• Between the citizen and their community?

Personally, I can’t stand to live that life.

And you shouldn’t have to put up with it either if you have the right information, strategy, inspiration, and wisdom to overcome it.

That is my goal with this article — to provide for a foundation of the aforementioned attributes.

And I hope it finds you well.

So go forth and start building your online business and passive income systems to help escape the “Rat Race” and start progressing towards your epidemic-free life.

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