The #1 Thing You Need to Make Passive Income with Ebooks

If you've been wondering what I mean by creating passive income with eBooks, as opposed to just creating eBooks, then this is for you.   I want to talk about the one key thing that ensures your ebook generates passive income.

Getting the topic right is so important that I’ve created an entire cheat sheet on the topic:

Now, I get a lot of questions about marketing tactics for selling ebooks.  But the truth is that the thing that makes your ebook an ebook that sells itself over time and creates a passive income stream for you actually comes in the creation process. And that is all about getting that topic right. You need to create a topic that your readers absolutely want! 

There's a few different ways that we can figure out what your readers want. I talk about this in the cheat sheet, so make sure to download it.  But, basically, you need to listen to your readers.  Or followers.  Or listeners if you have a podcast.  Or whatever it is that you do.

You may think you know what your audience wants, but you’ll often be surprised to find out that they actually want something completely different.  To figure out what they really want, you’ve got to take communication a step further. Pay attention to their feedback.  Go ahead and ask them what they want.

If you get the this part wrong, there's almost nothing you can do to fix it later. So there's no way you can save a bad topic with a nice design, or a nice title, or any sort of marketing tactic. You might be able to sell copies with your smart marketing tactics, but it’s going to be a very active process.

I've had clients that had come to me with ebooks that they've created in the past and they want help increasing sales. Sure there's a few tweaks you can make at that point. You can fix the sales page, or if it's a bad title you can fix that, or you can improve a cover. But there's only so much that that's going to help you. You need to get that topic really, really right. So pay attention to your customers!

Are they commenting on your blog? What are some comments that come up over and over again?

What are some questions that they keep asking?

Are there any common threads in those questions?

Are there any emails that you get frequently? Or that your assistant gets frequently, maybe he or she can take note of those for you so that you can figure out what it is that people are interested in the most.

If you don't have a lot of engagement on your blog, or you don't have a lot of engagement with your followers, then you can put out a survey. I wouldn’t necessarily ask “What would you like me to write about?” because they might each give a different answer.  Narrow it down for them instead by giving them a few different options.  You might be surprised at what they are most interested in.

I just did this with a client recently so it's fresh in my head. Once we had the information, we were able to narrow down her topic, and I think it took us all of three minutes to do.

It will take you a bit of time to gather the information, but it really will help you piece everything together so you can find out what killer topic is going to sell really, really well.  

I hope this has been helpful. If it has, please share it with your friends with the buttons below. Don’t forget to download the cheat sheet to learn methods of figuring out what your audience really wants from you!