I finally decided to write a book. It is called How To Make Money Online: Work From Home and Get Rich On The Internet, and you can buy at Amazon.com. Why the long title? On Amazon, it is all about keywords. There are millions of books about making money, and the chances of people finding my book are very small, so I packed the title with as many highly searched keywords as possible.
The book is a compilation of my most interesting blog postings from the past 7 years, edited into book format. I updated much of the material and also added some new content. A few months ago my wife suggested I turn my blog into a book, and back in 2010 I posted an introduction and epilogue for my book; I just never actually wrote the book. Then last month I read this blog posting by James Altucher about how he convinced his wife to turn her blog postings into a book, and it got me thinking, “Hey, I should do that.” So I did. Also, a friend of mine recently published his first book (it is about Yii computer programming) and has made over $8000 so far, and he just launched his 2nd book (99 Cent Wealth: A Young Person’s Guide to Unlocking The Incredible Power of Time and Money), so that motivated me also.
To get started, I went through my 100 blog postings and copied the ones that were bookworthy into a word processor file, just to see if I even had enough pages to fill a book. I then combined some of the postings that were on related topics into chapters and put the chapters in the order I thought would be most interesting. It then occurred to me that before I went too far, I should look into what I needed to do to format the book for e-book and print publishing. I assumed I would import my document into an e-book maker program and it would magically make it ready to publish, but it turns out it is best to do almost all the formatting yourself in your word processor. I also decided to spend $39.95 to buy Jutoh, which is the program most people recommend to convert a book to publishing format. This made things much easier, but there was still was a large amount of research, learning, and trial and error involved in all of this.
The biggest task though was actually editing the book. First I had to read through it several times to make changes, updates and grammar corrections. I then needed to give it an “editor,” to make further corrections. I did not want to burden my wife with all this work, plus in the past we had gotten into arguments when I had her edit what I wrote (she would suggest changes, I was stubborn and would disagree; it did not go well), so I found this amazing site to most of the editing work for me: Grammarly.com. I just copied each chapter to the site, and it pointed out all the possible errors and it suggested corrections. It even told me when my sentences were “too wordy,” so I could shorten them. After these hundreds of small changes were made, I had my wife edit everything, and it went much more smoothly. She spent many hours correcting mistakes and making suggestions, and the the final version is a much better book because of it.
Next, I had some different graphic artists design e-book covers for me for $10 each on Fiverr.com:
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I chose to use the first cover (by KimDesigns), but I thought all 4 were good. Once I had the cover, I uploaded everything to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service to sell the e-book, and to sell the hard copy I uploaded a version of the book with the links removed to Amazon’s print-on-demand service at Createspace.com.
UPDATES:
1. 10/22/15 – I am no longer offering a free download of my eBook on this site because in order to be part of the Kindle Direct Publishing program, I had to stop giving my eBook away. The main benefit of joining KDP is that it will better allow me to promote by book. Also, it will make my eBook available for free to members of Kindle Unlimited, which is an Amazon service that lets you read as many eBooks as you want (out of the 1 million+ available) for $9.99 a month.
2. 10/22/15 – I have had around 20 e-book sales so far and 10 paperback sales, which is pretty good considering up until today I was giving the eBook away for free on this blog.
3. As a resource for anybody reading the book (or even not reading it), blog reader Homero A. Gonzalez compiled a handy list of links to the websites/services listed in the e-book (excluding my own sites):
Domain Brokers:
Resources:
U.S.A. Patent
Search
Cloud Hosts:
Server Monitoring
and Management Companies:
Website
Monitoring Service:
Sites that can
help find people to get work done for you:
Upwork.com
(Formerly Odesk.com)
Online Mail Room
(Virtual Postal Address, Scanning of Snail Mail and lockbox service)
Domain Parking:
Custom Search
Engines:
Review Site
Software:
Video Game Review
Script:
Flipping/Selling
Domains:
Personal Life
Task Outsourcing:
Recording Studios
that make demos remotely:
Free MP3 Tempo
Changer Software:
MP3
Speed Changer (Download)
Music Sites:
Posting Board for
Small Tasks:
Bitcoin 2.0
Automated Domain
Appraisal:
Domain
Publications Domain Sales Reports:
Escrow Services:
Domain Industry
News:
CryptoCurrency
News:
Cloud Music
Services:
Cloud Storage:
Crowd Funding
Sites:
Real State Crowd
Funding:
Start a Web Site:
Merchant
Accounts:
Banner Ads:
Register New
Domains:
Blogs:
News Sites:
Entertainment
Sites:
Interesting idea. Eric! I downloaded the ebook to check later, but the title is so cheesy and generic I almost didn’t 😉
“How To Make Money Online: Work From Home and Get Rich On The Internet”
Yes, I was not sure about what to use for a title. It is too late now to change it though, as I already published it (plus the paperback version). For random people looking for a book on Amazon, I think that title is appealing, so that is what I was targeting. I could have just called it “How To Make Money Online” but there are already other books with that title so that was not a good option.
Thanks for sharing. Downloaded “How To Make Money Online” By Eric Borgos
Downloaded the PDF, will make some nice reading material while on vacation in a few weeks. Thanks for sharing it for free with your blog readers.
Thanks for the mention Eric I just downloaded the book, you’re always looking for new and innovative streams of revenue which you’re willing to share which I admire! Good luck with the ebook 🙂
Congrats on getting the book out Eric, it’s a big task.
And thanks for sharing the book, look forward to reading it.
Thanks for sharing your ebook, Eric! I have always admired you as one of the most successful domain investors and now I have one more reason.
PS: I added page numbers to your ebook for easier reading, if you give me permission to share the updated file here, I’ll do it.
The self-publishing sites I looked at when I was formatting the book all said not to use page numbers for an e-book, because whatever you read it with will have page numbers. Adobe Acrobat and Kindle for example both show page numbers as part of the viewing system, so having page numbers again would duplicate it. But sure, post the file you made, it can’t hurt.
To be honest, I always like documents, either in paper or digital format, to have page numbers, but maybe it’s just me. Here’s the file (I added page numbers from page 6):
http://www.mediafire.com/download/pq0ogucdx6tfm1f/Eric_Borgos_-_How_To_Make_Money_Online.pdf
Eric, my review is currently under moderation. Hope it’s approved soon.
Thanks.
Approved!
Great.
I just listened to the founder of AppSumo on James Podcast last night
It was Good
You should do one of those with him
He says he doesn’t respond to any email or calls, but he said he would do so for Nick (AppSumo CEO)
Maybe he can put you in touch with him, so that you could do one
I just downloaded the awesome ebook. I have no doubt it will make a good read. Thank for sharing this awesome package…i really appreciate it.
I started reading the book. I like how easy it is to follow, and you keep things interesting.
Not taking anything away from you, but you got in the Internet business game at a very good time. Also, your foresight into in acquiring very good domains early on paid off for you.
Yes, it is much harder to make money now from domaining.
Thanks a lot for the kind mentions Eric. I hope this new initiative will be a success!
Finished reading your book. Very easy reading. Very personal, honest sharing of both success and failure. I want to thank you for your generously sharing with us. You have contributed a lot to the community, and helped us become more realistic. You have many talents and you are willing to try them out. It’s wonderful we have such a person like you in our community.
Thanks! Please leave that same review at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B010VLB6L4 . Books with reviews at Amazon get many more sales, so having reviews is important.
Sorry. I tried but Amazon would not allow me to do so because I’ve never bought anything from Amazon.
Ok, thanks for trying.
Congrats on the eBook!
Did you sell any yet?
2 sales so far.
What the heck Eric, you messed up on the cover! You should of had yourself in a Lamborghini with hundred dollar bills in your hands and hot haft naked girls all around you! lol! Why didn’t you upload it to Kindle Unlimited? Do you make more money selling it? I have kindle unlimited I want to download it for free that way. What is next Eric seminars? I feel like you want to become famous!!!
I plan on putting it on Kindle Unlimited, but to do that I need to give Amazon a 90 day exclusive, and I can’t do that until I am done giving the book away for free on my blog, since they don’t allow that as part of the exclusive deal. But, if you email me at eric@impulsecorp.com and give me your Kindle email address (see https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email if you don’t know it) and add me to your approved Kindle email list, I can email you the e-book and then it will show up on your Kindle (or your Kindle app).
I am not really looking to make money from the book. Of course that would be nice, but realistically no matter what I do I would probably get 10-20 sales at most, so I would much rather give it away free on my blog, or free via Kindle Unlimited. Also, once I give Amazon the exclusive, they allow me to offer the e-book for free to everyone via Amazon.com for 7 days.
So you can’t just stick a book on kindle unlimited, you have to let Amazon sell it first for 90 days? Do you still get a % for the first 90 days or does amazon just take everything?
I found my kindle email and emailed the book to myself I will check it out! It looks like a lot of the blogs I have already read thought haha
Oh and you don’t have sticky text on the comment box , I forgot the security question and had to rewrite my comment 🙁 !
To get into Kindle Unlimited (free books for members) you need to make it part of KDP Select (https://kdp.amazon.com/select) which is the 90 day exclusive deal. As part of KDP select, I still make money if somebody buys the book. Not everybody pays the $9.95/month to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. Also, if a person reads it through Kindle Unlimited, I make a small fee, but I have no idea how much that is.
I will check on the sticky text comment box issue. Maybe there is a WordPress plugin to solve that.
Thank you very much for the ebook 🙂
Eric… Great book… truly. Thanks for sharing! My review just went live:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2ULLQAHIRE3MN?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview
Thanks!
You guys should check out this social network community for people trying to make money online! Eric, I would be honored if you could check it out. I’ve gotten a lot of flak for starting it and people continue to discredit me.
Thanks,
Mason
I looked at your site, and it is an interesting idea, but it doesn’t really say anything on your site about what it offers. Why is this any different than Linkedin or a entrepreneur forum or a Google+ group? For people who are looking to network, like to get a job, do more business, get idea feedback, or raise money, I can see why it might be useful.
All it is is a community. The real difference is that it’s a social network much like Facebook but it’s more connected than any Facebook group or anything of that nature.
I just finished reading your ebook and it was truly phenomenal. It’s straightforward, to the point and just plain real. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Thanks.
Interesting blog/book, thanks for sharing. I wrote a review at Amazon a couple minutes ago – something I have never done!
I see you dont recommend buying established sites, but you do buy domains. What are the key differences between successfully monetizing the two?
Thanks for the review.
It is not that I don’t recommend buying sites, it is just that I personally never had much luck with it. The 2 main reasons for that is that I bought all types of sites, so most were not anything I had a passion for or even an interest in. Mainly though, the sites needed somebody to promote them, and I didn’t do a good job of that, so traffic/income would always decrease in the months after I bought them. Monetizing the sites was never a problem, it was just getting traffic to them that was. It was easier to buy a site than start a new site, but with new sites they usually only cost me a few hundred dollars to create, so I had little to lose. I find it very hard to get traffic to any new site I create, so buying a site is a great alternative. I just have not been able to make money from either recently.
One good thing about buying a lot of sites was that I learned a lot. I saw how other people created their sites, how they marketed/promoted them, and how that niche worked. I had already created 300+ of my own sites before I started buying sites, so I had seen a lot already, but there is always more to learn.
Add the site UptimeControl.net to the article, because only they have a 3-minute site availability check interval on the free plan.