How To Easily Make Money Writing Kindle Books While Internet Marketers Do The Hard Work For You (Part One)
In internet marketing circles, there’s a meme that goes around that says “you should never give away your ideas.” That’s because there are a lot of internet marketers who look to make quick money by literally stealing everything about an idea and churning out replica copies of said idea until there’s no more money to be had.
The practice of ripping other products off and otherwise turning out quick-and-easy products is pretty much bad for everyone: The guy with the original idea has to compete with hundreds of other products now, the customers get a reduced quality product (if they choose incorrectly) and even the make-a-quick-buck internet marketer does themselves a disservice because they never build any lasting value.
That said, ideas are everywhere, and in a lot of cases, you can use the aforementioned internet-hucksters to your advantage if you follow this sneaky little guide I’ve just produced. Using your competitors’ weaknesses is smart, and it’s also ethical providing you’re going to create a better product or service.
(That, and you might as well make use of the fact your competition as a writer isn’t always producing good products.)
Backstory Time
I have gotten a lot of knowledge from Robert Koch’s blog 30 Days to X. Today, I was trying to find a bit of information that I’d read a few months earlier. I stumbled upon this article about various ways of making money. In it, Rob recommends writing about Kratom, and points out that at his time of writing, there were only 16 books on the Amazon marketplace about Kratom.
I thought to myself as I read this, “I bet that that’s not the case anymore.” I’ve read before that Rob gets his ideas (and even his entire posts) stolen by other people, so I guessed there’d be some examples of what I’m about to talk about. Here were the results today:
I suspected there’d be lots more results as (once again aforementioned) internet marketers have read an idea and jumped in.
Now, I’m not going to disparage anyone (at least any more than I have done, and that’s not personal) and maybe the books on Kratom are high quality. I don’t know anything about Kratom, and I’ve got no real interest in it. The following stuff is just something you could use to determine if an e-book market is worth jumping into.
Firstly, get a general feel for the covers, titles and taglines. Do the titles seem to be something you’d see in a “how to search for profitable keywords” article? Do the taglines seem very similar even though the authors are different? Do the covers all look similar as though the images have been pulled from the same stock photo site?
Again – I’m not saying you can’t have a simple title or a stock-photo cover on a book. I’m just suggesting that unscrupulous people definitely do this, because it cuts down on their time investment. (Actually, I’m not going to mention this point again – just assume it’s true for everything else I say.)
Secondly, Kindle Unlimited. I’m not a fan of Kindle Unlimited. A lot of people are, internet marketers included. It allows you to profit from people who borrow your book, and slightly maximises the amount of money you can get from a book. If a lot of the books are in Kindle Unlimited, there’s probably a big marketer presence there.
Thirdly, and here’s a key thing: Are there loads of “books” that are only 10-30 pages long?
This is a key thing because when you write your book, you want a competitive advantage. If you can produce more than a 3000 word article that’s apparently a book, then that’s a great competitive advantage.
Here’s the thing: The average Amazon shopper who is in the “books” section is looking for an actual book. To the average consumer, a book is well, book-length. In internet marketing, it’s common to charge money for a pamphlet that’s only a few pages long. But the average Amazon customer expects a book to be a book.
Check out this review:
It says exactly what I’m saying; people actually want a book. Here’s another thing to look out for: It’s really easy to set up a Createspace paperback and a Kindle e-book at the same time. So internet marketers will often do both – again in order to maximise profits – even when it doesn’t make sense. If you see a 20 page e-book that you can also buy in paperback for $10, then chances are you’ve found an internet marketer. Let’s face it, nobody in the real world is going to be happy with a $10, 20 page book.
The above brings me on to another way to spot some potential hijinks: Reviews.
If you see a ten page e-book that has twenty five-star ratings, all in dubious English and saying some variation of cookie-cutter compliments, then chances are something is going on that’s a bit odd. In general, people hardly ever leave reviews. There are books that have sold a million copies that only have fifty reviews, and yet there are some e-books that have nearly as many after a couple of days of being published. In a lot of these cases, those reviews are paid for.
The good news is that it’s another sign that your competition is a bit less-than-ethical, and you can probably deliver a better product.
Final Thoughts/How To Spot a Marketing Predator
This article has gone on longer than I thought, so I’m going to split it into two. (I’ll post the next one tomorrow, once I’ve written it.) Essentially though, when you find a niche on Amazon with the aforementioned traits, you know that there’s a) A profitable market, and b) a low level of actual competition (providing you want to deliver a great product.)
I didn’t intend to use this many words describing all these things to look out for. That’s because I’ve internalised them, and so will you: think of the above guidelines as a kind of “sniff test” for seeing where there are quick-buck chasers. Not all of these things might be present, and there’ll be some things I haven’t mentioned, but you’ll quickly get an overall sense of the product quality when you practice looking.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk about a few more things to do with this topic:
- How to find these niches in the first place.
- Why it’s not “too late” to enter a niche after the content farmers.
- How to actually build a product that’s better than your competition’s.