Expensive Lesson

I paid nearly $50 today for an ebook about making money from blogging. It promised so much and was generous in the number of pages, nevertheless the biggest lesson I learned from this ebook was that people can make a lot of money from information products irrespective of the quality of the writing and the information.

I have read a few ebooks lately which have fallen greatly short of professional quality. Yet, the authors are making a small (and sometimes big) fortune from selling their products online. As writers, we have a unique opportunity to profit from our writing by writing high quality and informative ebooks.

One of the things that has amazed me on my content writing journey is that people who have poorly written (if not downright shocking) websites, put their name to inadequate and unpolished ebooks and other material and in other ways indicate a poor personal standard, are often the most picky and difficult clients and pay the lowest rates. I've actually had a potential client want a number of unnecessary revisions because he wanted so many sentences between keywords - on unpaid test articles! What does this mean for a writer? It means we can expend a lot of unnecessary effort for little recompense instead of focusing our time and energy on activities that actually profit us most.

I read a self development ebook last week which had clearly been transcribed from a talk. As a written work it was dreadful but this author rakes in the money. So what do you think the possibilities are for good writing and great content? Of course, we could certainly learn a great deal about marketing from these people. They'd have to be great marketers to become wealthy from such poor quality work.

If you have been writing for any length of time, you will probably have favorite areas of interest and therefore have accumulated valuable research. What if you wrote an informational ebook and sold it yourself? How many books have you written that others have put their names on?

So this is my challenge to myself and to other content writers: write something for yourself and find a way to profit from it. Believe you can do it and you can. Just look at what's out there every time you waiver and doubt yourself.