E-Books & Money Making

When talking about e-books and money making, I bet the first thing came to your mind is that – you write an e-book, sell it and make money. Indeed, many people are making money doing that, but some folks are also doing it in some other ways. Here are two that might give you some inspirations, both are using free e-books as bait.

1. When you search for “Free Kindle Books” on Amazon, you get lots of results. Like right now, there are 137,686 free Kindles books available in Amazon US, 108,216 available in Amazon Canada, and 118,515 available in Amazon UK. If you are not a US user, you will get redirected to the proper Amazon regional website. Most of the free ones are stories in the category of romance, mystery, erotica, action and such. However, if you click “See more” on the left sidebar, you see lots more non-fiction categories like business, investing, health, dieting, self-help, and etc. So for all those popular money making niches, what is the catch for providing free e-books? Most of these e-books contain links to the authors’ money sites, and the authors kinda expect readers to either sign up a service under an affiliate link, or purchase a newsletter subscription.

Here is how it works. The more skilled marketers would focus on writing up something eye-catching or trendy like green energy or Ebola survival tips. Throughout the book, there is no affiliate link to be found, however it does include a website address for contact. So for once, I got curious and visited the website. After reading few more interesting articles, I finally came across a sales page – in order to get more reports on stuff that your government doesn’t want you to know, purchase a one year subscription for $49. That is a pretty smart move. And for the average marketers, they mainly dump their affiliate link roughly ten times within the e-book. Is that really the more often you see it, the more chance you will click it?

2. People love free stuff, so some clever marketers set up a website targeting the free e-book niche. Their website says that you can download all the free Kindle books you want, and there are even different editions for different countries like UK, Germany, or India. However, if you study the website a bit more thoroughly, you will see that the free e-book portal site is actually just an Amazon affiliate site. There are different editions because the marketers want to send you to the appropriate Amazon regional sites. And among all the “free” books, some are not really free and are embedded with Amazon affiliate IDs. That’s one hell of a good trick to sending people to Amazon eh?! It seems all good, except this particular website does not display the Amazon affiliate disclaimer, maybe they don’t want to make it look like an affiliate site, but that’s somehow against Amazon policy.

A grid based theme would work best with the free e-book niche.
A grid based theme would work best with the free e-book niche.

If you also plan to set up a similar website, here are a few tips. A grid-based theme would look best with this kind of site. Some plugin like “WordPress Automatic Plugin” can do the job nicely. Based on the keyword and price range, you can easily pull content from Amazon, create WordPress post and add your affiliate links automatically. Since this plugin also works with EzineArticles, Youtube, eBay, Clickbank and a few other popular sites, this would come in handy for your other projects. Lastly, you might ask, how to promote such a website? Here is a suggestion – compile a list of useful websites (20+), insert your website address in between, share your “useful list” in forums and social networks, and you can expect that others will also share it again in other places. 🙂

This plugin can create blog post and pull content from Amazon automatically.
This plugin can create blog post and pull content from Amazon automatically.

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