Writing and Selling E-Books
An SBI! Review

Better Late Than Never...
Or, How I Finally Found The Way To Reinvent Myself...

When I came online a few years ago with my very first Website I didn't even know what an ebook was. Now, 5 years later, I've written and published 10 ebooks/books both online and offline, and I'm about to begin the next one.

Fact is though, when I first went online I didn't even have a single idea for a book or ebook in mind, let alone ten!

And now I'm making my entire living from my various writing-related Websites. Who knew? Not me.

How did this happen? Well, sometimes even I am amazed when I look back at what has transpired over the past few years! I'll give you the thumbnail version below.

Trapped On The Treadmill

I had a 25 year career with the Canadian government. The sad thing about those 25 years spent as a civil service bureaucrat is that it was not truly me. I never felt comfortable in that milieu, but over time I just got very good at faking it. There was always a part of me that I kept buried most of the time, that wanted to be more than a just another nameless and faceless cubby-hole-dweller; I always had the feeling deep inside that I was capable of more.

Truth be told; for all of those years I was actually the spirit of a small time entrepreneur trapped inside the mind and body of a government administrator. In many ways it was a difficult, soul destroying, and spirit extinguishing experience. Arghhh!

Over the years I did make a couple of false-starts at escaping that situation and going out on my own, but life circumstances and fear always seemed to conspire against me so I never went through with it. And then a situation arrived where the break was made for me. I decided that I would take one last shot at going solo before throwing in the towel and giving up my dream of career and financial independence.

Finding My Way To the Web

By that time I was well aware of the World Wide Web. In fact, while doing my MBA at the U. of Ottawa in 1995, I researched and wrote a major paper that looked at the potential of the Internet to sustain small and medium sized businesses.

Even though it was still early days on the Web, I saw immediately how it leveled the playing field in an unprecedented way. It appeared that there was unlimited potential for developing and operating small home-based businesses online. This intrigued and fascinated me, although I didn't seriously consider it for myself at the time. It just seemed too "techie" somehow.

Five years later, I was an ex-bureaucrat trying to figure out what I would do next. Or should I say, desperately looking for how I was going to continue to pay the rent! I knew in my heart and in my wallet that time was quickly running out.

Because of my MBA paper I knew there was still one faint hope left... an Internet-based business! The only problem was that I had no idea how to get started online.

Suddenly, The Teacher Appears

Then wouldn't you know it, one overcast day when things were looking pretty bleak, hope arrived just in the nick of time, in the form of my daily newspaper. That day I just happened to scan the business section and the headline almost jumped off the page at me. It read:

"Dr. E-marketing - Selling on the Net is wide open, but Web guru says a prescription is needed for success."

The article told the story of Dr. Ken Evoy, the president of www.Sitesell.com who was regarded as one of the top experts in the world when it came to showing regular folks how to build a home-based e-business on the Internet.

Whoa! I thought; this has to be the answer to my prayers; this is exactly what I've been waiting for. Immediately, I subscribed to Ken's "Affiliate Masters Course" and devoured every lesson like I was studying for finals. That course was all it took to convince me that I had found "the way."

Soon thereafter I purchased Ken's SBI! and started creating my very first Website. That was a very early version of SBI!, so it didn't have all of the functions and bells and whistles that it does today. But it was still great for researching keywords, finding a niche, and then building a theme-based Website from scratch.

Discovering My Niche

In fact, it was the Brainstorming tool in SBI! that helped me do the demand-supply analysis that was necessary for me to sort through my various options and choose a niche that made sense for my online business.

After toying with a few other ideas I finally chose "writing help" as the theme for my overall content site. By mid-March 2001 I had uploaded the first 15 to 20 pages of www.WritingHelp-Central.com. I had become a Webmaster!

I learned from Ken's teachings in those early days was how important it is to find a subject that you are both knowledgeable and passionate about, which you can build quality content around. For me, that subject was "practical writing help for the average person doing day-to-day personal, business and educational writing". Something I was reasonably good at and I enjoyed doing.

Following Doctor's Orders

As per Ken's prescription, I built the content of that site up page-by-page over the following months, and within a year, many of those pages were ranked high in the search engines. The site was already attracting an average of more than 1,000 unique visitors per day. Since then, traffic levels at that site have increased gradually, month-by-month, and year-by-year, until recently it surpassed 10,000 unique visitors per day during peak periods.

Of course, getting such levels of free targeted traffic to your Website isn't difficult with SBI! All you have to do is create the theme-related content in your area of interest and expertise and then SBI! optimizes the pages and submits them to the search engines on auto-pilot. That's what I really like about SBI!, it lets you do the important content creation work while it looks after the techie stuff.

My next revelation? Diversify my monetization. In my particular "writing help" niche, there was no way that I was going to be able to generate a fulltime income on affiliate commissions alone, no matter how much traffic my site received. It turned out that the few affiliate products in my writing help niche were low-priced and, in any case, the majority of my visitors were from developing countries who couldn't afford the US dollars for those products, even if they wanted to buy them.

A few hundred dollars a month in affiliate commissions just wasn't going to do it for me.

Publish Or Perish

That's when I decided that I had to create my first ebook.

By that time, I was well aware that many online Webmasters were making good money by creating their own e-products and selling them from their Websites. So, I thought "Why not me?"

The next thing I knew I had written my very first writing help ebook, Instant Home Writing Kit - How To Save Money, Time and Effort and Simplify Everyday Writing Tasks. I started with a blank page in mid-July and I made my very first sale from my Website on October 1, 2001. That was a very exciting day!

And that's the beauty of SBI!. Once C T P is delivering thousands of PREsold visitors, all you have to do is plug in another monetization model, in my case selling e-books. SBI! does the hard part by delivering thousands of ready-to-buy, PREsold visitors. ClickBank collects the money for me. And all I have to do is write more books, something I love to do!

My first ebook immediately began selling steadily from my writing help Website. In order to further capitalize on the significant amounts of free targeted traffic streaming onto my theme-based content site, each and every day, I set up a mini-sales-site. My content-based pre-sell strategies on the various pages of my SBI! site, what I call the "mother ship," get visitors to click through to the sales page of my writing help e-product.

Since 2002 I have added an additional mini-site for each ebook I have written to the point where I now have nine (9) of them. And I'm the guy who didn't have an idea for a single ebook five years ago! Live and learn, I say!

The Bottom Line

Sometimes I sit back and look at all that I've done...

• I've built my own online business from scratch that now generates my entire income.
• I'm the author and publisher of 10 ebooks/books that I didn't even know about until I established my presence online.
• With more than 60,000 people from all over the world having taken my free writing-related courses I'm now a respected authority on practical "writing help" in more than 160 countries worldwide.
• I am Webmaster of one of the most visited writing help Websites on the Net (Thanks to SBI!).
• Unlike my many years as a paycheck-to-paycheck civil servant; every moment that I'm working now I'm creating additional value for me and my family as I build my business and add to my portfolio of products.
• I get to spend the vast majority of my time doing something I love; creating writing-related content and products.
• My various writing-related income streams won't dry up the day I turn a certain age.
• Oh yes, last but definitely not least; I've managed to leave all of my bosses behind!

I'm very happy that I paid attention to Ken Evoy's message 5 years ago. His advice got me started on the road that I had wanted to be on for a long, long time. Thanks for that Ken.

Shaun Fawcett
http://www.WritingHelp-Central.com