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How to Write an Ebook: choosing a topic

This past week, I haven’t had classes at my day-job due to midterm exams, so I’ve been busy working on my first Ebook. I’ve wanted to write one for a while because I think diversity is the key in trying to live off passive income. I really have no idea whether affiliate marketing on Amazon or Iherb will be successful in the future, whether Hubpages will shut down, or whether there will a huge crash in the economy and my companies will start reducing their dividend payments.

This will be the start of a series where I talk about various aspects of the process of making an Ebook but today I’ll talk briefly about choosing a topic. You basically have 2 choices:

1. A topic that you already know a lot about.

2. A topic that you don’t know a lot about but that you research well.

For my first Ebook, I decided to go with #1 and am writing about how to get a university job in South Korea, which is something I’m very familiar with. While I had to do a bit of research, it was really quite minimal because this has been my life for the past 8 years. I think there are just so many moving parts, and the learning curve for me is so steep that I just didn’t want to add another step to the process.

The second factor to consider with regards to topic choice is who will actually buy your book. You can do keyword and topic research using Google Adwords Keyword Planner, which is actually quite simple to use. Obviously there’s a lot to this, but it all comes down to writing about something for which there are lot of people searching for, but there isn’t a lot of competition.

The third topic choice factor to consider is the possibility of making a series, or other related books. On Hubpages (and formerly Squidoo), the best way to make money is to do a series of closely related niche sites, rather than little orphan hubs. You need to make lots of similar, or related sites about a common topic and then link them all together instead of just making random Hubs about any topic that comes to your mind. They best way to really get some authority on a topic is to establish yourself on not only a single site. Ebooks are the same. You will do best if you can get a following, or establish authority on a topic by having a series of related books unified under a single theme.

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