Saturday, February 7, 2009

Marketing Insight Tip #3 - Create a profitable ebook in an afternoon using NoteTab and OpenOffice

(photo credit: wonderlane)

How to make an ebook from PLR using OpenOffice and NoteTab
Hello - this is a pretty mundane one. But thought you might like a short post.

There are two tools which are both indispensable and free (don't you love it when that happens?)
I use NoteTab as it has an incredible amount of built-in scripts to reformat your text any way you need it. (Like Making A Title Into Just The Caps.)

OpenOffice does just about everything else - and far better than any other office suite I've tried - especially MSWord.

Sequence here:
  1. Get your PLR out - you'll have a bunch of independent articles in either .doc format or .txt
  2. Convert everything to .txt with Open Office
  3. Drop these into OpenOffice and then save as text.
  4. Fix up in NoteTab as needed.
  5. Open the text file in OpenOffice (haven't we just been here?)
  6. Fix it up with formating and export to PDF.
Why this convoluted way?

Because NoteTab has better text editing tools than Open Office.

I've been working around with various other assembly programs (such as converting to PDF, combining them all in NoteTab first) and this is the fastest.

Reason: OpenOffice can take a drag and drop text file (doesn't do as well with .doc files) and put them in as Sections. You then save the whole file as a .txt file and you get only the text in that exact order. Saves tons of time.

Then, you can fix up the odd-ball titles with NoteTab, as well as search and replacing for excess linebreaks.

Now, when you re-open that file in OpenOffice, you simply use your H1, H2, etc. headers to format the pages the way you like them. And also put in page breaks. Just generally spice it up, do a spell-check, drop in some ads for other products you offer, etc.

Then export it to PDF and you've got an easy ebook all in an afternoon, depending on how fast you can edit (your mileage may vary).

That's how easy it really is.

You don't have to re-edit the PLR, unless you want to, since you have the Private License Rights to do anything you want with them. The duplicative content rule is for web pages and articles. An ebook is as good as the content in it.

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When you plug this sequence in with your keyword research, then you can quickly come up with a new ebook to give away or offer through your ecommerce site. Often, you can find a neat niche with nice demand/supply (traffic/competition) ratios, look up and buy PLR articles, create an ebook as above, then create your marketing campaign with your blog and shopping cart.

The viral part of this is that you can see some keyword keep coming up in the news - search your harddrive or the web for PLR which covers that keyword, then you have an instant ebook which you can then set up for sale on Amazon (via Mobibooks) for free - and then invite traffic over to that ebook via your blogging. (Or post it on Lulu.com at the same time.) You take advantage of the rising trend for that particular keyword and get into the hand of people who need the information quickly. Of course, you want to keep track of trends, probably using Google Trends or Google Insight...

Of course, once you have the ebook done, you can always excerpt article from it and offer these as an introductory mini-course - selling the complete ebook these were excerpted from... Imagine if you did all of the above - you'd have a huge mail list virtually overnight!

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And if you have a faster way to do this, let me know. I'd love to hear about them.

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