Write Blog posts or Ebook

I concur, you might feel like you're leading people on but most eBooks are made up of publicly available content, just someone has gone through the effort to put it in one place and sell it.

-Aaron

And you can get that published for Kindle as well, or make a free report, give it away for free and build your list.

This is a good idea...the great thing here is if you are getting enough traffic you have different options in what you can do to make money...Best of Luck

This is the perfect idea. When you sell the compiled works, don't call it the "best of the blog" or anything. Mark Cuban's book was a compilation of his blog, but on the title he didn't point a finger at it. He just did it.

Most of your customers will come from long-tail keywords and won't bother looking through every post you've ever done before buying the book, they'll just buy it.

This. People buy mostly for all of these reasons listed. Focus on solving people's needs and you won't have any problems selling eBooks.

I think it might be an interesting idea to split-test! (Not very easy to do with book titles, really??). The reason I offer this observation is that, to me, "100 Tips to Burn Fat" sounds like a downgrade from "60 Tips to Burn Fat" rather than an upgrade: it perhaps suggests a quantitative approach rather than anything to do with quality. I'd expect "7 Tips to Burn Fat" to outsell either title. But I might be wrong, which is why testing (if possible) might be interesting.

Amazon.com : Self-Publish with Us

That's something you'll want and need to change, perhaps, in the long run, to make many sales? :confused:

I know a guy who sends out emails in the personal development niche with "X tips to do that or that", with X being a high number. 90% of those tips are worthless, to say the least. You're focusing on quantity, not quality. 60 tips are a lot, so that means they're either worthless, or you're giving away too much content right off the bat.

I don't know, I wouldn't buy a book of tips, especially in this niche, but that's me. People probably want a plan, a system to follow, not something to figure out for themselves. (Sounds to me that individual tips need some work of putting them together, even if they are good tips.)

Hold on, there. I think you've misunderstood what these folks were trying to tell you. When they said people buy for the convenience, they referred to the convenience of not having to scour the web and put together a series of articles found on tens or probably hundreds of websites, not when they are all in one place (i.e. your website). Imagine buying an eBook that is basically a collection of free and easily accessible articles found on one website, would you be happy? I wouldn't.

This whole quantitative approach seems to me to work against you. Why give away for free 60% of your content, and make the last 40% available only for purchase? It doesn't make much sense to me. Also, if, as I said, those 60 tips are not something to write home about, why would people pay to get another 40 of that type of tips? I mean, you can't say "well, the first 60 were so-so, but these 40 are stellar, buy them." Nobody is going to believe you.

Just expanding on what Alexa said...

The whole point is to exchange value for money. Writing an eBook with 100 tips to burn fat is short changing your customer. Think about it. No way in hell all those 100 tips are equal in effectiveness, so in essence you're filling a book with mostly junk content. The best approach is to take the 7 absolute best tips, expand on them and deliver the content in such a way that motivates the reader to take action.

Honestly, who's gonna buy a 100 tips book? I could sit down right now and write 100 tips to burn fat in 30 minutes. Easily done because there's no research that goes into creating the content, unless it's a 200 page book that expands on each and every tip.

I have to agree more than ever now that I've started using IMGlobal for my blogging platform. In the process it gives me an option to help other business owners learn how to brand themselves on the internet simply by offering them lots of tools for free so they can see the value. It is working for me and I have only been using it for 6 days. I'm really feeling like I understand internet marketing and rankings and why blogging is so important if done correctly. It is teaching me all that.

It all started because I took the 30 Day Free marketing challenge. It was a no-brainer for me in order to grow my primary business.

Manny

I totally agree, except for desperation part. Personally, I buy a ton of e-books simply because I know that I can learn a valuable skill without having to wait for a physical book to be shipped to me.

Building a blog is great, but an e-book definitely bring some sort of authority with it. Even if it's a free e-book, it shows that you have some kind of skill that other people do not have. Honestly, anyone could go to blogspot.com and build a blog or go to WordPress.com, etc., but not everybody makes an e-book. For that matter, not everyone makes a physical book, so the harder the thing is the more authority you were inherently going to receive.

Anyway, I would do both. Create a blog so that you can capture e-mail addresses. Also, create an e-book that provides a perceived value to those who visit your blog.