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#280: Writing An Ebook Is Easier Than You Think: Step-By-Step Guide

ByJillian Leslie

Welcome to the latest episode of The Blogger Genius Podcast! I’m your host, Jillian Leslie, and today I’m going to be talking about the amazing benefits of creating and selling ebooks using ChatGPT.

If you’re looking to create and sell an ebook, I’ve got you covered. In this episode, I’ll be providing you with a roadmap for creating an ebook that will help you solve a problem for your audience in a few hours.

We’ll cover everything from outlining and writing ebook the content with AI, to choosing a platform to sell it on like MiloTreeCart, creating a sales page, and promoting and selling it.

I’ll also be sharing some tips on how to use upsells and order bumps to increase sales, partnering with other businesses or influencers in your niche, and reframing “selling as service.”

As a creator, it’s important to not let perfectionism hold you back from releasing your ebook. This is the first step to building your digital product empire!

So, if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, tune in to this episode and let’s get started!

Writing An Ebook Is Easier Than You Think | The Blogger Genius Podcast with Jillian Leslie

Show Notes:

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Intro (00:00:03) – Welcome to the Blogger Genius Podcast, brought to you by MiloTree. Here’s your host, Jillian Leslie.

Jillian Leslie (00:00:11) – Hello my friends. Welcome back to the Blogger Genius Podcast. I’m your host, Jillian Leslie. I’m so happy you’re here. I’m a blogger and a serial entrepreneur. I started building businesses with my husband in 2009 when we created Catch My Party.

If you need graduation ideas, Father’s Day Ideas and free printables head over there. Next, we built MiloTree, our pop-up app that so many of you use to grow your social media followers and email subscribers. 

And now we’ve launched MiloTreeCart, which is the easiest way for you to sell digital products to your audience. And the thing I’m going to talk about today is how easy it is to create ebooks, especially now with ChatGPT. 

And the best thing about MiloTreeCart is you can upload your ebook as a PDF or any sort of file, and we will deliver it directly to your customer.

Last week I did a solo episode on how to start a quick membership. I’ve gotten such great feedback on that episode that I wanted to also break down how you can write and sell an ebook in just a couple of hours. 

I have an ebook that’s going to go through what I’m going to highlight today, and you can grab that for free by going to milotree.com/aiebook. I recommend you download that.

I don’t know if you remember this story, but I wrote this ebook on how to use ChatGPT to write your ebook using ChatGPT myself. And it took me about three hours. If I didn’t have ChatGPT to help me, this would probably take me something like 20 hours. 

So I want to show you how you can just churn through these so that you can test different ideas to figure out exactly what your audience wants to learn from you.

I think in today’s world, selling digital products to your audience as a real person is a way to compete directly with AI and win. I think the world is going to get weirder. 

I think we’re not going to know who or what to trust, but if you show up and I can trust you, I will buy from you, I will follow you, and I will feel a deep connection to you. I get posed this question a lot.

I talk a lot about building your digital product empire, and here I am talking about selling a $5 or $10 or $15 ebook and people will say, can I really get rich from that? And I say, probably not. 

Why You Should Start Selling an Ebook

However, just what I said previously, if you can see what it is your audience wants from you in an ebook, it’s an easy way for somebody to purchase from you without a lot of risk.

And if you can deliver, chances are they will buy a more expensive product from you in the future. It’s like you building this ladder out and let’s put the ebook at the bottom of the ladder and let’s put either one-on-one coaching or big service packages or a membership at the top of that ladder. That’s the goal, but you have to start somewhere. 

Here’s the roadmap of what creating an ebook actually looks like. Step one, you’re going to choose a very specific problem to solve with your ebook. Step two, you’re going to outline it and write the content. 

Step three, you’re going to choose a platform that you can use to sell it. And this is why I recommend something like MiloTreeCart because all you do is add it to our platform and we deliver it for you. 

Step four, create a sales page to advertise it. With MiloTreeCart, you get unlimited fill in the blank sales pages that are simple. 

And then stage five, you’re going to promote it and sell it. You’re going to promote it even more than you think and sell it in ways that make sense. 

Again, why start with an ebook? Because they’re easy, they’re fast, they’re low cost, you can sell them all over the planet. It’s a great way to generate passive income for people who are selling eBooks. 

With MiloTreeCart currently, the feedback I keep getting, which is, “I love waking up in the morning and I’ve gotten sales while I was sleeping.” Also, there is virtually no customer service with selling an ebook. This is a great launchpad. 

If you’re listening to this and certain narratives are showing up in your mind like I don’t have anything to write about, or I don’t have the time, or I don’t know what topic to choose, or I don’t know how to sell, just know those are normal. I hear them a lot.

And all I’m going to say is just put one foot in front of the other and see what happens. And please know that ChatGPT is your best friend and hopefully by the end of this you will agree with me. 

I’m going to assume you already have a niche, you have an area of expertise, but you might not know what topic to write your ebook on. I have a prompt in my ebook that you are free to use. I think it’s good.

Writing An Ebook Is Easier Than You Think | The Blogger Genius Podcast with Jillian Leslie

How to Use AI to Help You Write Your Ebook 

And this is what it says, create 15 ebook topics in my niche. You’re going to add your niche. It should apply to one of these areas. Makes my customer money, saves my customer money, saves my customer time. 

Moves my customer toward happiness, moves my customer away from pain or raises my customer’s social status. These are the six buying triggers that I talk about where people will actually pay to solve these problems.

You just prompt ChatGPT to come up with ebook ideas and it’s amazing how far this will get you. And remember, if you don’t like what ChatGPT gives you, just have them regenerate more ideas, fine tune your prompts, play around with ChatGPT. 

The first response is almost never the one that I use. I will ask questions in different ways. I will tell ChatGPT, they are an expert in whatever my niche is. I might say, you have a PhD in this, or you are a top marketer, or you are a top food blogger, anything like that. 

I want ChatGPT to play that role and to give me answers based on that expertise. So, do get in there and play around with ChatGPT and assume that your first response probably won’t be the one you ultimately use.

Once you’ve picked your topic, now all you’re going to do is ask ChatGPT to put together an outline for you. When you ask it to write the outline, target it toward your audience. Maybe your audience is filled with beginners or intermediates experts. Really hone in on that. 

Then look through the outline, see if you like it, adjust it accordingly. And now copy and paste each subheading into ChatGPT and ask it to flesh it out for you in maybe two or three paragraphs. And guess what? You’ve got a rough draft. 

Put Your Personality and Expertise into Your Ebook

The next thing I would do is see where I could put myself into the ebook. Remember, yes, you want to make sales, but this is also a great way to introduce your customers to you. Therefore, share personal stories, maybe add a video, maybe share about your expertise, build that bond.

Next, go to Canva and find a template that you like. For ebooks, we offer one as part of MiloTreeCart. It’s a Canva template, super easy to use, and now you’re just going to format your ebook in your template, going to add some images, maybe an image of you, personalize it, make it easy to read. 

Do not think that the length of your ebook has anything to do with the quality. You want to cover your topic the fastest way possible and give your customer a win, an actual tangible win. 

Now you’re going to find a platform where you can sell it again with MiloTreeCart, just upload it into our platform, give your ebook a name and a price, and you could start selling right then and there. 

You can also create an ebook sales page in MiloTreecart. In about 10 minutes, it’s got just some fill in the blank details. And now you’ve got a professional looking sales page that you can send people to purchase.

How to Promote and Sell Your Ebook

You’re not done because now comes the part that people I think cringe the most over, which is promoting and selling. What I always say is sell harder than you think. Selling feels icky. 

But when you start to reframe it as I’ve got a solution that could help people in their lives, that’s incredibly powerful. Selling is service. Selling is not icky. Charging for something that provides value to somebody else is a great deal. And remember, people value what they pay for. 

How many free ebooks have you downloaded and never looked at? However, if you’ve spent $500 on a course or on something, my hunches, you’ve paid it attention. Therefore, what you want to do is you want to promote it and talk about it, whether it be on social media, whether it be in blog posts.

So, any blog post that is related where it would make sense to put your ebook there, go do that. Send out a newsletter on this topic and sell your ebook as a way to help people. I hope you promote it everywhere because hopefully you believe in this solution. 

Also with MiloTreeCart, we have tons of marketing materials. In fact, I’ve got a six day launch calendar where you can follow along. It’s a checklist and I’ll give you email templates to use to send to your people where I’ve done all the thinking for you. 

I’ve got social media templates that you can use to help you sell. And literally all you have to do is go day one, do this, day two, do this. Day three and boom, you are selling. So, take some of the onus off of you of having to think through a strategy of having to put yourself out there.

New Ways to Make More Money With MiloTreeCart

I’m just like, go, go, go. We are rolling out at MiloTreeCart the ability to add upsells and order bumps to your product. 

What that means is an order bump is very much like you’re at the grocery store. You’re just about to pay and you see the gum and you put it on the conveyor belt and you purchase. 

So, somebody is about to buy and you offer something else of value that they can bundle together, maybe get it for a special price. 

An upsell is after they have purchased and they feel really good, you offer another product, usually something more expensive, maybe coaching, maybe join your membership, maybe buy some services, put those up on the thank you page. 

They’ve already put their credit card in, they don’t have to do it again. All they have to do is click a button and boom, they’ve now purchased that. These are some of the features that really help you make more money easily. 

So, just think about this when you are selling, I love this quote and it’s in my ebook and it’s that “selling is essentially a transfer of feelings.” I find that really powerful because ultimately what you are selling is a better life for your customer in whatever way that is. But lean into the storytelling and lean into the feelings, the good feelings that your product will elicit in your customer. 

Writing An Ebook Is Easier Than You Think | The Blogger Genius Podcast with Jillian Leslie

Tips on Selling Your Ebook

Here are some of my last tips on selling. One is, do not feel weird reaching out to your biggest fans. So, DM people and sell your ebook that way. Or talk about it where people hang out, whether that be in Facebook groups or subreddits or Discord servers or Instagram. Keep talking about it. 

Promote it of course on social media over and over again in different ways from different angles and partner with other businesses or influencers who are either in your niche or in niches that make sense where the two your product fits with what they are selling.

My final pieces of advice offer a guarantee. People get weird about this because if they’ve purchased your ebook and then they’ve gotten a link to it and they now actually have it, should you offer a guarantee? 

And I would say, because it’s all about building that relationship. If somebody wants a refund for the $15 ebook that they actually have, but they somehow weren’t satisfied personally, I’d give it to them. 

If a hundred people wanted a refund, maybe I wouldn’t, but in a one-off situation I would, because I don’t want them to have bitter feelings. 

My last piece of advice is do B- work, which is don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Be a little embarrassed about your ebook because that’s how you get stuff out and that’s how you learn and that’s how you move fast. 

Remember, you’re a miner and you are mining for gold. You don’t know where it is. So, keep digging and remember, this is the first rung on your digital product ladder. Plus this is a great way to get your feet wet and start using AI tools. 

And by the way, I know I’ve been talking about ChatGPT, but I have also been playing around with Bard and Bing and there has truly been an explosion. This is the new world. Welcome to it. If you create an ebook, I would love to see it. Send it my way. 

Also, if you want to purchase MiloTreeCart, head over to milotreecart.com and if you purchase it now, you get a free coaching call with me because I want to make sure you are set up for success. So, reach out to me.

If you have any questions email me at jillian@milotree.com, get the free ebook download at milotree.com/aiebooks. And that’s A-I-E-B-O-O-K. It’s got all my favorite prompts and I will see you here again next week.

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