If you’re a veteran welder with years of experience in the welding trade, your practical knowledge and expertise represents a goldmine opportunity to earn great money by publishing your own welding eBook.
Skilled Trades Welders
As you’re probably aware, the demand for skilled trades workers, especially welders, is on the rise, due to a shortage of skilled labor in the construction, manufacturing and industrial fields. New and beginning welders currently pursing welding careers are by and large enrolled in some type of welding education program, but they’re always seeking additional resources; especially when it comes to learning unusual or unique welding processes and techniques. Many welding students are also seeking tips, advice and tutorials to help them past their certified welding exams.
Home-Based Project Welders
Additionally, there are a growing number of home project welders, with little to no practical welding experience, who are hungry for new and greater welding knowledge covering welding processes, techniques, projects and other welding related information.
Online Blogs, Welding Forums and Welding Resource Websites
True, there are tons of blogs, welding forums and welding resources websites; however, blogs and resources websites generally offer basic information, designed to be read and digested quickly. And forums often don’t provide complete information on a particular subject, present contradictory opinions or discuss overly specific issues, and are not universally applicable.
eBooks, on the other hand, can be topic specific (without being too specific), and their longer format allows the author to expand in much greater length for a particular topic. eBooks can also be consumed at the readers discretion, as they don’t have to search for or refer back to a blog or website, and they can also print out the PDF eBook or download it to a mobile device and read on the go.
Writing Your Own eBook
OK, so you’re a welder, not a writer. Fair enough, but just because you’re not a “professional writer” doesn’t mean you can’t write your own eBook. If you can talk, you can write.
Grab a pencil and paper (or even better, a word processing program like Microsoft Word), and simply write down your thoughts about a welding related subject you would like to make the focus of your eBook. Don’t try to use big words and ornate language, or pretend you’re a wordsmith, just write out the words you would use if you were to verbally explain whatever topic your eBook covers.
Don’t stop, go back, or make any edits until you’ve completed the entire eBook, just get everything out in one fell swoop. Then, and only then, go back and edit, removing everything extraneous or unnecessary, focusing on economy, using the least amount of words to express the ideas at hand. Edit a second time for spelling, punctuation and grammar—if the “mechanicals” of writing are not your strong suit, ask your wife, girlfriend, friend or hire an editor to review your “final draft.”
If you’re really uncomfortable with writing, but you’re convinced you have a great idea for a welding eBook that can really make money, hire a professional writer. There are tons of writers who make their living almost exclusively writing eBooks. You can place an ad or find a potential writer for free online at websites such as Craigslist and Elance.
In terms of compensation, you can negotiate a fee up front, or in some cases, make an arrangement to pay the writer a percentage of the gross sales.
Copyblogger and The Book Consultant both offer highly informative resources outlining how to make money writing your own eBook.
Publishing Your Own eBook
There are tons of free and paid online resources to help you publish your eBook. Professional business consultant and copywriter, Bob Bly, offers a very informative eBook publishing seminar. Blogger and professional graphic designer, Pamela Wilson created a complete eBook publishing platform that includes all the tools you need to write and design your own eBook.
If you’re at least a little bit computer savvy, and you have Microsoft Word 2007 or later, the cheapest and easiest route is using one of MS Word’s templates (which are included as part of the application) to draft your eBook.
MS Word also includes clip art, and you can grab pictures from Google Images, or use some of your own personal photos to add some pictures to your pages—photos are always a welcome addition to any eBook.
You can write and edit your eBook in MS Word, add some photos, create a cover (MyEcoverMaker can help with this) and print or save the file as a PDF.
Marketing Your Own eBook
These days, it’s pretty easy to set up your own website or blog, and both of these options are the perfect platform to offer your welding eBook for sale. WordPress is a blogging application that enables you to set up a blog for free.
Visit their site and they’ll walk you through registering a domain, setting up a hosting package, and installing WordPress to launch your own blog (which can double as your website).
Your blog or website is the entry point for selling your eBook, but a landing page is the store from which interested parties can buy your eBook. A landing page (also known as a “squeeze page.”) offers a sales pitch and link to pay for and download a PDF version of your eBook. Bob Bly offers excellent great resources on creating landing pages, and Copyblogger’s Premise application offers a complete landing page construction application.
For payment and delivery of your eBook, you can set up a PayPal merchant account to process payments and set up an automatic eBook download. eJunkies is another option for payment processing and automatic eBook download.