Promotion: Good e-book example (+ WordPress step by step tutorial)

Thinking about publishing an e-book?

I found an e-book example which IMHO looks like an e-book project template for e-book beginners.

Caroline Middlebrook has published (and maintained!) an e-book about 'How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress' (link below). Her e-book is not only an e-book but a whole e-book project! Three arguments why I like this specific e-book:

1. What makes this e-book so outstanding in my eyes is that the e-book shows a very concrete and practical approach instead of hammering out philosophic statements.
2. The great bookmark and navigation structure which makes it absolutely easy to pick out essential single items.
3. The e-book is accompanied by a live website. You can always go there and see live how the website looks. Creating a live website for an e-book is pretty outstanding.

What I don't like: Her approach to create a static website with the blog CMS WordPress. Reading my blog entries you will know that I do not recommend to use the blog CMS WordPress for static pages. For this task I would always use Textpattern which is not only a good blog CMS but handles static pages much better (Performancing.com: Tag Textpattern, Search Textpattern).

The reason for choosing WordPress is clear though. The goal is to get as many e-book downloads as possible. Why? The monetization aspect of the free e-book is to make money from the many affiliate links. Is that goal worth to choose the IMHO wrong CMS platform? From an affiliate point of view the approach is at least understandable.

Having said that here are some details about her e-book project...

The intention of her e-book

This e-book has been written with the intention of walking you through the set up of a new WordPress powered niche site. However, much of the content can be applied to any kind of WordPress site or blog and of course you can also use the techniques in this book to monetize an existing blog.

The basic premise is to create static pages that are not dated, not cluttered with comments and are highly targeted towards a particular keyword and then monetized with relevant ads.

Put half a dozen pages like this together on a single topic and you have yourself a mini-site but of course there is nothing to stop you from adding such pages to any existing WordPress site using the instructions given.

The table of content of her e-book

Citation from the e-book announcement page:

What I have done to write the e-book is created my own little niche site from scratch and documented the whole process live, step-by-step with images. The resulting site is live and can be viewed as you work your way through the e-book.

The e-book is 43 pages long and these are the major sections:

• Chapter 1: Getting and Installing WordPress
• Chapter 2: Basic WordPress Administration. 10
• Chapter 3: Installing a New Theme. 13
• Chapter 4: Setting up Adsense On Your Site. 16
• Chapter 5: WordPress Plugins. 20
• Chapter 6: Creating Your Site Content
• Chapter 7: Final Thoughts
• Appendix 1: Uploading Using FTP.. 33
• Appendix 2: External Resources. 36

Click here to download How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress

Resume

Of course I did not read everything. And of course WordPress geeks will have to look deeper how good her technical solutions are. Instead I concentrate on the e-book promotion possibilities and the general appeal. To me this specific e-book project looks very polished and mature.

• Good announcement page for her e-book. Maybe a little bit too cluttered because of the sidebar content.
• Well done structure of the e-book. Using PDF bookmarks is a value by itself.
• The How-To Step by step approach is attractive and keeps readers reading.
• The e-book is maintained! Telling that the e-book has version 1.4 draws people to her site to check for an updated version and IMHO adds a feeling of trust to the content.
• The many affiliate links inside the e-book are a good base for monetization. But too many of them may offend readers

Did you check the e-book out? Do you think this e-book looks like an e-book template for beginners?