Make money online teaching your passion and solving your own pain point

By Alvin Lai

Whenever I talk about earning money online, folks around me get skeptical. You’re probably wondering if it’s really possible. Here’s a real working example, an ebook about jQuery, a javascript Library. http://jqueryenlightenment.com/ What’s the deal with jQueryEnlightenment?
  • Costs US$15 a copy
  • Contains 123 pages
  • 12 chapters
  • 1,000+ copies sold.
That’s a cool US$15,000 in revenue (web hosting costs and a cheaply-taxed Paypal payment gateway are very low). Notice each chapter contains a great chockful of tips and useful information. You’re probably wondering: how can you make money with ebooks today?

Social media helps people interact more transparently online

Facebook, Twitter, RSS and even forums like Hacker News have become a daily online staple for a lot of people these days. Every morning, people tune in to these sites to keep up to date with the newest and shiniest – now that’s a ready to tap attention pool of people (targetted even considering similar folks are more prevalent in one forum, e.g. Hacker News techies).

If your product is truly useful, word spreads fast

Whenever you encounter something valuable, wouldn’t you feel compelled to share it with your friends? It’s really easy these days with Twitter:
  1. Click on a Tweet link
  2. Submit tweet
Done, in 2 steps. Compare this when you only had email previously:
  1. Opening an email client
  2. Add multiple email addresses
  3. Crafting a catchy title
  4. Describe it in a paragraph to not look spammy
  5. Send
With Twitter and Facebook, you don’t even have to worry about spamming your friends’ inboxes, knowing that they’d only check their Facebook or Twitter feed when they want to take a break. See how social media makes it easy for people to share good stuff these days?

Receiving online payment is easy and affordable

I use Paypal for handling online payments for Freshlog. Other than having no minimum sales volume or monthly fee to uphold, Paypal supports credit card transactions for customers who don’t have a Paypal account. jQueryEnlightenment also uses E-Junkie, a good online shopping cart provider that’s real cheap. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, as long as it’s something you’re passionate about. If you’re sincerely passionate about something, by definition you’re most likely to be good at it. There are countless passion literature covering good work coming from passion, a good one is from 37signals’ book ’Getting Real’, It shouldn’t be a chore If jQueryEnlightenment can write a 123 page ebook about a Javascript library with documentation already readily available online and sell 1,000+ copies each for US$15 and get US$15,000 in revenue, you can too.

People actually pay for the experience

You probably noticed that I’ve bolded ”documentation already readily available online” in the previous point. The take away here is: Sure, there are lots of information around, but it’s likely not fun to read. People take enjoyment pretty seriously. If you can portray existing information in a way that’s approachable, friendly and useful, there’s a good chance that folks would really want what you have to teach.

Use Google Keyword Tool to gauge demand before you start

Basic principle of supply and demand – if no one wants your product, you’re not going to sell anything. These days, whenever someone wants to find something, they’ll think of a series of keywords to Google. By definition, when someone searches for something, there’s relevant intention attached to the keyword, so you’d be pretty sure to get a good feel of targeted folks interested in your product. Google has this free to use Google Keyword Tool that’s originally intended for advertisers to decide what Google keywords to base their ads off. It can also function as a useful research tool to gauge customer demand for your product. For example, search for ‘jquery’ and you’ll see this:

[[posterous-content:qxzxpJCbjHrFrtkCoJtc]]

Pay attention to the highlighted column ‘Global Monthly Searched Volume’, which means: how many searches were done for that respective keyword on an average monthly basis. A more generic keyword ‘jQuery’ was searched 7.48 million times, while a more specific keyword phrase ‘jquery autocomplete’ was searched 60,500 times. The take away here is that the topic ‘jQuery’ is highly in demand. The other long tail keywords are also highly searched too, which means that lots of folks are looking for lots of stuff  related to jQuery too. Hence an ebook on jQuery has a high chance that it would be in demand. Web developers in the circle would know that jQuery is indeed hot, but I’ve just used this example to illustrate using the Google Keyword tool in gauging demand, since its related to the jQueryEnlightenment product topic.

How about piracy?

Here’s my take – Music, videos, software are real big and mature industries where piracy is still rampant, so I would argue that piracy is here to stay. The good news is that there are lots of good folks who do the right thing by paying for stuff and legitimate businesses in the world that cannot use pirated products without affecting their businesses. That’s a sizable chunk you can earn from. Let the poor school kids, hackers and folks who just won’t pay for anything pirate your products. I like how Wil Shipley mentions that piracy helps you to spread the word, so you’ll gain in areas other than earning money – reputation, awareness and attention even – valuable stuff you can channel like giving training to earn money in other ways. A good analogy would be musicians who earn money organizing live concerts – people pay to experience their bands live.

Start thinking and identify what you’re passionate about

Now go out and share your knowledge, teach others how you solved your own pain point. Make stuff that would help businesses make money, or make peoples’ lives easier. I have. I got frustrated with the following tedious process of communicating visually with my clients:
  1. Take a screenshot of design drafts and bugs
  2. Annotate it with arrows and circles
  3. Save it
  4. Alt tab to project management tool
  5. Select new message/issue
  6. Select screenshot file to upload
  7. Type in title and description while file uploads
  8. Submit
So I made Freshlog, a tool that I use for taking screenshots, annotating it and uploading to my project management tool in one step. Watch how: Creating annotated screenshot-attached messages was previously a very tedious, frustrating and mechanical task that’s not enjoyable. Now that Freshlog has streamlined the 8 step tedious process to a single step, I’ve noticed that I’ve started creating more screenshot attached messages – a good thing because pictures speak a thousand words and it’s easily understood in a single glance. Often, it’s much easier and clearer than trying to absorb a whole paragraph and trying to understand the problem. What are you passionately working on today that you could possibly monetize? Tell me! :) Update: Coincidentally, my gf bought a set of ebooks worth US$33 on Ukuleles the same day I wrote this post.
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