If you want to make money like a best-selling author, you can and should learn how to make money before you write your book.

Now, that might sound strange to you–how to start making money with something that doesn’t even exist yet! Well, the reality is that’s what entrepreneurs do all the time. And a best-selling author is something akin to an entrepreneur; for entrepreneurs come up with visionary new products or ideas or services, and every book is a unique, singular vision and one-of-a-kind expression.

And a very important part of that plan involves a lot of ways to make money while you’re in the process of content gathering but have not yet even written a single word of the actual book. You will make money from teleseminars, their audio transcriptions, e-classes, even selling yourself as a coach to someone–all before you write your book!

This means that you as an author should not dream of making money with your book. It happens for some people, but they are few and far between, and that has as much to do with good luck as it does with their talent, for the reading public are an extremely fickle group. Instead, you will plan to make big money from the credibility that your book brings to you.

You see, if you have credibility as an author, then when more people learn of that credibility, they decide they want to buy your books. It’s a feedback loop: you write a book to establish credibility, then your credibility causes you to sell more books (and you can make money in other offshoot ways).

So, if you want to know how to make money before you write your book, it’s like this: envision; plan; and get motivated about the right thing.

When you break the whole thing down, we can say there are 11 steps for becoming a bestselling author.

Following these 11 steps to becoming a bestselling author puts you into the system that you can follow to get that book out of your head and into the world, changing people’s lives and making you buckets of money.

1) Pick your field or industry and your subject. Both of these will come from something you know about and are interested in. Ask yourself what you want to and could help other people with in their lives.

2) Write up a survey question that you’ll e-mail out. Your survey question will allow you to set up a teleseminar based on that topic. This can be a question like, “What is the most important question to you about how to improve your competitiveness in running long distance races?” You’ll get back lots of responses, perhaps hundreds or thousands if your list is large enough already.

3) Next, write your initial title. This may change. Your title is based on what you determine is the #1 point that your audience wants to learn more about. This title should be short and snappy. You’ll also use the other important major points that the audience wants to learn about as bullet points for the back cover of your book and as chapters.

4) Do research for each chapter of the book. You’ll do this by writing or audio-recording all that you know about each bullet that you wrote down, and/or doing additional research if need be on the Internet. Put the information into a separate folder, one dedicated to each chapter.

5) Now make sure your chapters are in the right order, that each chapters sets up the very next one, and that their order causes “flow”.

6) Now you want to hold the teleseminar. This teleseminar will include a question and answer section which will enable you to fine-tune your book and see what you left out or what you need to change. Again, the people are telling you what you are to include in your book. You may even write your entire book based on the transcription of the teleseminar if you don’t already have one written.

7) Now send your material out to an e-class. This e-class is a “book writing boot camp”, and you’re now going to answer questions from people to refine even more your ideas of what you left out of your book or what could be changed. These are people who attended your teleseminar and they are also people whom those people referred you to.

Once you have your material refined, send it off to an editor. Expect to pay about $300 and he’ll take up to one week to get it back to you. When you get it back, review it yourself to make sure it still sounds like “you” and then send it off to a second editor. This one will only cost you about half that the first did because it’s a second editing. This will take up to another week to get back to you.

9) Get the nearly finished book indexed. A good indexer will cost you about $25 and take a couple of days to complete her work. Do NOT use indexing software programs nor let them do that.

10) If you think you need a bibliography, have one done up for about $100. This will take about five days.

11) This actually goes with Step 8: Send off your book cover design notes, images, fonts, colors, and everything else via snail mail (NOT e-mail) to your graphic designer so he can be working on it at the same time as your book is being edited.

Now that you’ve done all that, while you are waiting for the final printed book to be able to be printed, sell the final edited material online as an e-book through affiliate marketing, so you can start making money right away! Here we have the 11 steps for becoming a bestselling author.

If you hear about someone that is selling their own informational products on the web, you probably think about ebooks right away. However, while these written products are popular and a great way to profit, they are not the only option out there today through which you can make money with good information.

There are a variety of marketers that are beginning to realize that audio information products are a great choice too. With these audio products, you can easily provide great information that your customers can download from the web and then listen to while they are doing other things. This makes it very convenient, which is popular with people who are busy and have little time.

You’ll find that these audio products can come in files that can be downloaded and put on iPods or they can be in a CD format that customers can purchase and listen to at home, in the car, or even on their computers.

It’s actually quite inexpensive to burn off your own information products on CDs if you have a CD burner. Usually these products can be shipped for a reasonable price too, since they are quite light.

Another type of information product that can be sold other than audio is a video product. You can easily compile information into a video that your customers can see. There is great software available, such as Camtasia, which allows you to create your own videos that will allow you to put your information on video so customers can easily buy and access it.

Although some informational products may be okay in audio, if you want to engage your audience even more, a video is a wonderful idea. It helps people to get more from the information and is pleasing to the eye.

You may also want to consider combining some of these informational product formats. When you do this, you’ll increase the amount of profit that you can make and buyers will feel that your products are more valuable as well.

One example of this is to create a 40-50 page ebook on using social networking. When you sell this ebook, you can offer some great bonuses, such as a video that gives them step by step guidelines on setting up their account and you may even want to add an audio file as a bonus as well that relates to the product.

Usually you’ll find that there are great wizards that will walk you right through creating these informational products, which will make it simple for you. This way you’ll be able to create professional products that people will be excited about buying.

If you plan on selling your informational products on the web today for profit, then you may think that you have various items for a variety of niches. However, you actually need to make sure that you use an approach that will make use of the lists that you build when people make a purchase from you.

If you decide to cater to the niche of marketers today, you’ll want to start off by coming up with a product with information on How to Find Your Niche. Then, you’ll want to go on to develop another product that will compliment or accompany the first product that you sell to this niche.

When you do this, once that second product is ready, you’ll be able to announce to the customers you already have that you have another informational product available that they are sure to enjoy. If they liked the first product you sold them, then there’s a good chance that they’ll come back for more.

You’ve probably heard that the money is in the list that you have. Well, this has been true for many marketers out there that have made their millions with their list. They simply sold their products to the people on their list, which made it easy to sell, instead of always having to go out and find brand new customers.

Whenever you get a new customer, you’ll want to make the most of that customer. Even if it doesn’t cost a lot to get new customers, you’ll find that it is far better to court your customers to make thousands in recurring sales, rather to work on bringing in a one time sale that is worth a small amount of money.

It’s important that you come up with a great backend strategy for your products that is based on the needs of your customers. Work to find out what your customers are interested in so you can create the products that they really want and need.

Most people love to let you know about their opinion. So, use your contact list to ask for input and opinions. You’ll probably be amazed at what your niche is looking for. Although you’ll want to make sure that you continue to provide great information products to your customers, you’ll also want to provide great information for free as well to keep your customers from going elsewhere.

The last thing you should do is always try to throw a sales pitch at them. If you have their name on your list, then you need to take the time to pass on helpful information for free from time to time as well.

Once customers see that you have their best interest in mind, they will not have a problem spending money on your products since you have built up trust with them. This will help you to build up a huge amount of income. So, it’s all simple. Just find out what your current customers need and then provide excellent solutions to the problems they face.

More than likely you have heard it said that, “The money is in your list.” Many marketers use this quote and the reason that they say this when you are trying to sell a book is because they know that a list is important. When you have a great list of people that will let you market your products to them, then you will have a higher rate of conversion.

Of course it is important that you understand what this list is. Your list is the list of names and email addresses that you get from the opt-in form that you have up on your site, which is usually where you actually sell the books and other informational products.

Usually you’ll have visitors come to the site, and there is a good offer that they can get in exchange for their name and email address. This opt-in box, where they put in their information, sends the information that they provide to your own software for list building.

If you happen to have autoresponder software, like AWeber, you can easily set up different lists that go with various domains that you have. This is important when you want to sell your book for profit, since you will want to have different lists for each site where you are marketing and selling your informational products.

After the contact is added to the list, then an automatic email is sent to them by your autoresponder. This email provides them with the link to the offer that you promoted, which in many cases is some kind of information product.

Usually marketers will use their list and their autoresponder service together in order to constantly provide emails to people on the list. This can be done on a weekly basis or even on a daily basis if you desire. This allows you to start introducing your list to some of the higher priced products that you want to sell.

When you are using this method to market your products, it is important that every single email you send is valuable to those reading it and that it is high quality as well. You don’t want to spam people with a sales pitch each day, which will end up ruining your reputation. If you do this, they’ll probably either opt-out of your list, or never even open up your emails at all. This means they won’t know when you have a new product for sale.

When it comes to trying to sell your book on the web, most of the time people expect that they are going to be able to quickly download your materials unless you let them know otherwise before they buy. There are some information projects that are audio files or DVDs though that are actually shipped out as a tangible product to the customers.

If you have decided to offer your book as an intangible product on the web, then you need to learn how you can compile it in a way that customers can get to the files immediately and then access them when they want or need to.

You’ll find that a major concern to be aware of when compiling your book is that people are often a bit nervous about downloading other files from people they are not familiar with. They are putting their trust in you that you’re not going to end up putting a virus on their computer, so before you start compiling the information, have software in place to keep your own computer protected from viruses. You don’t want to accidentally infect your customers.

Compiling your book online to sell is actually easier than you would expect. There are several different ways that you can accomplish this. There are a variety of compilation tools that can be purchased to help you create ebooks. However, you can also create your own PDF file from a Word document as well without having to pay a cent.

There are sites on the web that will allow you to try them out by offering a few free conversions into PDF format. They’ll take the file that you have and in just minutes, they will turn the file into a PDF file from the file that you give them.

There are some marketers today that prefer to use .exe formats; however, many people will not open these types of files. Usually they will bring up warnings from their virus protection programs, so they are not likely to even open these types of files.

You’ll also need to consider security when you are trying to compile your book for online purchase. The technology offered today allows you to help prevent your book from being printed off, shared with others, or even accessed by those who do not have the right password.

It’s important that you make your book very easy for your customers to download, no matter how you have the information compiled. Make sure that you actually spell out the ways to download the files so that they can easily get the information, since they may not know a lot about computers.

Providing contact information is imperative when you are working to sell your book online. This way your customers can easily get in contact with you, if they happen to have a problem while trying to download the book. When you provide great customer service, they are less likely to ask you to refund their money, and you’ll build up a base of loyal customers that are happy and satisfied.