When creating an ebook to sell online there are a few things you have to do before you start writing your profitable ebook and these little steps are as important as the title of your ebook and they help to shape your ebook into something worth buying.

Publishing an ebook is different to a regular book to be published as there are not really as many costs associated with doing so, there may be some cost if you can't create a good cover, but generally speaking it's cheaper than a physical book and you'd do well to learn how to do everything concerned with your books design as you'll save some money in the long run for marketing your efforts.

Now on to some steps to take to publish your ebook and sell it online

Research For Content

The first step to do when writing an ebook is to really get the research out of the way first, to really nail a topic that people are actively searching the solution for, this the right way to go, because people in your chosen niche will be looking and searching through the Internet for how to do something or find out specific information that only you could really write, the more solutions you can solve that people need to overcome and you can group them altogether in an ebook the better.

Researching online takes time, but it's worth doing to find current discussions in related forums that address problems that need attending to with your information that will eventually be your ebook, always look for new forum members and seasoned forum gurus as you'll find that these two type of forum posters you will learn the most from and quite possibly they could turn out to be future allies or joint venture partners as they know a bit about your niche area.

The new forum members will pose the questions and sometimes these questions might just be simple straight forward questions that the experienced forum posters might answer, but occasionally no one will answer a question and that's where you could step in if you know your stuff and even if you don't know the answer you can quiz the member further about the trouble they are having, it goes towards your research notes!

Of course with this being the Internet, you can research anywhere on Google and any search engine and just read information, study everything you can, some may be highly relevant, other bits might be inaccurate, but you yourself make that judgement and decide what's true by process of elimination as you can usually spot the articles that don't seem to try that hard with content and quite often it is those that are not worth reading.

As well as researching on the Internet, you may look offline in magazines and newspapers for ideas and content that could be used in your ebook, of course copying others writing is out of the question, so it is a process of writing down quick notes and when it comes to writing your ebook you can re-write these notes in your own words and really flesh them out.

Interview an expert if you wish as this could be valuable information that you could transcribe to be included in your ebook.

Writing Your Ebook

Once you have researched your topic, you need to be inspired further by brainstorming chapter titles and what content you could arrange in order of importance and so that your ebook content flows well and is readable, I generally don't spend too long on this step usually 30 minutes tops, as you want to start getting on with writing your ebook.

Once you have a rough outline for all the chapters you can just start writing each chapter out and don't stop with your writing, whether you type or write in notepads just write until you finish all of the words as what you would do is write now edit later, so shut yourself in a room with no distractions and bash that laptop or squeeze that pen, quite often the writing is the easy part that can be blasted out at a fast pace and the editing can be the bugger.

Design An Ebook Cover

A professional looking ebook cover is what you want for your ebook and you could either outsource this task or do it yourself and I recommend you to do it yourself as you'll save the cost and the time waiting for the work to come back and once you do one cover you'll find that you might quite enjoy creating ebook covers.

But if you really want to outsource the task you can go to Elance and hire someone on a freelance one off basis to create an ebook cover for you, which will cost you, but then save you the bother of trying to create a cover for your ebook.

I've been tinkering with Photoshop and Gimp combined to try and create some ebook covers and they look quite good and also you could use some stock photos from places like Istockphoto to use in your ebook, whatever the topic, you can pretty much find top quality photos for a dollar or even free at other stock photo sites.

A 3D cover graphic is what you want to achieve.

Publish Ebook

Publishing your ebook could be exporting it to a pdf format document which is the usual route, I use openoffice to create an ebook almost instantly, but you could use microsoft word and then export it that way, but once you do publish your ebook to a portable document format you need to make it available as a download link on your web server through your main website, so a bit of research about uploading files using FTP is needed to do this and a little bit of insider technical knowledge with thank you pages and all that web hosting stuff which you can find for free on the Internet if you ask the right questions.

Submit to Clickbank And Other Relevant Websites

An outlet for selling your ebook is needed, so people can find your hard earned written work and there are a few sites out there you can integrate your ebook into and sell online.

Clickbank is one, but you have to pay a set up fee of $45 to do so, but you can justify this expense by having your own affiliate sales force that will help sell your ebook, of course you'll have to create your own pitch page to sell your ebook and all associated download pages and a thank you page, but that's also about the research you did way back in step one, so if you didn't find this stuff out, nows the time to find out.

Amazon, Lulu, Createspace and Cafepresscan also be considered as each have their own benefits for ebook creation, but what I would recommend is to use all of them, because the more places you can have your ebook for sale, the better for you in terms of profit, if of course you did your research at the beginning to see if your ebook would reach a target audience and actually sell.

Promote Your Ebook

Promoting your ebook seems like a simple straight forward solution, but there are many ways to promote something online and what works for one may not work for the other, so do your own trial and error marketing online to see what works.

I know what works, but it's up to you to stick to it and market non stop, particularly if you want to make sales from your ebook:-

Blogging works quite well, you could start off writing a review of your ebook, by looking at it objectively and seeing the benefits and also by taking the side of the customer you could also state what might need to be added to it, as it's your own book, you know what's in it so do a good review and promote that well, by back linking it to related videos and other articles on other directory sites so that you market your content and continually brand your ebook in the faces of your target market.

Building up networks elsewhere is one great method to use, for example if you create videos on YouTube and you have regular subscribers who view and comment on your video content then you have a network to draw more traffic from and what's happening more and more lately is that social marketing and bookmarking sites are being linked to popular content sites, so that it aids the content distribution and helps spread your content far and wide all over the Internet.

Check out more about Article marketing

Video marketing

Joint ventures work well too, so look more into how you can promote online and even offline to maximize your sales