Millie (Camille) Adrian, aka ModernMillie, never imagined becoming a full-time content creator running her own business. She was pursuing a teaching degree in college before an intense injury forced her to drop out and settle with a low-impact job as a call centre representative almost a decade ago. Adrian wasn't ready to give in. Her genuine hard work over the following years helped her become a project manager. Given California's high living costs, she had a generous paycheck and a host of full-time benefits. However, she consistently felt a void and missed teaching and creating.
Although it sounds impossible to build a brand from the ground up while balancing a full-time job, Adrian persevered by applying her creativity with her project management skills to create a thriving content creation company that teaches you to leverage the potential of social media efficiently. The business, ItsModernMillie, garnered thousands of social media followers in the first month. The company started growing fast and soon replaced Adrian's corporate income, which gave her the confidence to leave that nine-to-five job.
Adrian's one-stop shop for content creators helps newbies and seasoned creators find valuable free resources like the UGC creator bundle, YouTube channel toolkit, email pitch template guides, and business start-up kits for various other social media platforms. In a recent YouTube video, Adrian shared a detailed guide to creating and selling an e-book that could return north of $1,000 in monthly income. And no, you don't require a vast social media following to break into this niche business segment.
1. Exploring Profitable E-book Topics
Adrian believes the first step to creating an e-book that will sell is to explore topics you think you could teach about or pick a transformative life experience that could be helpful to others. The idea is to write down ideas of topics you have experience with and can break down for someone else.
For instance, you can be a parent with three children and have mastered many quick and easy recipes. You can choose to write about it. Or, you turned vegan last year, which significantly changed your life. That's a transformation you can share as well. Adrian urges you to write down all ideas and see if they fit into a listicle structure or a "how-to" guide. The next step is to narrow down an industry niche idea before conducting further research and validation to gauge profitability. Adrian has a simple way to do this. She instructs potential e-book writers to Google their ideas and click on the "Shopping" tab to understand if there's a market demand. Note that an oversaturated market doesn't mean you should move to a different idea.
Oversaturation doesn't matter because if there's traction in the market segment for someone else, there could also be traction for you. Another way to find profitable e-book ideas is to research people who have created businesses similar to your idea, like checking out their websites and digital products, which can be helpful for influencers or creators who know the niche they want to work on. She emphasised that drawing inspiration from topics or e-books of established influencers that work is not copying because you apply the idea to your personal experience to create a unique version of the story.
2. Creating The E-book Using Free Graphic Design Services
Adrian says she brain-dumps everything about a topic on Google Docs, which allows her to reorganise her ideas more efficiently. When sorting through ideas for your topic, like recipes, addressing the what, why, and how in the simplest form possible through a step-by-step approach is essential. Once the rough draft of your e-book content is complete with the proper formatting, it is time to choose the book title, which Adrian does using ChatGPT. The AI platform can suggest tons of funny and crisp title ideas, but you should pick one based on how easy it is for your target audience to understand, if it explains the product, and how the transformation can impact readers.
The next step is breathing life into your e-book draft with design templates. Adrian uses Canva's services to explore free e-book templates and stock photos for brand images before directly modifying the templates on Canva's platform. She replaces the template text with the Gdoc text before carefully formatting each page, starting from the cover page and introduction to the conclusion. Adrian says that the introduction page can make or break your e-book business. Hence, communicating the purpose of the workbook with tips on how to get the most out of it alongside a small introduction to yourself is vital.
She also ensures that the closing page has some form of call-to-action (CTA) and directions to find more resources, like her online courses and social media profiles. If you can embed YouTube videos, for example, in the recipe steps of your e-book, explaining the process further, Adrian believes it could translate to a bonus traffic boost for entrepreneurs, especially those who have recently started out. Once your e-book is complete, download it in a PDF standard format via Canva since it is the best format for documents optimised for sending over emails.
3. Deploying Low-cost Tech Infrastructure To Sell Your E-book
This critical step involves choosing software, tools, or an online platform that you can easily use to upload your e-book and sell it to your followers. Adrian has been using Stan's creator store for a long time, given its user-friendly interface and the streamlined workflow to upload, sell, and cash out on digital products, including e-books, online courses, and webinars. You can set up your Stan store in under 30 minutes and upload your e-book using the digital product option that allows you to customise pricing, CTA, e-book description, email flows and automated followups, among other features, to enhance lead generation potential.
While Stan charges $29 monthly for its services, it won't charge you extra fees or take a portion of your sales as commissions. Many other digital store creators often charge a percentage of each sale transaction as fees, which naturally grows with the size of the transaction. Stan estimates it costs entrepreneurs an average of $428 monthly to use similar services on other creator platforms.
4. Marketing Your E-Book In An Authentic Way
Adrian explains that the first step to marketing and selling your e-book is to target and build an audience base that is genuinely interested in the topics you write about. While one can market their e-book without relying on social media, like Etsy or Pinterest, Adrian always strives to offer her readers the fastest way to reach their destination, which is to make money.
She believes the quickest way to make money in this field is by establishing an online presence through video content creation. The ItsModernMillie CEO also believes in creating videos where you talk about your products at least once a week, like dedicating an Instagram story, to build the trust of potential customers. It makes you appear more authentic and genuine than sharing links and SEO-optimised descriptions.
Adrian asks us to analyse our personal buying behaviours, like how we verify the credentials of the person teaching the lesson and check if they have had a meaningful impact or good customer ratings/feedback before buying their products. The goal is to ensure that the person you are learning from is experienced enough to teach you that topic. Ultimately, you are more likely to buy something from someone you trust. She stressed that marketing, selling, and driving traffic to your product is where most people give up since creating passive income streams, especially through digital businesses, requires upfront work and dedication.
5. How To Convert E-book Leads Into Sales?
Adrian's favourite way to make passive sales is by linking the product everywhere on social media, such as Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. If you have already advertised a freebie on your Instagram bio, you can create a highlight to post your e-book in slides and link each to your other applicable digital products. A pinned post on Instagram with a brief product introduction and a CTA still remains an effective strategy.
Meanwhile, those who work on their YouTube channels can advertise their products in YouTube descriptions and comment sections to maximise outreach. As organic traffic grows over time, passive sales start to come in. Readers often ask questions in the comment sections of social media posts, which, according to Adrian, can be leveraged by leading viewers to a paid answer in the CTA section of your e-book.
Businesses always carry some degree of risk, regardless of what they sell, their location, marketing models, and balance sheets. The best entrepreneurs can do when starting a business is prioritise risk mitigation, primarily by exploring ways to lower initial capital investments and operational overheads while maintaining manageable debt levels. Extra focus is also required to secure online assets from growing cybercrimes, which authentic content creator platforms like Stan can ensure.
Adrian believes that finding a niche for creating content, adopting genuine marketing practices, and leveraging low-cost, high-quality tech infrastructure combined with free graphic design services significantly boosts one's chances of developing a steady e-book business from the ground up.
