Selecting a Topic for Your Ebook

You can write ebooks on fishing, starting your baby-sitting business, how to increase self-esteem, herb gardening, crocheting gifts for your family, knitting baby booties, how to use the tarot to write your novel, how to plan a frugal wedding, vegetarian meals in under twenty minutes, and so on.

Your ebook can be about anything that interests you.

Keep in mind that if you're planning to sell the ebook, you'll have to conduct market research to make sure that there's adequate demand for your ebook and that the market is not overly saturated.

This hub will help you choose a topic for your ebook.

photo credit: Kema Keur

You're going to come up with a long list of possible topics by answering the questions below. Remember that during a brainstorming session you don't question or criticize, you just write anything you can think of.

1. Answer the following: what are your three top talents?

2. Have someone interview you on how you successfully perform one of your talents.

3. What do you enjoy reading or talking about?

4. If you know the general topic you're going to write about but aren't sure how to tackle it, purchase your competitors' products and make notes of what important information is missing from them. Can you improve upon these products?

5. Is there a level of expertise that's missing from the products that are already out there about your topic? For example, are beginners being left out in the cold? Is there a market for a manual on your topic for advanced readers?

6. Get away from your computer and go to a bookstore where you can look through the books and magazines. Look for ideas, in particular, ideas that sell; that is, ideas that fill a need.

Once you're done with your brainstoming session, go do something else. Then come back and look at the list you came up with. Now you're going to look at it with critical eyes and narrow the list down to the five ideas which you think are most likely to sell.

Here are several ways to determine if there's a market for your ebook--in case you want to sell it--and if the market is overly saturated.

Doing Keyword Research

If you're thinking of writing an ebook, the first thing you need to do once you've chosen your topic is to determine whether there's a market of eager buyers out there. In order to find this out you need to do some keyword research. Start with the free version of Wordtracker.

Wordtracker will tell you how many people are searching for specific keyword phrases in your niche. It will also show you the number of websites that are competing with that keyword phrase.

With Wordtracker it's very easy to determine how many people are searching for a topic; for example, let's suppose you're thinking of writing an ebook on how to plan a wedding on a low budget. You can try "low-budget wedding", and then you can look at all of the related phrases.

Then you can look up "cheap weddings," "frugal weddings", "frugal bride", "weddings with little money", "saving money on your wedding", and so on. Wordtracker and similar tools will help you find all the different keyword phrases that are available. Then you need to determine which key words have high traffic and relatively few competing pages.

When you determine that there's a strong demand for an ebook, you can start choosing the best topics to include in your ebook.

Submit Articles on Your Topic to Article Directories and Judge the Response

If you write a few articles on your topic and submit them to article directories, you can get an idea of how many people show an interest on the topic by seeing how many webmasters publish your article on their site and how many people click on your URL. This can give you some idea of whether there's a market out there for your ebook.

Check Google Adwords

Suppose you want to write an ebook on "Christmas Cookies". Write this term into the Google search bar and see if there are people spending money on products related to Christmas cookies. If so, there's probably money to be made from that topic.

Check to See if There Are Forums Related to that Topic

Forums indicate that there are people online who are actively talking about your topic. For example, in the cookie example above you may want to search for "baking forum".