Jinjee Talifero sells her raw food eBooks on her family homepage at
TheGardenDiet.com and was profiled in an article about eBooks in the June 07 issue of Business 2.0 magazine. For the full article visit:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050985/Jinjee Talifero and her husband hate
meat, despise milk, and disapprove of stoves. Cooked food, to them, is
poison. And while they aren't the first health nuts to become what are
known as raw vegans, they may be among the shrewdest. They've turned
their lifestyle into a healthy business, thanks to the power of the
e-book. Talifero, 40, writes and sells titles like "The Garden
Diet" and "Raising Raw Vegan Children." She pulled in $120,000 last
year and expects to double that in 2007 -- all for working a few hours
a day with a subject that is her passion. Says Talifero, who lives in
the secluded valley of Ojai, Calif., "I feel grateful."
During the
first Internet boom, lots of people predicted that e-books would
replace paper books. That obviously hasn't happened, but the Web is
filled with authors like Talifero who are making money and attracting
readership that most paperbound authors would envy. Take Aaron
Wall, 27, a self-taught expert in the art of search engine
optimization, or SEO. He sells his "Seo Book" for $79 and earns about
$300,000 a year. He's even rejected an offer to turn "Seo Book" into an
old-fashioned print version. "What's the point?" Wall asks. Dating
and dieting are popular topics for e-books, as they are for paper
books, but it's often smarter to find an underserved niche. A Google
search can tell you if there's a lot of competition in your chosen
field. You can also scan the marketplace section of Clickbank.com,
which shows the best-performing titles. Talifero didn't plan to
become a raw vegan guru. She worked in Internet marketing until the
dotcom crash left her unemployed. Then she noticed that traffic to a
family website she'd built -- much of it about her food preferences --
was growing. People began e-mailing questions about her diet. When she
tried to sign up for a raw vegan retreat, it had sold out months in
advance. Clearly there was a market for her expertise. So
Talifero decided to write an e-book. She put together some recipes and
transcribed a speech that her husband, Storm, had given at another raw
vegan retreat. She charged $5, but sales were slow, so Talifero doubled
the price (pricing e-books too low can actually hurt sales) and threw
herself into marketing it. She started an e-mail newsletter -- "The
Daily Raw Inspiration" -- and posted comments on vegan forums. She
pastes a link to her site below her signature wherever she posts. She
also frequently updates her website to boost her ranking in Google's
search results. Talifero advertised in a few health magazines
but found it a waste of time and money. She doesn't even pay for Web
ads; she uses the Internet to tap into the raw vegan community and sell
directly. She's now pumped out a dozen e-books, and her newsletter has
more than 14,000 subscribers -- helping her earn more than enough to
keep raw food on the table.
