We were extremely lucky and honored to recently have social and dating coach Nick Sparks on as the first guest for our show/podcast.

Nick Sparks has coached hundreds of men from across the country and around the world that fly in to work with him in New York on mastering social skills. He has been featured on CNN, and is the Head of Live Training at Sparks of Attraction. Go there immediately if you want to work with him, which you should.

Watch the above video for a fascinating discussion of how Nick became a professional dating coach in New York, and how and why he does what he does.

We were also lucky enough to have him do an amazing, focused course on How to Start Conversations with Strangers. Check it out if you want a highly affordable way to get your feet wet with the kind of life-changing training Nick does.

We plan on having more “lifehackers” on to talk about how they got to where they are today. Please let us know if you have any feedback on whether or not you liked the show, and how we can make these maximally useful for all of you. Thanks!

Then we walked through using our favorite get-your-feet wet option, Weebly, and both why their service is great, and why you should not buy a domain (a www.myname.com address) from them. (They overcharge on that by a lot, but everything else is free/inexpensive and excellent.) We’ll talk about getting a domain name (one that you can use for any of these services) for less expensive than what any the big website brands charge in a second.

Let’s talk about the most popular free option right now: WordPress.

WordPress

Pricing: Free. They offer only one other option: $99/year or $8.25/month to get your own www.myname.com address (instead of myname.wordpress.com), more space (10-GB), custom fonts, no ads, and the ability to embed videos.

Summary: I don’t think WordPress.com’s offering stands up to Weebly’s. WordPress was and is still geared toward blogging, and it doesn’t have as many options for other kinds of content that Weebly does. Additionally, WordPress doesn’t offer the same level of drag-and-drop whatever you want anywhere ease-of-use that Weebly does.

Weebly offers a lot more flexibility, and the paid options are cheaper, especially if you go elsewhere for your domain. The only area where WordPress.com wins over Weebly is in the number of out-of-the-box “themes” (designs) available to for you to use.

Pros: Tons of beautiful designs, adequate free option.

Cons: Less easy to use than Weebly, paid option is also more expensive than Weebly.

In the next part, I’ll go through the other free/easy options: Blogger and Tumblr.

We felt the information was too important to throw away.

Since then, tens of thousands of people have visited and continue to visit our sites each month. The information we put out there has helped a lot of people, and it has given us thousands of dollars of income each month.

I’ve been hooked on the power and scale of the internet ever since, and I think my ability to build websites has been one of the most valuable things I have to offer.

I want to give you the same power. Here’s what learning to build a basic website can do for you:

1. It’s a real, useful skill – Even local companies have some kind of online presence these days. Want to be hired anywhere? Web skills are in demand.
2. You can make money doing it – You can use a website to promote your off-line business, or even create a new business from scratch.
3. It’s a platform to a potentially limitless audience – While it’s not true that everyone in the world will visit your site, it is true that everyone in the world with an internet connection can if they want to, and in a matter of seconds.
4. You can make your dreams real – Pretty much anything you can think of can be placed online in some form. Do you have an idea you’ve always wanted to try? Want to write a novel? Try blogging it weekly and putting it online for feedback! Do you have a business idea? Put it up! Now!

Let’s start with the out-of-the-box options out there, and their pros and cons. All the services below are free.

They make money by charging you for upgrades, like additional space, or removing the “This site built with…” credits from your pages. In all cases a completely free account will start you out with a basic website with a web address of this form myname.serviceprovider.com (for example, myname.weebly.com or myname.wordpress.com).

In all cases, you can get your own more professional-looking www.myname.com address and have that direct to your free site. It’s always cheaper to buy the domain on your own instead of through one of these website builders and we’ll show you how. On the other hand, it is faster to just get the domain through one of these guys.

Weebly

Pricing: Free, pro features like removing the “Weebly” name on the footer, embedding audio/video, and adding files larger than 5mb cost $2-5/month depending on how many months you pay for in advance. Don’t buy your www.myname.com from them, you’ll overpay (see below). Instead, buy the name elsewhere for less than half the price and link it to your Weebly site (we’ll show you how).

Summary: When I came back to the web following a three-year or so hiatus in order to build a site for our ebook The Transfer Book, I started with Weebly (note: our site has since moved on, which I’ll talk about later).

Weebly combines the most features with the best ease of use out there. Best of all, it’s free. Getting a free Weebly account is the best way I know of right now to dip your feet in the water with having a live website with most of the standard features: a blog, photo galleries, forms, etc., all with some pretty nice looking themes (the designs look a lot better than when I used the service back in 2009).

It’s all drag-and-drop. Want a form on a page? Drag it from the options at the top of the screen and drop it onto the preview of your website.

Pros: All around, I would say it really combines the most features with the best ease of use out there. If you want to see what working with a full-featured website is like with minimal cost and maximum ease of use, go with Weebly. I think it’s really underrated and underused for it’s quality compared to some of the more popular options that I’ll talk about below.

Cons: I personally don’t like having any service provider’s branding on my site, even if it’s small and in the footer, so that’s a major negative on the free edition. If you want to look really professional, I would go in for the pro option (at most it’s only $5/month!) and buy your own domain and link it to Weebly. Don’t buy your own www.myname.com from Weebly: you’ll overpay. They charge $25-40 a year for what you can easily get for $7.50/year elsewhere (we’ll show you).

In the next part, I’ll go through the other free/easy options: WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr.

This is a two-part series demystifying the postdoctoral fellowship.  In this series, Dr. Stella Aslibekyan, a current postdoc in Epidemiology, answers the following questions: What is a postdoc, why do one, and how do you get the best possible postdoc?

Dr. Aslibekyan began her academic and research career at Stanford University where she earned a bachelor’s in Human Biology.  After conducting research at the Mount Sinai Medical School in New York City, she completed a master’s program in Epidemiology at Harvard University.  She then earned her Ph.D. in Epidemiology from Brown University.  She is currently a postdoc fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the Department of Epidemiology.  Note that, although she was offered an ultra-competitive postdoc at Harvard, she turned it down to accept her current fellowship, and she is very happy with her decision.  She has published many articles in high-impact, peer-reviewed academic journals, including American Journal of Cardiology.

In this talk, you’ll learn about Dr. Aslibekyan’s academic journey that has brought her to her current post-doc.  She also explains the benefits and purposes of doing a postdoc: to focus on conducting research, write grant applications, and produce publications.

Check out the audio below (click on the play button or right-click on the download link below it if you want to save the discussion to iTunes).

Download the mp3: Demystifying Postdoctoral Fellowships Part 1

Download the transcript: Demystifying Postdoctoral Fellowships Part 1

We’ll be posting Part 2, which is about how to apply for and obtain the best postdoc possible. If you want to be notified when Part 2 is up, subscribe to our mailing list (there’s a quick signup form at the top of the page).

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Just in case you prefer to read the transcript of the discussion directly on our website, here it is below:

Lan: This is Lifehacks.com. I’m Lan Ngo. I’m here today with Stella Aslibekyan, who is doing a postdoc. When you get into academia, if you really want to move up on the ladder, you usually need to do a postdoc, especially if you’re in a field that is scientific or involves a lot of numbers. Stella is going to tell us about what a postdoc is, but first, she’s going to give us a little background concerning her academics and professional life. Stella, do you want to start with your academic life at Stanford and what you’re doing now?

Stella’s Academic Background

Stella: Sure. That sounds great. I graduated from a lot of impressively sounding schools and ended up at the University of Alabama. To a lot of people, that sounds very counterintuitive, but the truth is that it’s one of the best things that has ever happened to me professionally. I’ll take this time to tell you why. Let me rewind to Stanford, which is the first impressively sounding school that I attended. This is a really great academic opportunity. Like many, I entered without a clear idea of what I wanted to do, but because of the flexibility of the environment at Stanford, and the wealth of undergraduate research opportunities, I found myself drawn to medical sciences. I majored in human biology. I did an honors thesis and worked in a lab for two years. It was great in a lot of ways. It opened my mind to the breadth of research opportunities. After Stanford, I took a year off before applying to graduate school. I wanted to try something else. I wanted to try working in public health and just see how it is that this biological knowledge can be translated to improve the lives of people. After a brief stint at a health maintenance organization, which wasn’t as exciting or research-based as I would’ve liked, I ended up working at a lab in Mount Sinai Medical School. I applied to grad school and the grad school was in public health. Grad school turned out to be Harvard, so that’s school number two.

Lan: That was for your master’s.

Stella: Yes, that was for my master’s. I actually started off in a program called Society, Human Development, and Health, which sounded like a nice integration of my interests in biology and public health. As one of the required courses, I had to take an epidemiology methods class. At that point, I had no idea what epidemiology was. It turns out that it’s the study of patterns and disease distribution–who gets it, why people get it, and how we can intervene on a population level basis. Think of it as mathematical models of disease that use knowledge from different disciplines. Why people get sick and what can we do about that?

I fell in love with that course, and that was unexpected. I ended up switching to the master’s program in epidemiology. I wanted to do more research because by that point–thanks to Stanford and Mount Sinai–I already knew that research was something that I wanted to do.

We had a thesis requirement, so I ended up working on a heart disease project. We looked at whether or not cocaine use was associated with heart disease risk. Of course, it was. After that experience, it helped me realize that it was exactly the kind of research I wanted to do. I also got a publication out of it, which really helped me get to the next stage, which was my Ph.D. program.

The Ph.D. program was forty miles south of Harvard, which was at Brown University and it was in epidemiology. While I was there, I continued the research on causes of heart disease, and I started doing more work in the genetic basis of heart disease. While I was there, my Ph.D. advisor with whom I had a very good relationship, for family reasons she took a position in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. That was a thousand miles away, so it’s not quite as easy a commute between Harvard and Brown. I ended up spending some time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as well as Brown. I had a very unusual Ph.D. trajectory. When I was there–partially because of that long distance relationship–I knew I had to finish quite fast because I couldn’t keep that up for a long time; I didn’t have a lot of funding.

To make a long story really short, I finished my Ph.D. in two and a half years. That’s when I realized I had to do a postdoc. The main reason I wanted to do a postdoc was to publish a lot of papers. To get an attractive position in academia or to advance anywhere in the research world, whether with the government or in the industry or in academia in the university setting, you really need publications. At that point, I had published my master’s thesis and one other project, on which I had worked with my advisor. By in large, I needed to publish my papers, particularly my dissertation papers. That’s when I realized that I had to do a postdoc.

What is a Postdoc?

Lan: I thought everyone had to do a postdoc.

Stella: It’s become an unwritten rule. Some people don’t do a postdoc. For example, if they took a really long time doing their Ph.D., and they’re able to publish a lot during their Ph.D., then there is less of a need for a postdoc. They’re already appropriately enriched. They can compete for faculty positions much easier. To publish those papers takes at least six months, so when you do such a short Ph.D., you need some extra time to get the skills that you didn’t have the chance to get, and you can get those skills by writing papers.

Another thing I didn’t mention was grant applications. Because I was on my graduate grant, I never had the need to write my own grant application, which is, of course, something you need to do in academia day in and day out. For my postdoc, I had set two goals: to publish papers and to apply for research funding, which are grants in this country.

Lan: Do you want to tell the audience a little bit more about what a postdoc is exactly?

Stella: Sure. Postdoc is short for postdoctoral fellowship. It’s protected time to do research. Postdoc fellows do not usually have teaching obligations, even though I ended up teaching because I enjoy it, and I was asked to guest lecture in a course. In general, those commitments are very minimal. This is the time to focus on your research and establish your professional reputation, to apply for grants, and to get through dissertation papers. If you have a Ph.D., and you haven’t published a dissertation paper that is a huge red flag for potential employers. Postdoc is the time to address all those issues and whatever gaps you may have in your training; postdoc is a great time to address that. It’s the last training opportunity that you’ll get before becoming an independent investigator.

The main goal of the postdoc is to start making a name for yourself and to figure out where it is that you’d like to take your research and how you are going to fund it. You’ll also learn a lot of nitty-gritty things, such as how to participate in international consortia, how to be a good reviewer, how to get your paper published quickly or with the most impact, and how to pick the right grants to apply for. There are a lot of things that nobody will teach you in a class. Think of postdoc as an apprenticeship before becoming a professor.

Selecting the Best Possible Postdoc for Yourself

Lan: You had a lot of choices and options, especially given all of your accomplishments. I’m going to take this time now to mention that Stella is the only person I know who has rejected Harvard twice. The first time, she was offered to be in the Ph.D. program at Harvard, and she did not accept that offer. The second time was when she was applying to various postdoc positions, she was also offered a postdoc position at Harvard and, again, she declined. She instead chose the University of Alabama. Stella, would you like to tell us why you chose that particular position, and how that has really helped you in your career so far?

Stella: Sure, I’d love to. That is true about rejecting Harvard. I didn’t do it just for the sake of rejecting Harvard; it just wasn’t the right opportunity. I applied for four post-doctoral fellowships. I found a really great resource to look for postdoctoral fellowships. It is a website of the journal Nature. It’s called Nature Jobs. If you Google Nature Jobs, you’ll be able to find it. I put in epidemiology as a search word, and it would come up with all of the epidemiology jobs for both faculty and postdoc, and then you can search within your search and ask for specifically fellows or postdocs. Keep in mind that sometimes postdocs are called different names like research associate, which is a common term for a postdoc. Fellowship or training fellowship are others. You have to look through everything to see all of those opportunities.

To make a long story short, I ended up applying for four positions. One was at Harvard. One was at the University of Washington in Seattle, through their cancer center. One was at the University of Alabama–Birmingham, where I happily reside currently. One was in Oklahoma City.

I got through all four interviews at Seattle. I’ll tell you how many offers I got in the second part of this discussion. Getting to the interviews is really the most important part. If you get invited for an interview, that’s a sure sign that they’re interested because they’re spending their time and money to fly you out to the campus. That’s really more to ensure the fit. They’ve seen your papers. They know you’re qualified for their postdoc. As much as I enjoyed my visit to Seattle because I’m a big fan of the west coast, I realized it wasn’t the right fit for me. I do heart disease. I like heart disease. I think it’s a really pressing public health problem. They did cancer. Of course, that’s also a pressing public health problem, but that just wasn’t in my heart. No pun intended. Based on that incompatibility of interests, I rejected Seattle early on in the process.

The one in Oklahoma just wasn’t well established enough, and I didn’t want to live in Oklahoma, so that was a no-brainer. After a telephone interview, I realized I wasn’t going to pursue that fellowship any further.

That boiled it down to Harvard and the University of Alabama–Birmingham. Of course, Harvard being Harvard, I was sure at the time I would pick the Harvard one, if for no other reason than the name. I went to the interview, and I gave a seminar. Usually, as part of the postdoc interview, you have to give a job talk, which is usually a summary of your dissertation research. They don’t call it a job talk. They call it the department seminar. Everybody comes from the department, and it’s a chance for them to see how integrated you could become in their research community, how well you answer questions, how passionate you are about your topic, and, of course, the quality of your methods and those very scientific metrics they use to evaluate your work.

To give you an idea of how sure I was that I was going to Harvard, I did not even prepare my job talk presentation for the University of Alabama until I was on the plane to Birmingham to go to Alabama for that interview. I figured I’d go to Alabama, but I’d stay with Harvard.

After going through the process at both campuses for visits and meeting with everybody in the research groups, I decided on the University of Alabama.  The most important factor of my decision was the mentoring. As I said, postdoc is your last training opportunity, so you want that to be under somebody good and with someone with whom you click with both professionally and personally. That’s exactly the type of person I found at Alabama. She also happens to be the current president of the American Heart Association, so it was a great fit for my interests. She also has tremendous clout and tremendous convictions, which has helped me a lot in my career. She has already done a tremendous amount for me, above and beyond her duties as a mentor. I really look forward to growing as a postdoc under her mentorship and quite honestly, I’ll probably stay here as a faculty member as well.

Lan: What other reasons played into your decision to do your postdoc at the University of Alabama, rather than Harvard, which you had previously had your heart set on?

Stella: That’s a great question. I’ll divide those reasons into professional and personal reasons. Professionally, I knew my relationship with the Alabama mentor would be richer and better. I felt like being a bigger fish in a smaller pond was better at that stage in my career because I would get a lot of attention and a lot of mentoring. I could really grow as I envisioned my growth as a scientist, as opposed to being a cog in a large, departmental machine. That’s the professional reason. Alabama was particularly strong in genetic epidemiology, which was a strong interest of mine, whereas Harvard was stronger in other factors of heart disease, like nutrition. While I was interested in that, I thought genetics presented a more promising avenue for developing my career. That’s another reason that played into my decision.

For personal reasons, I hate winter. I had lived in New England long enough. I had a maybe not so mild case of seasonal affective disorder. I’d get really depressed. I really wanted to get out of there for a number of personal reasons. At Alabama, the value difference is pretty striking, and I’m way too liberal for this place. It has a lot of good points that ensure a high quality of life like nice weather, not much of a winter, and a very, very low cost of living. I ended up getting offers from both places and financially, I was able to compare them, adjusted for cost of living. Birmingham was also way more generous and could have a high quality of life doing a postdoc here because I can afford one.

Another reason was that it was nice to obtain a different professional network. I already knew people at Harvard. I already had good relationships with people at Harvard from my master’s program. Between Harvard and Brown there has been a lot of poaching and trading of faculty, so I knew a lot of people through both Harvard and Brown. Coming to Alabama presented a completely different regional community of scientists. I was really able to build on my metrics to make them more national and actually international because I collaborate with quite a few people in Europe. It’s really a great program. I’ve been here for a year and a half now, and I’m absolutely in love with it.

Why Do a Postdoc

Lan: You’ve given us a very comprehensive view of what a postdoc is. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Stella: I have some suggestions about how to go about one, which I’ll delineate later. If I were to say one more thing, it’s that I’m a big believer in doing a postdoc. I think it represents a really nice cushion between Ph.D. work and faculty work. A lot of time when you’re in graduate school, you have no idea what it means to be on the faculty. You have no idea how to obtain funding and how stressful it is. You have no idea about the administrative requirements and how to juggle teaching and research. Then, of course, you have that imperative to publish your research. Postdoc, in a way, is a very happy time and a very indulgent time because you really get to focus on just your research and nothing else. That’s an opportunity you may never get again. If you’re in the sciences–and I know a lot of the social science programs are starting to offer postdocs–they’re definitely becoming more popular. There are more postdocs becoming available every year. If I were to say one last thing in this interview, I would say that I highly recommend doing a postdoc. It’s worth it and it’s a very enjoyable time. It’s not a bad way to spend your late twenties or early thirties.

Lan: That was a lot of great information and very insightful advice. Thank you, Stella.

Stella: Thank you.

Lan: This is Lifehacks.com. Thank you.

We’re doing a series on writing and selling your own ebook. We (Chris and Lan) have written and published several ebooks ourselves that generate five-figures a year. Here’s one: The Transfer Book.

In this first part, we’re going to go through all the reasons why selling an ebook is often a good idea. We talk about five benefits that we’ve identified:

1. Passive/scalable income – It’s easy to automate sales so that you can make money in your sleep
2. Becoming an expert – One of the best ways to become an expert on something is to simply pick what you want to be an expert on and write a book about it.
3. Helping others – It’s a great way to share life-changing information with people. We talk about some of the amazing emails we get from readers.
4. Creating something – A lot of people have jobs where they don’t really get to create something from scratch and own it. Here’s your chance.
5. Learning all the parts of a business – We’ve learned so much creating our own ebooks. You get to see and understand product development, marketing, sales, customer service, everything.

Check out the audio below (click on the play button or right-click on the download link below it if you want to save the discussion to iTunes).

Download the mp3: Lifehacks.com – Write and Sell Your Own Ebook Part 1 – Why

Download the transcript: PDF – Lifehacks.com – Write and Sell and Your Own Ebook Part 1 – Why

We’ll be posting about the next steps you need to take to write and sell your ebook soon: picking a topic, generating the content, selling, and beyond.

So if you want to be notified when we talk about all the other steps to take to create an ebook, subscribe to our mailing list (there should be a quick signup form at the top of the page).

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Here are the links to the sites we mentioned:

Transferweb – our general community site about transferring
Transfer Counselors – our site where students can get affordable, high-quality transfer counseling

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Just in case you prefer to read the transcript of the discussion directly on our website, here it is below:

Lan:  Hi! This is Lan Ngo. Welcome to Lifehacks.com. Here, in this talk we are going to discuss why you should write an e-book. There are five main reasons why you should write an e-book:

1. You generate passive income.
2. You become an expert in the area of our special niche.
3. You get to help others and benefit them.
4. You create something and get to add something to the world.
5. You learn how to run a business inside and out.

I am here with Chris Goodmacher who is going to lead us through these five reasons. Chris and I are the co-writers of The Transfer Book. We also co-founded TransferWeb and Transfer Counselors. We have three books coming out very soon.

I am going to pass it on to Chris, who is going to give you an overview of all of these ventures we have just mentioned.

Chris:  We started out writing The Transfer Book. It actually began as a book that we wanted to publish through a traditional publisher. We had a connection to a publisher, who I will not name right now, and we were working with them on the book. After a little while of working with them on the book, our project suddenly got dropped. We sent an e-mail to our contact at the publisher, and it was bounced back to us. It said that person no longer worked at the company.

We had a lot of research and a lot of writing that we had already done, and after a while of thinking about it, we thought it was a shame that it was going to waste because we really felt, as students who had transferred colleges ourselves, that there was very little information out there for college students about transferring. We really felt that a book would benefit a large number of people out there, so we decided to publish the book ourselves.

We decided to complete the book and to put up our own website/blog to talk about the book and promote it and eventually to sell it. It did well enough for us that we expanded this idea of giving information about transferring to a couple of different places. One of them is TransferWeb, which is a general free-advertising-supported website all about transferring colleges, and we also have a separate site where students can get affordable high-quality transfer counseling by visiting Transfer Counselors. In addition, we love being able to produce information that people find useful in niches that other publishers might be ignoring. in addition to all of the transfer stuff, we are continuing to publish e-books. I am very excited to tell you why it is a good idea for you to try publishing your own e-book because we really believe that there is a lot of information out there that people have that would benefit the world if it was shared.

Make Passive Income

Lan:  In addition to sharing all of this information, writing an e-book is a great idea because you actually generate passive income, so Chris and I are actually making money from these little ventures that we have been talking about. Chris, do you want to tell us a little bit more about what passive income is and why it is awesome to have passive income?

Chris:  Sure. Passive income is basically income that isn’t tied to your working hours. The classic example of passive income is real estate. If you are collecting a monthly rent check every month from someone renting a property that you own, that does not require you to put in additional effort or work to get that check. You simply own that property, and you collect money each month. Passive income is defined that way, and producing a book fits very closely with that definition. Once the e-book is done, as long as it is selling, people can buy it at any time of the day, and you don’t have to send out each individual e-book. We will show you how to automate the selling so that anyone anywhere in the world can buy it at any time of the day.

Lan:  You can get this income by starting with very little capital, so there is very little risk involved.

Chris:  Right. One of the great things about writing an e-book is that your main investment, or the vast majority of your investment, is simply your time putting together the e-book. There is very little cash cost involved. If you want to host a basic website on your own domain name of your choice, posting these days is very, very cheap. You can get it for less than $100 a year easily. In addition, purchasing the domain name that you want to have will also cost about $10 a year so you’re all-in-cost is going to be about $110 per year, and based on our personal experience, it is not too difficult to generate close to four figures of income per month, which easily pays off the cash cost of running the website.

Lan:  In addition, for those of you who are risk averse, and we know that a lot of people out there are, you can actually keep your full-time job while writing an e-book and make money from doing that.

Chris:  Right. In order to produce an e-book, you don’t have to produce something that is 400 pages, but you can actually relatively easily produce that much content, and we will show you how. If the information is important and people want it, then people are happy to pay a decent amount of money for a book that may only be 30 pages as long as the information is good and useful.

Become an Expert

Lan:  I am going to move on to the next topic, which is why writing an e-book can actually help you become an expert in an area or a niche. In this way, writing an e-book and selling it adds to your personal development.

Chris:  Right. As you write the e-book, whether or not you are already an expert in the area, you will develop expertise in whatever you are writing about. For example, if you are writing a book about real estate, you’re going to learn a lot about real estate as you write the book, and that expertise is useful in a number of ways. Maybe you are just interested in the topic, and you want to learn more about it. A great way to do that is just to say, “I am going to write a book about this topic,” and then learn all you can about that topic and put together the book. Your knowledge will be much more structured for you than someone who read the same books but did not actually put together their own book about it, so it would help you synthesize your information.

In addition, one of the great things about becoming an expert in a particular area is people are happy to pay you for your advice about that topic or area. Consulting has been a major source of income for us, and it is wonderful because we get to help students. Our niche is transfer students, and we are very good at what we do because we know a lot about it.

Lan:  Just to give you a little bit more concrete information, when we were writing The Transfer Book, which is about how to transfer from one undergraduate school to another, we had to do a lot of research. That included Internet research and research on books. We also had to interview a lot of students and contact hundreds of successful transfer students to learn about their process and story in terms of how they went from one college to another. In this journey, a lot of people asked us a lot of questions about transferring. We got more and more questions and more and more e-mails about transferring, and sometimes we didn’t know what the answer was, but that meant that we had to find out the answer. That helped to build up our knowledge. Now we can call ourselves experts in college transferring, and that is why we are able to be very successful in consulting.

Chris: Absolutely.

Help a Lot of People

Lan:  Now. Let’s go on to the third benefit of writing your own e-book, and that is you get to help other people.

Chris:  Right. Probably the greatest thing about this is that a lot of students who talk about our particular niche were interested in transferring colleges and were looking for information. Maybe they were wondering whether or not they should transfer and if they decided that they didn’t want to transfer, how to put together a really great application and what they should say on their essays, how do they ask for letters of recommendation from professors without sounding like they dislike their current school, and how do they say that they want to transfer without also saying that they are unhappy at their current school or that their current school is bad. There were a lot of questions that they had, and we were able to answer them. We talked to a lot of transfer students who had successfully made the switch.

We, ourselves, had transferred, so that was a big plus. The reason why we felt that the book was necessary and why we wrote the book, though it is totally not necessary for you to actually have done that thing in order to write a really good book about it. For example, you could interview a bunch of experts in a particular area that you want to talk about.

By far, I think probably the best overall thing about writing an e-book is to help a lot of people. We have helped hundreds and hundreds of students in a scalable way to transfer colleges. We were able to get testimonials. Some of the best things about it are the letters that we get from people, the e-mails. We got one e-mail from a parent saying that her son had been sort of an underachieving high school student. She had no idea that it was possible to transfer, and he had made a complete turnaround in college and transferred to a really great school. His future looks much brighter than it did before because of our book. It is a great, great feeling to see that happen.

Lan: I remember that e-mail very clearly because the mother said that she was telling us about her son’s acceptance to a college before she told anyone else.

Chris: That’s right. Yes.

Lan:  We have received many e-mails about how we have, in many ways, changed people’s lives through providing this service and selling this e-book.

Chris: It is very fulfilling. Yes.

Create Something – Make Your Dent in the Universe

Lan:  Next, let’s look at how writing an e-book lets you create something and add something to the world.

Chris:  Right. If you are a creative person, then it is very fulfilling to be able to create this brand new thing that did not exist in the world before. For one, I was previously in a job that was not particularly creative. It was very interesting. I learned a lot. There were a lot of great, very smart people there, but you didn’t really get to create things there much. I discovered through the process of creating this book how important that was to me in making my own life feel very fulfilling. If you ever wanted to create something brand new that people value and that people like, this is a great way to do it.

Lan:  It could be an extension of what you are already interested in. I am in the field of education, but I am mostly looking at high school students and adolescents. Through this book I am looking at the realm of higher education. It is really interesting for me to see the entire lifespan of someone’s education. For me, it is not exactly building something brand-new, but it is new in that it is an extension of what I am already doing.

Learn How to Build a Business

Lastly, we are going to talk about how writing an e-book allows you to learn how to run a business inside and out, even if the business you run is actually quite tiny.

Chris:  Right. I think writing an e-book and selling it yourself is a great way to get your foot in the water and to test, “Okay, am I ready? Am I interested in being an entrepreneur?” because the cash costs are relatively cheap, and as you can see the time costs can be pretty cheap as well, too. You do not have to spend a ton of time in order to produce something that is really good and valuable.

Also, you get to try basically putting together a mini start-up. You get to put together the product and then you get to think about “How are you going to sell that that product? How are you going to market it? Who is going to be interested in your product?” as well as all the aspects of the business. You will see the money come in. You will see what your costs.

For learning, it has just been incredible, and that is probably even greater than the monetary gain of the passive income that you gain from it. It has really helped us learn so much that we are using now in other things that we are working on, such as other books and other projects.

Lan:  Once your e-book gains enough traction, you will have a lot of work to do, and you will want to actually hire people. That is something exciting to do because now you are managing people. We are working with writers and other freelancers. That is another aspect of learning.

Chris:  Absolutely.

Lan:  Just to wrap up, I am going to review the five benefits of writing an e-book. First, you get to gain passive income. Secondly, you become an expert in a niche. Third, you help others. Fourth, you create something. Lastly, you learn how to run a business inside and out.

Chris:  We have talked about the five benefits of writing an e-book, putting it together, and selling it. We are going to continue this series. Stick around and subscribe because we are going to walk you through step-by-step of how to conceive what to write about, actually putting the book together, writing it, selling the e-book and beyond.