One of the best things you can do as a freelance Web writer is diversify your income streams by creating, and selling, informational products. I would hazard a guess that the most common informational products for freelance writers to be selling would be e-books or reports (you also might sell membership to premium content on a website though).

Now I’ve tried a few different services or methods of selling informational products, including manual delivery with Paypal payment buttens, E-junkie for payments and secure delivery, and Clickbank.

E-junkie is by far my favorite of those methods from a seller’s perspective. Here are some of its benefits:

• E-junkie can be used to sell pretty much any kind of informational product you could imagine.
• You can sell up to 10 different products (you can sell an unlimited number of each) for just $5 per month - other service levels exist if you need to sell more.
• They don’t charge transaction fees (Clickbank’s biggest problem - they really add up).
• They don’t charge a setup fee (Clickbank does).
• You can easily create discount codes for promotions (you can’t with Clickbank).
• E-junkie gives you secure delivery built in - for example, you can set a time limit on each download link set, or a maximum number of downloads before a link expires to stop people from passing around a static download link (you can’t do this with Clickbank either).
• You can still accept Paypal payments, among other options.
• You can run your own affiliate program there (the only problem is that you deal with the affiliate administration and payments yourself - although they do give you the tools and reports - the affiliate issue is the only area where Clickbank comes out on top).
• It can be used in conjunction with other programs - for example, if you want to have an affiliate program through Clickbank but want E-junkie to secure your downloads and delivery, you can do that (that’s what I’m doing now with the first Web Writer’s Guide e-book).
• When you make a sale through E-junkie, you get your payment right away (unlike services like Clickbank where they hold the payments and pay you weekly, bi-weekly, etc.).
• You have complete control over your guarantees if you want to offer one (or return policies) - you don’t with Clickbank, where you have to abide by their return policies.

E-junkie’s a great service. I love it. I went with the E-junkie / Clickbank combo strictly to have Clickbank manage the affiliate program. Honestly, that program hasn’t done much for my e-book sales other than cost me more money (I lose nearly $4 of every sale I make myself, which would be unneccessary since I was making those same sales solely through E-junkie without the added cost). Unless that changes quite significantly, I’ve already decided that the future e-books in my series here will be sold exclusively through E-junkie without the affiliate program.

If you’re looking to start selling products of your own, I urge you to give them a look. The interface is pretty intuitive even if you’re new to selling informational products, the prices can’t be beat, and you retain a lot of freedom that you would lose with other services.

One thing you’ll learn in The Web Writer’s Guide to Launching a Successful Freelance Web Writing Career is that being a Web writer can be about much more than taking on articles, copywriting, or other writing projects from clients.

Something I like to talk about when I’m chatting with new writers is moving beyond that client work and writing “for yourself.”

What is “Writing for Yourself?”

When you write for yourself, you’re not being contracted to create something based on the needs of a client. You become the client! You have absolute control and complete freedom, and rather than a one-time payment, in many cases you’ll earn recurring income over time.

E-books as a Form of “Writing for Yourself”

E-books are one of my favorite things to work on as far as my “me” projects go. As you know, I’m soon launching the first e-book in the Web Writer’s Guide series. I also previously wrote and sold a short e-book called Press Releases Made Easy (which is now available for free through ProBusinessWriter.com).

Both of these projects have been completely different for me. My press release e-book was created at the demand of my clients - some simply wanted to better understand press releases. I spent a “whopping” 5 hours writing it - yep, that’s it! At that point it was just 18 pages (the updated version available on the site listed above is now 20 pages). It earned me far more during the time it was being sold than I would have earned by billing out those 5 hours to clients - and the income kept coming in. When you aren’t expecting it, it’s like a pleasant little surprise every time you see a new payment rolling in (you’ll learn to love that feeling).

The new e-book is over 80 pages (it will likely be closer to 90-100 pages when the edits are complete). It took me months to put together (a big difference from the first e-book). I ran a 14 Day E-book Writing Challenge at my freelance writing blog a while back. At the end, I felt my work was too general, and that it would be better served as an e-book series. So I spent further weeks separating that information, expanding upon parts of it, and weeding things out to target the more narrow niche of freelance Web writing. That’s how the Web Writer’s Guide series and this blog were born.

My point is this - when you write for you, you get to decide how much time you want to put into a project, what you want that product to “look like” after the fact, and how much you want to earn from it (you’ll get there with a combination of the right pricing strategy and the right marketing plan). The only deadlines you’ll face are the ones you choose to set for yourself, and a little bit of discipline will go a long way in letting you work your own writing projects around client work that pays the bulk of the bills in the meantime.

Pick up a copy of Launching a Successful Freelance Web Writing Career after the e-book launches to learn more about residual income streams available to Web writers. Keep your eyes peeled for updates on its pending launch (hint: in less than 2 weeks)!