Lets say you’ve identified a skill you have. For the purposes of this example, we’ll say that your skill is fixing wooden chairs. It could be grooming the dog, it could be finding the cheapest petrol. It really doesn’t matter what your skill is, the methods we are going to outline here will allow you to use the skill to make extra money from home.

The first thing you need to do is put down on paper exactly what your skill is and how you go about doing it. Pretend that you are sitting (maybe on a wooden chair), with your hands tied behind your back, and you need to explain to someone that has never touched a wooden chair in their life, how to fix it. Now, write down in your word processor exactly what you are saying to this person. 

By the end of doing this exercise, you should have a couple of pages of in depth information on your skill. If you haven’t written at least 800 words, then you probably haven’t gone into enough depth, and your imaginary trainee is standing there looking at the chair and scratching his fictitious head. Go back and fill in some gaps until you have a decent couple of pages.

Now that you have a few pages, grab some images that match the skill that you have described and place them into the document. You can get royalty free images from sites such as Flickr, just go to advanced search and select the Creative Commons option. As long as you remember to credit the original author, you can legally use these photos however you like. Play around with their placement until it looks good and give your topic a nice title page. Once you are happy with how it all looks, you need to print the document as a PDF file. If you don’t currently have software to do this, you can download a program called CutePDF to do so. Then Voila! You have an e-book.

Of course, this technique is not limited to chair repairs. You could be teaching someone how to put on a diaper, how to fly fish, how to count cards, what to invest in, the options are only limited by your imagination and knowledge.

That’s all fine and well, you say, but how is that possibly going to make money? Well, glad you asked. What you need to do is sign up for a service like Clickbank. Sign up as a vendor and list your eBook as a product available for download for a small price (say around $5). You will be surprised at how many people will buy this information if the price is low enough. And the best part is, the way Clickbank works, other people sell the item for you. You offer them a bit of commission for their trouble, and sit back and watch the dollars trickle in. 

Now, I realise I have glossed over a lot of the details in this post, but in future posts we will be going into a lot more depth on how to set up Clickbank, how to set up a web page that will sell your eBook, and lots of other tricks to get this working for you. This is just one of many ways that you can start making money from home. Stay tuned for more ideas next time.