Some years ago, my company published Child Health Care, a textbook for nurses in South Africa. The content is open-licensed (Creative Commons). While EBW has a site for all its content (EBWHealthcare), I thought it would be an interesting experiment to create a super-simple one for basic mobile phones containing only the content of one book. The primary focus is simplicity.

I’m monetising the site as a sales affiliate and as a reseller. First, I’ve linked to the printed book on Kalahari.net, so that visitors can buy it from a popular online retailer. I’ve used an affiliate link to earn a little from each sale. Second, EBW Healthcare has a reseller system: anyone can register as a reseller to sell EBW Healthcare books, and receive up to 20% of the sale price. (It may seem odd that I’d receive a reseller fee from my own company, but I’m doing this largely as an example of how it could be done by others.)

Of course, Google doesn’t like duplicate content, so this site won’t get great rankings in search results, if it appears at all. Canonical links on EBW Healthcare’s site will help keep it ranking as the primary source for this content.

Tools used: WordPress CMS with the simplr theme by Scott Wallick. (I had the adjust the theme quite a bit.) Filezilla for installing it and phpMyAdmin for getting the content into the database. That’s about it.

Process: First, I checked with the EBW Healthcare team that it would be okay to do this site. I got the content directly from EBW Healthcare as SQL. Once I’d imported the SQL content using phpMyAdmin, I spent several hours moving it around and cleaning it up the way I needed it in WordPress. Then I worked through the template files making changes (mostly commenting out code I didn’t want and changing CSS). Finally, I added the affiliate links for purchases. Probably about ten hours in total in the end.