$1k Blog

I just set up a gallery of all the e-covers I have done so far - there are only two there at the moment (I might be uploading the third one, depending on whether I get permission from the website’s owner). In the meantime, you can check out the gallery here.

Well, after much hesitation, I finally broke down and got a copy of CoverAction Pro. Although I’m not exactly a Photoshop expert, I was able to start creating my first e-cover with it within an hour of downloading the software (thanks Mark for those how-to tutorial Camtasia videos!)

You can see the results for yourself here:

http://www.how-to-diet.net/ecover.html

Now, yes, I know, it’s not perfect. In fact, it’s far from perfect. In fact, it probably sucks horribly. But it’s still one heck of an achievement for someone who was scared to death of working with graphics all his life!

Shockingly, the e-cover was well-received on the Warrior Forum - this thread has so far garnered about 30 replies, most of them positive (and those that aren’t positive contain constructive criticism, which is just as important!).

I’ll be working more with e-covers in the future, since I quite enjoy the creative process (now if only I could figure out this damn Gradient tool…) You never know, maybe I could open an e-cover service someday!

Now, to be a little bit more serious about it, I’ve been thinking about offering free e-covers to a limited number of Warriors. The objective is not primarily to build up my portfolio (although that would be nice, too). Rather, Warrior Forum has helped me a LOT over the last year, and I know from experience that people are always interested in free e-covers, so it could be a good way to give back to the community.

On a side note, if you don’t know what CoverAction Pro is, it’s a collection of Photoshop action scripts. Basically, you simply load them up into Photoshop and execute them and they handle the more complicated aspects of e-cover design (for example, adding a spiral binding or rotating the image). As a result, your ability to create an e-cover is now limited only by how well you can design the front and the side; CoverAction Pro takes care of positioning and adjusting the image to look like an e-cover.

Dear all,

The time has come to raise the proverbial curtains and reveal my newest project. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a very warm welcome to Free Diet Programs!

As the name suggests, the website is about weight loss. It’s something I put together in cooperation with a good friend of mine from Warrior Forum (Michael Oksa). The website provides 121 free weight loss tips (including free diet programs), with one such tip sent to your e-mail inbox every 3 days.

It’s completely free of charge, so if you are dealing with weight loss issues, do visit us at Free Diet Programs!

As I implied in my previous thread, I’m a little bit of a Scarface fan. That doesn’t mean I’m into the whole gangster thing or that I approve of Tony Montana’s moral choices or, indeed, business dealings; however, as far as rags-to-riches stories go, he’s certainly one hell of an example to observe, if not necessarily to follow.

Anyway, below is a great clip from Scarface which shows Tony’s growing prominence and wealth. The soundtrack (”Push It to the Limit”) fits right in with the whole advancement theme. Somehow, just watching that clip energizes me, whether it’s working out in a gym or doing my next Internet marketing project (by the way, we have reached a major milestone today, but I’m not going to talk about it… yet).

Anyway, here’s the clip that’s got me all excited:

Well, ok, not quite to the top yet - but, having watched Scarface yesterday, I started doing some research on the movie, which led me to doing some research on Al Pacino, which in turn led me to this…

This is a wonderful and very inspirational speech by Al Pacino, and a rather decent kick in the shins for aspiring Internet marketers like me who are just brimming with creative ideas but never get around to implementing any of them…

I hate SEO.

Quite frankly, when it comes to my list of things I’d rather be doing, SEO isn’t just right down at the bottom - it also has “Would rather shoot myself” scribbled right next to it.

Now, obviously, it isn’t wise to ignore SEO. All things being equal, a search engine-friendly, keyword-optimized website will always perform better than one created without extensive SEO effort.

However, if you’re driving traffic to your website with articles, then you can afford to disregard SEO and instead focus on content. In fact, the only thing you should worry about is whether your article can be found in the EZA database by people looking for thematically-related information.

As an experiment, I wrote an article without any regard to SEO and submitted it to EZA. It received over 100 views in two weeks.

Now, obviously, I could have done better - but keep in mind that the topic I was writing on is not highly popular to begin with, and, if search engine traffic is any indication, not a lot of people were looking for it on the Internet. I reckon I could’ve gotten much better results with a more popular topic (and that’s something I will be trying out over the next few weeks).

Now, let me set the record straight - I am not suggesting that you shouldn’t focus on SEO. SEO, even for EZA articles, can be a huge advantage, especially if you can include your keywords in such a way that the article gets ranked on the top of Google’s SERPs for the selected keyword.

The point is, if you are working with something like weight loss, where almost every last keyword - niche or not - has been “taken” by someone else, you can always write articles that people, not search engines, will read. You might get less traffic than way as compared to going the SEO route, but a bunch of articles like that can quickly add up (and maybe land you the sales you need to start a PPC campaign).

Failure is the best teacher.

I know this sounds rather pessimistic, but it’s the truth. Only by failing do you carefully sit down and examine exactly what you did wrong - and how you can get it right the next time.

Sure, success works, too. But, sometimes, when the money is rolling in, there seems to be little need for introspection. Why fix something that isn’t broken?

So, what have I learned from my failures so far?

First and foremost, do your keyword research before you start a project. Chances are, if you’re a creative person with brilliant ideas bursting out of every conceivable orifice, you will probably find the whole process of keyword research horribly boring. I don’t blame you - in my books, as far as excitement goes, keyword research is right there next to accounting or Biology classes.

Keyword research is dry and dead boring - but it’s also necessary. Even if you ignore basic SEO for a moment, keyword research allows you to figure out whether there’s actually any demand for your idea. For example, the biggest problem with my latest e-book was that I thought it was a great idea. Unfortunately, the rest of the world disagreed (how ungrateful!), so here I am, stuck trying to drive traffic to a site for a keyphrase that gets about 10 uniques a day.

Sure, you can get lucky, roll out a product and discover that there’s a lot of demand for it. That’s great - go collect your paycheck and throw a party at the local nightclub. However, if you overestimate the demand - and that can easily happen without keyword research - you’ll have wasted weeks on writing the product, not to mention the money it cost you to register the domain name and get the ecover done.

When it comes to keyword research, I strongly recommend NicheBot. I finally broke down and subscribed, and I’ve been seeing some rather good results. With Overture gone, NicheBot relies mainly on Wordtracker and shows both daily searches and the number of competing results. It’s pretty nifty, and you can do some in-depth digging too if you want (though it costs you so-called “premium credits.”) Better still, at $9.97/month, NicheBot is pretty cheap, and it sure gets the job done.

Ok, first of all, I know I haven’t updated this blog in ages. Sorry everyone - I wish I could say that something terrible had happened (house burning, pet dying or Armageddon taking place). Unfortunately, saying any of that would be untrue - I don’t have a house or a pet, and Armageddon got cancelled because of the exobriant cost of on-stage pyro effects.

Fact of the matter is, I guess I have somehow lost interest in blogging - but not in Internet Marketing. I’ve been experimenting with my own info products ($7 reports and full-fledged e-books). Some of them have done better than others, but I have yet to strike it big and experience the kind of success that you see people talking about on WF.

I’m currently working with someone on putting together an autoresponder series. If everything goes planned, we should be looking at the end of this week as the release date. I can’t really go into the specifics yet, but I will say that this is problably one of my more thought-out and better researched projects today.

As for this blog, I have just gone through all the comments I have neglected to moderate and deleted a LOT of useless spam (Akismet isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it seems). I can’t guarantee that I will continue updating this blog, but I just wanted to know that I’m still alive somewhere out there, working on bringing the next e-book to a website near you…

Well, just as I promised, I am getting started with some seriousInternet marketing this weekend. What I have so far is a blueprint for my Internet marketing campaign. Please let me know what you think:

1. Develop a free report.
2. Build awareness of this free report by interacting with the target audience on their forums. Since the report will be free of charge, I will be able to create links to it without violating anti-advertisement rules.
3. Use the free report to create a list of contacts.
4. Develop a paid e-book and sell the e-book using the list.
5. Create a membership website and promote it to existing customers.
6. Depending on how much time it takes to maintain the website on a monthly basis, I will either continue developing it or sell it on SitePoint as a consistent revenue stream. I will attempt to broker an agreement whereby I retain a percentage of all monthly profits generated from the site.

Well, this is my Internet marketing plan in a nutshell. I will also post on the Warrior Forum discussion, but in the meantime please do not hesitate to let me know what you think.

Today, I came across a very interesting study by Dee, a fellow Internet marketer. She did a terrific job of surveying a number of ghostwriters to determine lowest, average and highest prices that people charge for an article or an e-book of any given size.

You can dispute her calculations all you like, but it’s still a pretty interesting read. One of the notable things is that those $5 writers are not as prolific as I thought - in fact, the study shows that, on average, a 500-word article costs $20! To be completely honest, this is almost too good to be true, so I can’t help but wonder if the relatively small sample size had something to do with it.

Be that as it may, Dee still did a great job and if you’re a ghostwriter or are thinking of hiring one, I strongly suggest you check our this thread on the Warrior Forum.