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.

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…

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…

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.

First of all, there’s been a new breed of spammers visiting my blog lately, and, in spite of my best efforts, Akismet has been unable to prevent them from posting. If this trend continues - as I fear it will - I will have no choice but to enable manual moderation of comments. It’s not something that I would like to do, but I’m sure it is preferable to having thousands of links to porn sites all over my blog. If anyone can recommend a better anti-spam addon than Akismet, please do let me know.

As for me, it seems that this week has finally drawn to a close. With only one day left, I am really looking forward to getting down and dirty with info product development. I think it should be quite exciting and I really want to push myself to the limit and finally get some serious work done. You know what they say - that the best way to start writing is to never stop, and there is exactly what I intend to do. Heck, I spent the better half of the class today just looking around the room and writing down possible niche subjects (people thought I was crazy).

Ok, just a few quick noteworthy updates:

1. Steve Celeste has just updated his blog with the next chapter of his life story. If you’ve never read it before I strongly suggest you do so, because he really gives you a nice breakdown of how he succeeded as an Internet marketer from scratch. I have been following his story closely and strongly encourage you to do the same - here’s a link to his site.

2. I have become increasingly frustrated and confused with keyword research. As many of you may know, the Overture tool is no longer functional, since it only returns results from January 2007. I am currently thinking of buying myself a Word Tracker subscription, but with $27 a week and no clear business plan on how to use it, I’m going to wait for a while and see what other free keyword research tools I can find.

3. Warrior Forum got a new look today. One of the most noticeable changes is that there is now a Warriors Offers section in addition to the Warrior Special Offer one. Warrior Forum takes a 20% commission for all product sold through the new section, but there is no initial deposit fee to put your product up for sale. As I understand it, the commission fee payment process is not automatic, which means that you will have to make your payments to WF manually from your PayPal account every month.

4. This weekend, I’m planning to get some serious work done on my info product. The exact subject of the e-book has by now changed several times, reflecting my confusion with keyword research. However, come Friday, I am hoping to finally have some time to sit down and make up my mind on what exactly I want to write about. I will also probably buy one-week Word Tracker subscription then - I will, of course, let you know whether Word Tracker is worth paying for (I know a lot of people who swear that it is the best thing since sliced bread).

Well that’s all the updates from now — I don’t know if I will have the time to update my blog tomorrow, but you can definitely expect to see some news over the weekend as my product development process finally shifts into the next gear.

Those of you bored enough to read my blog will know that I’ve set myself a goal to be earning a stable $6,000 a month within 365 days.

The way I see it, that should get me started on my ultimate life goal - a Piaget watch for my girlfriend and freedom to play World of Warcraft for me. Hey, a guy’s got to aim big in life, right?

But, here’s the deal - when I first posted on WF about my goal, people told me that I was barking mad to be focusing on e-books to accomplish that. For example, Steve Celeste pointed out that e-book profits are based on sales, and that means they don’t make a good source of residual income. Vince Runza (Vince, if you’re reading this, you are very inspirational) suggested looking at putting together a membership site (a PLR site could work well in my case, since I’ve got some writing experience to begin with).

So, here’s the choice I’m looking at - e-books vs. memberships. An e-book is fun to write and all, but a membership site will probably mean more reliable income (ultimately, I could write an e-book and sell it to my site’s members). However, it also means constant maintenance and provision of new content, which, if not outsourced, will lead to me working 20h a day just to keep everything going.

Steve Celeste writes that he successfully flipped his first-ever membership website when he realized that he just couldn’t keep up with all the work. After earning his first $2,000 from memberships, he sold the site via SitePoint forums for another $6,000.

What do you folks think? E-books or memberships?