Now, I don’t normally use my blog for ranting purposes, but this time around I reckon I had better test your patience than the structure of my monitor, as I have a few extra heavy books next to me and am not afraid to start tossing them around…

Basically, as some of you may/may not know, I’m combining a part-time job, graduate-level courses, girlfriend, Internet marketing, product development and another temporary job, which kind of leaves me with little time for myself. Now, that in itself is manageable - but the professor for the class I’m taking right now has a reputation for assigning unreasonable amounts of homework. Well, this time, he has really outdone himself.

I have a time-consuming piece of academic work due for Tuesday, plus I need to get started with the research for two project he assigned me. Yet another piece of work was due as soon as possible, and I made the mistake of informing him that I’ll have it delivered by the end of Friday. Of course, as it happens, things came that required my attention, so I didn’t manage to get it done - and one hour later, I get the following e-mail

Dear George,

the end of Friday was 1 hour ago… I did not get the subject list. Best regards

Ok, I might as well just come out and say it…

No, sir, your class is not my priority, not by far. Somehow, I think I’m going to get a lot further in life by focusing on things that matter - such as my girlfriend and releasing my own info product.

 

I’m doing the best I can - and if you don’t like it, get over yourself and accept that there are more important things than your class.

 

I appreciate everything you’re doing for us, but, for our common sake, please stop.

Goddamn it, I understand that it’s graduate-level study and it’s supposed to be tough - but whatever happened to figuring out that all of us - and I mean all of us - need some “me time” when we can relax and not have to worry - even for a few hours - about something that is due tomorrow (which is exactly the kind of schedule this professor forces on you).

Sure, it’s great if you’re like half the people in the class who are full-time student, have rich parents and don’t give a damn as to where their money is coming from and why. But if you’re actually working to make ends meet, having someone bug you about a one-hour late deadline is pretty frustrating.

Sure, it’d be normal if he’d be paying my salary - but, for crying out loud, I’m the customer here, not him. And, while I’m all in favor of demanding academic programs, e-mailing me at 1:21am on a Friday night is, frankly, ludicrous.

Well, rant over, I guess - now here’s hoping no one from my university drops by to visit this blog…

In my last post, I had a bit of a debate with my childhood friend Pavel (see the comments for this post), and one of the things he said kind of got me thinking - are us e-book writers, for the most part, just compilers?

Don’t get me wrong here - I know there’s plenty of original material out there. I know when Andrew Hansen releases another e-book, it’s going to be a new Internet marketing technique, not a compilation of all WF posts for the last year. I know when Michael Cheney updates his AdSense Videos, he’s going to come up with something really new, not a rehash of free advice that you can find online.

But, let’s face it, for most of us working in non-IM niches, we’re just compiling the stuff out there. As a ghostwriter, I had to work on a number of e-books where I was basically told “George, I need a book on this and this and this, and here’s a good website that can get you started.” Only once was I asked to write an article on a topic I had personal experience with - the rest of my works were based solely on Internet research (and I bet the same goes for most ghostwriters out there).

So, are we the information sellers just compilers? I suppose it is a more accurate description than most of us are prepared to admit. Yet, compilers though we might be, if there is a demand for our services, why not? After all, isn’t it better to spend $27 on an e-book than to spend a whole week researching the topic yourself?

One final point should be made here, I think. Consider the example of history books. By definition, most of the stuff you find there is not new. In fact, in the Preface to his fabulous “Europe: A History”, Norman Davies wrote that “Little in this book is new”, proceeding to openly admit that 99% of the information included in the book is really a compilation from other sources.

Is the real source of our demand not the scarcity of information, but its abundance? With so much stuff out there available on just about anything, it’s sometimes great to have someone who can sit down and put it all together in a nice 100-page e-book - and with search engines such as Google making access to information increasingly easier, this trend is unlikely to continue.

Are we building our fortunes on a global information overload?

Well, another week has gone by and I’m not any closer to releasing my information product. Sadly, the sheer amount of stuff I’m having to deal with every day is plain ridiculous - in fact, Tuesday was the only day when I was free of both helping my girlfriend and attending my part-time job, so I took that opportunity to relax as well as get a little bit of writing done.

With my Mum’s project still on the backburner (she’s as swamped with work as I am), I started working on a separate product as well pending the completion of her part of the job. However, this time around, I’m going to follow a more systematic approach by using the step-by-step guide in Jim Edwards’ How to Write an E-book in 7 Days. It’s a huge piece of writing (200+ pages), but it’s really worth every penny.

Basically, Jim explains really well how to write your own e-book in just a week. He gives you a 7-day schedule (with only 3 days allocated to writing, actually), and he claims you can even release your info product in a weekend (although I suspect he assumes that you already have sufficient knowledge of the subject and don’t need to do research). Some of the advice he gives isn’t really applicable to me (for example, he spends some time explaining how to overcome writer’s block or any inhibitions regarding writing that you may have), but it’s a great read for anyone new to writing.

I’ll be honest with you here - you probably don’t need Jim’s e-book to write one of your own, especially if you’ve already written a few of them before. However, if you have never done it, then Jim’s guide is really great. I’ll be following it for this week - let’s see if I can get my product ready by the weekend!

For those interested in Jim’s e-book, you can get it here.

Over the last few days, I’ve been working extensively with a number of free keyword research tools. Now, I know there are some paid alternatives out there, but I can’t afford them, and, at any rate, I see no reason to invest into them just yet, since the research tools I’ve found so far seem to do their job just fine.

At any rate, I thought I’d take this opportunity to give something back to my readers and share the free tools I use for keyword research - who knows, those of you who’ve been living under a rock for the last few years might find them handy.

Here they are, in no particular order:

• Overture
• Wordtracker
• Digital Point (a nice combination of Wordtracker and Overture)
• SEO Book (only came across it today - seems to be very powerful)

Now, a few notes as to the functionality of these tools.

Overture is great, but it’s slow and it only pulls results from Yahoo, which means that you have no idea what people are searching for on Google (which, after all, is probably what most of you are hoping to dominate, right?) One rule of the thumb I’ve heard is to multiply the Overture number of searches by 8 to get an estimate of Google searches for the specific keyword.

Wordtracker is great as it already includes Google results - however, the free tool I linked to provides daily search count, which is not always consistent with Overture results (some phrases will appear in Wordtracker but not in Overture, and vice versa). Use at your own risk.

Digital Point is slowly becoming my favourite because it provides both Overture and Wordtracker results - however, be prepared to enter really long authentication humans to prove that you’re not a bot (can be rather annoying at times).

SEO Book provides an estimate of Google and MSN searches (although it multiplies Yahoo results by 2 to get its Google estimate, which may be too conservative an estimate). All in all, a very nifty tool, but I’ve only been using it for a while, so I’m not at all sure if their Google search calculation formula is correct.

One final note of caution - never, ever rely on just one keyword research tool! Not all of the search instruments I listed above are 100% accurate, so it’s always best to analyze what looks like a lucrative niche with another tool or two just to be on the safe side.

Just a few moments ago, I was thinking how to deal with the difficulty I’m having with taking action, when, suddenly, a thought struck me:

Taking action is a question of faith

Really, at the end of the day, it all comes down to whether you believe in your business venture or not. Do you think that your product is going to be a success - or do you fear that it will fail miserably? Do you think that, a month from now, you will be wallowing on piles of cash - or are you scared of wasting time, money and effort to end up with a 1-2 daily visitors to your brand new niche website?

However, the fact that I need to drill deep inside my tiny little head is that risks are inevitable in every business - and even if you invest nothing except for the domain registration fee, there’s still an opportunity cost to your time.

I guess a lot of it depends on how much faith you have in the method that you used to uncover the niche in the first place. Sure, if you’re a grizzled veteran who knows exactly what he’s doing, you probably don’t stop to think about it - you know your tools work, and, anyway, even if they don’t, you probably already have a nice income stream going from your previous successes.

But what do you do when you’re just starting out, when you haven’t got any release products behind your belt - how do you convince yourself to take that proverbial shot in the dark and hope that it doesn’t ricochet right into your face?

Yes, I know, I haven’t posted here for a while - my apologies to all of you who bothered visiting my blog in the meantime and were dismayed by the lack of updates.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, I had to deal with a tremendous amount of offline work, ranging from studying for - and successfully passing, of course! - my own term exams and helping my girlfriend with hers. Afterwards, I also had to leave the country for a few days to address some legal irregularities, so, all in all, this has been anything but the kind of vacation I was so looking forward to.

What’s worse, I had a bit of a difficult time with my girlfriend afterward, and, though we’re back together now, for a few days, Internet marketing definitely did not top my agenda.

In the meantime, I have also got myself involved with a rather lucrative - though not entirely reliable - income opportunity offline, which pays me well enough to stop bothering with writing articles. Writing is a great way to start making money online, but it is very time consuming, and, unfortunately, the payoff is not always worth the time you invest into researching and writing a quality article.

So, what’s next? Well, with my schedule looking rather relaxed for the next few months, I will likely release an information product of my own (which should be quite managable, now that I no longer have to write articles for a living!).

In fact, just today I came across a great e-book by Myleena Phan which explains step-by-step how to identify profitable niches - it’s free and you can download it here.

Well, as you may have guessed, I did not reach my goal of earning $500 in residual income over the last 30 days.

This was, unfortunately, an effort plagued by systematic setbacks, some of which I am personally responsible for, whereas others simply came right out of the blue and smacked me exactly where it hurts the most.

My bum marketing campaign was delayed substantially by waiting to be approved for Basic Plus status with EzineArticles, followed shortly by the suspension of my account due to similar article content. That, at least, was a man-made problem that I take full responsibility for and that I should have anticipated.

This spring, I also suffered with my first case (in 23 years!) of allergies, which pretty much knocked me out cold for about two weeks and resulted in cancellion of one extremely lucrative writing assignment, in addition to rendering me unable to restore my EzineArticles account by rewriting my submissions.

Finally, I also ended up dealing with a completely unexpected amount of university coursework, which left me very little time for writing articles. My part time job was responsible for swallowing up what little free time I had left.

On the positive side, I did learn a few lessons from this debacle. First of all, I finally started keeping an agenda (Google Calendar is great for that). After just a few days of following my schedule to the letter, I already saw some rather impressive results and managed to find quite a few hours of extra time. Whoever said that there are only 24 hours in a day probably never heard of proper organization.

Am I giving up on bum marketing and residual income? God, no! My schedule tells me that I will have a lot more free time starting on May 9, which is when my university term ends. Armed with a more organized schedule, I am confident that I will be able to turn my dream of earning $500 a month of residual income into a reality.

In the meantime, wish me luck with upcoming exams and term papers!

Ok, this post is a rant, so bear with me here…

Just how hard should one work to get an Internet connection upgrade free of charge?

My ISP provider decided to upgrade everyone’s connection for free from ADSL 2000 to ADSL 3500. Great - so I sit there patiently and wait to get my faster connection speed. Fast forward two weeks, and nothing happens, so I call them and they cheerfully tell me that the effective speed of my phone line is only ADSL 600, which is about 4 times less what it should be.

My request for help and for an upgrade results in them calling a technician on Friday to look at my connection.

Come Monday, I can’t connect any longer, because my login details have suddenly become incorrect. Apparently, my ISP’s idea of upgrading my Internet connection is canceling it completely.

Today, after a day of no Internet and of chewing my nails in desperation (imagine spending 6 hours without Internet connection), I call them, they assure me that the line has been upgraded, fix my login problem and wohoo…

…I’m back to ADSL 600!

Why? Well, that’s what the effective speed of my phone line is! So now I’m going to have to wait a week for a technician to look at it and upgrade it, which means I’m almost back to square one.

For crying out loud, how hard is getting an Internet upgrade supposed to be? Dealing with these guys is like pulling out your own teeth - you’d think they should be falling all over themselves to provide quality customer service.

Anyway, /rant off - thanks for listening.

Ok, it looks like my residual income effort will have to be postponed by a few days, simply because I need money quite badly in the offline world.

I’ll be working on a WSO set of 7 PLR articles available for distribution exclusively via WF. That should provide me with a quick injection of cash, as well as experience in WSO deals. Oh, and I’ll have to write my first-ever sales letter (oh, dear).

Ok, yes, I know it sucks and yes, I’d much rather be working on getting a residual income stream going - but my credit card company won’t give a damn about it, trust me.

Ouch, now that was a bit of a “aw bugger” situation! I thought I had my bum marketing campaign more or less planned out (and, indeed, accordingly to the plan I spent yesterday writing articles like a monkey that just got a typerwriter for a birthday present).

What I wasn’t counting on is that I can’t submit more than 10 articles without being a Platinum member! And with articles from my other campaign still pending review (which should happen by Friday), I can’t submit anything else until those get approved and I get awarded Platinum member status.

So, unfortunately, it seems that I’m losing a few days due to EZA stupidity! As if setting up residual income streams wasn’t hard enough already!