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.

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).

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.

Folks,

I just wanted to give you a head-up that Steve Celeste just posted a really nice guide on his blog about how you can go from $0 to $1,000 in a month. It’s a really good step-by-step guide - not very detailed, of course, but if you’re at a loss how to get started making money online, then it’s definitely a nice read.

You can find the guide here.

For those of you not in the know, Terry Semel is the CEO of Yahoo - or was until Monday 18, when he got the boot. Ok, so it might not have been as flashy as Carly Fiorina’s exit from HP, but it does show just how long executives from traditional businesses tend to last in the Silicon Valley.

The short answer is: 6 years.

And, by Gods, the guy deserved it. Look, I don’t mean to be hard on him, but let’s face the truth - Yahoo has been underperforming Google ever since the latter’s inception. I remember sticking with Altavista just because I could search for exact phrases by using quotation marks - but as soon as I saw that Google had that functionality, I never looked back.

Come on - does anyone here even seriously consider Yahoo in their Internet marketing business (especially now that the Overture tool is become increasingly useless with everything passing day?) Seems like everywhere you go, it’s Google, Google, Google - Google Mail, Google Video, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Earth.

And then there’s Yahoo, stumbling blindly in Google’s footsteps, trying to haphazardly match its moves and acquisitions without really understanding the reasons for them in the first place.

I don’t mean to be hard on Terry Semel, I really don’t - I’m sure the guy did his best. But I, for one, welcome the fact that he’s out and Yahoo’s co-founder is in as the new CEO. If there was ever an example of an innovative company that blew it, it’s Yahoo - so hopefully it’s co-founder can return it to its roots (and maybe give ol’ Google some competition, thus making things better for us Internet marketers?)

Hey, maybe we’ll even get lucky as the new CEO will bring the Overture tool back?

You can read more about this story at TechCrunch.

Recently, I’ve been looking at a number of what appear to be profitable niches. Unfortunately, they all have one major issue with them - they need to be addressed from a woman’s point of view.

Now, no matter how talented a writer I may be, I really can’t write as a woman. Sure, I can design the e-book in cute pink colours, but anyone who reads it will immediately realise from my analysis that it’s being written by a man.

However, there’s one person whom I never considered involving in my Internet marketing adventure…

My Mum!

She’s a woman. She can write. She can analyse things from a woman’s point of view. And she doesn’t charge you an arm and a leg for coming up with the bullet points you need to get started.

So, next time you’re fishing around for an alternative point of view, never forget your family and friends. You’ll be surprised just how many valuable perspectives you can get this way.

So, today I registered the domain name - a niche Overture keyword .net domain - for the niche product, while my Mum is sitting in the other room scribbling away at the bullet points I need to get started.

Honestly, I never thought I’d turn this into a family business, but it might not be such a bad idea, after all…

Ok, I might as well admit it - I’m suck at taking action.

Loud boos from the audience, please…

Here I am, sitting on a goldmine of a keyword. It receives 600 searches daily and has only about 900 results on Google (most of which are utterly worthless). It’s just begging for an e-book, and yet today…

• I played Victoria and annexed Korea and a sizable chunk of China
• I played Kudos and modded the game to my satisfaction
• I played Democracy and turned Russia into an alcohol-free, capitalist society
• I watched the first half of the fourth season of South Park (and it rocks)
• I promised my girlfriend I’ll take her out for dinner when she comes back

The only thing I didn’t do is take action!

So, here’s my question, folks - how do you motivate yourselves to take action? How do you go from the “Oh my God, I found a niche!” stage to “Oh my God, I’m friggin’ rich!” stage?

Really, there’s no worse feeling in the world than putting a lot of time and effort into your article, doing research and optimizing it for the benefit of search engines, only to see those ungrateful readers leave without bothering to click the link to your site in the “About the Author” box.

Well, it doesn’t have to be like that! Infodude posted at WF a great way to “pre-sell” people into visiting your website - simply make it clear from the start that it is only Part I of the article! Obviously, your biography box will then say that the rest of the article can be read at your blog.

Again, all credit goes to Infodude for coming up with this fantastic idea - I will be testing it over the weekend to see if it results in increased conversions (although I have a gut feeling that it will). His original post can be found here.

On a side note, my final article with EZA is still awaiting approval, which is rather frustrating as I cannot submit any more articles until my account is upgraded, and that won’t happen until the final article is approved. Looks like I’ll have to make the best of what GoArticles and ArticleDashboard have to offer…

Yay! My first EZA article to end up on the front page of Google (beyond the fold, though). I’m pretty happy, actually - now here’s hoping I got my keyphrase stats right and traffic will finally start coming in!

Alright, I know that two days isn’t enough time to see any results at all - I did start getting some inbound traffic from my articles, but that’s about it. More ominously, Google seems to have dropped my Blogger niche site from its SERPs for whatever inscrutable reasons - hopefully this is just a temporary fluke.