How can you target your articles to get their interest?
You need to know what people want to know. Some topics won’t be interesting to you, or you won’t have the resources of knowledge to write about them, but somebody somewhere is out there looking for you, and they don’t even know it.
How can you find them? What do they want to know?
Everybody knows about Wordtracker, but now you can use their service free for a whole week–seven days of the best search engine information available and training videos to show you how to use it.
This is not the little 85-word trial, but a full 7-days with all the stops pulled out to let you learn what you really need to know.
The videos are quick and simple, so you won’t waste time trying to figure out how to get the really juicy words or what to do with them once you find them.
This is your chance to match what you know with what people–real people (sometimes called “traffic”)– to your website to see what you are about.
The smallest change in a headline or description can make the difference between 1% and 10% conversion, if you know what change to make. Whether you are writing fiction or self-help or general information, you need to know where to focus your research and expertise.
Just click on this nice big banner (Okay, I make a nickel from it…you can get one too) or go to http://wordtracker.com and have at it.
It might just be the week that changes your online life and your writing career.
If you act quickly, you can snag a f.r.e.e PDF of Mark Joyner’s classic book The Great Formula. This is 245 pages of Joyner’s marketing formula in his clear and entertaining style. He says that they are testing the impact of free ebooks on the sales of print books. I say it’s a steal.
The link is http://www.simpleology.com/courses/tgf/ You’ll be asked to login or register with Simpleology for a copy via email. Wihle you are waiting, you get a chance at the new Great Formula course with lots of goodies for only $97.
Simpleology Elective: The Great Formula You already know The Great Formula can give you the key to a truly profitable business. Now you’ll actually master and implement these ideas in record time.
Advanced Martial Art Techniques for the Mind! Renowned as a master of influence and persuasion Kevin Hogan teaches you the 2 questions you need to ask to uncover someone’s buying profile. Many people have gratefully paid him $195 for this information alone.
The Power of Influence and Confidence 3 audios from the master of influence Kevin Hogan. They include a full length program that shows you the techniques successfully used by others to build their self confidence. Now you can do the same for yourself and your friends, family or customers.
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Psychological Sales Triggers Direct from Joe Sugarman
I’m studying as hard as I can to get myself organized and to take advantage of all the information at my fingertips. I suggest you do the same.
Jack Sinclair has a quick video on his Referral Camp blog to show us how to find a niche for targeted articles and products. It’s clearly produced and takes only three minutes to watch. Give him a look.
Go to http://www.automaticbestseller.com/frank/ and listen to the story of one author who self-published his first book and made it a best-seller. It’s inspiring, and a clear idea of how we have wrong ideas about how publishing works. If you sign up, you can listen in as Linda Geyer interviews rich author Christopher and extracts from him powerful book writing and marketing tactics–eight audio files of about six minutes each. There is also a $1 for 14 days trial of his Best Seller Inner Circle group. I’m not an affiliate, but I’m willing to bet a buck that he knows something I don’t. See you there.
A major component of becoming a wise author is excellent marketing. For a perfect example, check out http://www.hochstadt.com/. This post is an entry, but I really see this as being a perfect way to joint venture and get folks to promote you and your friends products.
What’s my payback in this win/win/win? It’s simple. I’d like to win Gary Evans’ Manifest a Miracle system.
The prizes of the contest are below. click on the Banner to see how to enter. The deadline is April 30, th with Draw Day on May 1st. Check it out now.
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James Brausch knows the power of story to get the reader’s attention. The premise of The Voice Said “Obey” is that anyone can go from any situation, even being homeless with no resources, to living a life of financial reedom in a few weeks, if he or she will take action. He describes coming to awareness out of a methamphetamine blackout through grace and revelation, and then following the command of the quiet inner voice to obey the rules and suggestions those who he came to understand were God’s servants.
His is a case of Divine Intervention, which is the only reliable way for a person to get clean, sober or unaddicted to whatever drug of choice…TV, sugar, mediocrity. Much of the story is graphic and raw, which stands in contrast to the grace of his healing. He makes clear the changes in his perception and how he was able to be happy in what many of us would call dire circumstances.
The events are extremely time compressed, which makes his spiritual awakening and discovery of the Mormon path seem all the more supernatually inspired. In the non-fiction version published on his blog, it took Brausch about six months to get his obedience working in such a way to go back to the mundane work world, and then several years more to his current freedom–not two weeks. But the premise is that he could certainly do it again, and that we can too, wherever we are now. Of course, he knows the value of what he knows, and most of the rest of us do not–and that helps him leverage that knowledge online.
This book is definitely worth the read, though the plot is too time compressed to be completely believeable. In the video offered by Marcus Hochstad, Brausch says he wanted the book to be more exciting, so he made it shorter. It is, however, inspiring and a blueprint for setting up an internet business.
I shared a pre-production copy with my brother, who has had his share of experiences with methamphetamine, and now he is willing to attempt learning some computer skills to promote his music.
I highly recommend this book, for an inspiring story and a quick read. His Internet Business Books (Vol. 1 & 2) are good, too. They are based on blog entries from http://jamesbrausch.com or you can read his new blog at http://jamesbrausch.org, which has much less story content.
We need to feel that things are fair, that if we give, we get. And we need to feel that what we are getting is worth more than what we are giving.
Commitment and Consistency –
Once you make a committment, stick to it. Do what you say you will do. Social Proof –
This is the name for “but everyone else is doing it.” Make it look like your book is the hot thing, and it will sell, at least to people who want to be “the same as everyone else.” Marketing to an elite group makes your product a social marker of “the elite.”
Authority –
If you trust someone’s opinion, that person has authority for you. That’s the key to all sales is gaining the trust of people who see you as an authority in your market.
Liking –
It’s easier to buy from a likeable, friendly person than from an arrogant boor. Which are you?
Scarcity –
Supply and demand…raise one and the other goes down. the trick is to keep the demand up by controlling the supply.
Get a domain name, get a hosting account, set your dns, get an autoresponder, get HTML software, get FTP software.
Now that you have your tools, think about what you want your website to do:
1) attract buyers for your writing
2) collect names and email addresses for later sales
3) tell the world who you are and where you are appearing, speaking
4) host you blog so you can share your thoughts
5) sell your books
You will also need a paypal or paydotcom account to collect money online.
Now build your site, keeping it fairly simple–avoid music, stringy cursors, slow loading pictures. Go to paypal and make your buynow buttons for your book or seminars or other products. Put them in you site. Upload the whole thing to your host, and test it. Then set up your blog on a subdirectory. If you have a Cpanel hosting, look for Fantastico. It will manage the setup for you, if not, go to Wordpress.org, where you can get someone else to do it.
Then start blogging–post something every day, or write a bunch of posts and set the time stamp to release them one a day. Write articles abou the subject of your book, submit them to and link them back to your website. Find other people who write about the general subject of your book,a nd comment on their blogs.
Don’t spam, though. Add to their discussion, or they will delete your comment. After all, you are knowledgeable. Show it.
This is what I am working on for this site. It’s what the gurus say to do. Share your experience for the rest of us.
Amazon, the world’s bookstore has taken a step that affects everyone who is thinking about self-publishing. According to Angela Hoy, owner of Booklocker.com, Amazon has threatened to remove the convenient Buy Now buttons from all books printed on demand (POD) from printers other than their in house printer/publisher Booksurge.
She says:
It is our opinion that Amazon is creating an unfair competitive advantage for itself in two ways… possibly more.
1. Production and Printing - They force publishers to use their printer (who has a bad reputation for quality), which they profit from (cha-ching), and force publishers to give them a deeper discount (cha-ching), and force publishers to pay setup fees for new titles (cha-ching). All this is just for books being sold through Amazon directly. Amazon knows the publisher must also pay to have files formatted to different specs in order to get Ingram distribution (considered imperative for bookstore sales). In fact, all this expense and trouble could even make it more difficult and more expensive for Amazon’s other competitors (bookstores) to obtain these books for their customers.
2. Amazon also competes directly with these publishers for authors. Authors can pay Amazon/BookSurge an average publishing package fee of over $1,000 to have Amazon publish their book. So, Amazon is competing directly with its publishing customers for authors’ books and will, of course, even have access to the publishers’ customers’ (authors!) contact information. I wonder if their new contract protects publishers from Amazon going over their heads and trying to land contracts with the authors directly?
Remember, Amazon has a contract with Lightning Source (LSI), but has gone over its head and contacted LSI’s customers (the POD publishers) directly. That’s how all this trouble began!
Many small press publishers use the services of LSI to manufacture their books with POD technology because LSI printing also includes distribution through Ingram, where nearly all booksellers buy books to sell. This is a hard blow to small presses and self-publishers, who may be forced to decide between the global of Amazon and the lucrative traditional channels used by libraries and bookstores.
Anyone considering self-publishing would do well to read more here: http://www.writersweekly.com/amazon.php where Angela Hoy has collected links about this story.
Amazon.com makes the argument that a digital book can be more easily supplied to a customer if they print it in their warehouse rather than having someone else print it and ship it to their warehouse:
There is no request for exclusivity. Any publisher can use Amazon’s POD service just for those units that ship from Amazon and continue to use a different POD service provider for distribution through other channels
Clearly, it is more aggravation for an author who self-publishes to contract with two different companies to produce books. Amazon also requires the publisher of record to supply a digital copy of the book for the new Search Inside feature, so the point may be moot.
But today’s news from Amazon about Print-on-Demand is the latest move from Amazon revealing a trend toward much more aggressive explicit lock-in attempts. (Not that it’s an entirely new strategy from the folks that brought you the “one-click” patent). Amazon has effectively told publishers that if they wish to sell POD books on Amazon, they must use Amazon as the POD printer. Small/self publishers are unsurprisingly feeling bullied.
Let’s look at four levels of lock-in at play here:
Data-driven lock-in. This is the core “Web 2.0″ piece. Reviews and recommendations (and now data on S3 and EC2 usage). Again, this implicit, and in general is good for consumers.
Format lock-in. …. This one is bad for consumers (who can’t read their Kindle books on another device — oh, the irony!), but isn’t immediately much of a problem for publishers — at least until it leads to …
Pricing power lock-in. Just as Apple reset the price of music … Amazon is resetting the price of a book. For customers who feel they shouldn’t have to pay as much for something that never needed to be printed or shipped, this makes sense. It’s good for consumers, but bad for publishers. … The upshot here is that lower prices in the short term can have expensive long-term consequences.
Channel lock-in. This one raises the stakes considerably. …This is very bad for publishers, particularly because it’s really a 1-2 punch of pricing-power lock in as well. When a book intended for POD has only one route to customers, the company controlling that route is free to add whatever tolls it would like. But it’s also bad for consumers, who will soon have fewer places to find POD-only titles, and less choice is rarely a good thing.
Lock-in per se is almost always good for businesses, … but publishers will defensively respond to this by treating Amazon more like an adversary than a partner, which in the long run isn’t good for anybody.
Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore is a wonderful tool for editing, light on theory and full of technique and examples. It is easily the best book I have read on revision with specific suggestions on all aspects of fiction writing.
Lyon writes both for planners and seat-of-the-pants-ers, with thoughts on structure, style, characterization, and punctuation and syntax. I am reading an advance copy, which came just at the right time (Thanks, Universe!) to help me with the WIP.
Lyon’s style is conversational, clear and supportive. Her examples come from contemporary literature rather than from movies or television, and she assumes that the reader has a manuscript in process. Her book has many good suggestions for creating a first draft, but that is not her focus.
My favorite technique is in the first chapter, called riffing. Here’s her explanation:
It is similar to what has been called free writing or writing to a prompt–a picture or word or memory–or free association on paper. These methods fill your pages with writing, they help loosen you up and stick it to the censors, and they generate ideas for manuscripts. Riff-writing differs from these methods by being expressly applied to revising a portion of your writing….Riff writing helps you expand your imagination around a particular problem or need–to lengthen a section, to add images or to develop more characterization for example.
Starting with a sentence or paragraph that needs work, pick one aspect of craft–feeling, object, memory, attitude, setting–and develop it with whatever comes to mind: “overwriter; dont’ stop when you have the first impulseto. Keep writing; keep writing.”
Lyons goes on to tell the story of playing jazz with professional musicians, and being mortified when she played wrong notes. She was told, “There are no wrong notes. you work them and they become part of the riff.”
Each chapter has a handy summary-checklist to keep the reader on track with revision. The book is designed to be used as a reference, so that the reader is directed to the chapters which deal with specific approaches and specific difficulties. She is careful to discuss pitfalls of any approach to writing, such as advantages and disadvantages of single point of view, dual points of view, and author intrusions. She discusses the differences in structure between the hero’s journey, as described by Joseph Campbell and the heroine’s journey described by Maureen Murdock, and how each fits into a different genre and approach to storytelling.
Lyon writes from two decades experience as an independent book editor at her freelance editing company, Editing International, http://www.4-edit.com. Her other titles are The Sell Your Novel Took Kit, A Writer’s Guide to Fiction, National Directory of Editors& Writers, and Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write. She is available to speak and instruct at writers conferences and will present private custom-made workshops for groups of writers called “I’ll come to You.”
Elizabeth Lyon, Manuscript Makeover from Penguin Books, ISBN 978-0399-53395-2
