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Article (C) 2005
Stuart Reid
http://www.netpreneurnow.com

Making money online is often a solo affair and those that do it full time are usually self-employed. So, this counts as a business. The question that I want I want to debate today is just how hard should we be working at our own businesses, especially when we work from home.

This post has been prompted by an article by Don Miller that I read recently. It’s about Running a Home Based Business Like a Business. Don talks the merits of treating a home based business just like any other business and warns us to be wary of the freedom that comes with working from home.

With Freedom Comes The Need for Disclipline

I love the freedom that my new life gives me. It used to really annoy me to have to turn up at work at 9am 5 days of the week! I hated having to ask for days off or explain that I wasn’t feeling well and I simply hate being told what to do on a daily basis. Employed life was just not for me.

So now I can get up when I want, work when I want, do whatever work I feel like doing, and I can take as much time over it as I like. It’s easy for me to go to the gym or run little errands around town. I don’t have to explain to anybody what I am doing, I don’t have to justify myself in any way. Well I suppose those last couple of points aren’t quite true as I do feel a certain responsilibity towards my blog readers but that is self-imposed and not a result of my circumstances.

Of course the trouble with all this freedom is that it is so easy to abuse it. Just last week I had a couple of days where I had nothing planned and I had intended to work really hard those two days. I was going to write a load of blog posts, do some more marketing for my ebook, catch up on some courses I am working through and so on. On the first day I got to about 4pm having done pretty much bugger all and wondered where on earth the day went! The next day was pretty much the same!

I Used To Be More Organised

After reading Don’s post I felt rather guilty because he suggests I should create a schedule that mirrors my day job, use a to-do list, curb my email time and basically discipline myself much more!

This is just what I used to do. In fact, before I had even quit my day job I had created myself a time planner and plotted out just how much time I was going to spend on various activitied related to work. For the first few weeks in business I worked extremely hard and I tracked all my hours diligently.

There’s More to Life Than Work

The trouble with all this hard work is that it came at a price: I sacrified many of the important things in life in order to make time for all this work. I stopped going to the gym, I stopped doing Karate, I didn’t see my friends and I totally neglected my home life with my family.

The reason that I dived into work so heavily is that as long as I was not earning an income, I was eating into the equity in my home so of course I wanted to start earning money as quickly as possible. However, money is not everything and that really hit home when the relationship with my partner broke down.

Since then, I have been unable to get back into my previous groove and to be honest, I have absolutely no desire to do so. Nowadays I work the equivalent of no more than 3 days a week, sometimes less than that. Instead, I spend time with my family, with my friends, I exercise, I go on days out, I do sports… in short, I’m enjoying my life!

Work Smarter, Not Harder

I’m sure we’ve all heard the expression that it is better to work smarter and not harder. Back in October I reported that I had worked 235 hours in the month and that I had not earned any money. In that post I also shocked myself (and my readers!) by realising that a huge proportion of my time had been spent on activities that were non-essential - lots of reading and not enough doing.

That’s all changed. For instance, as a blogger, I love to read blogs and I have a ton of great blog feeds in my reader. I used to read them all dilligently but now I just scan through the posts and will only read those that stand out and even then, I tend to scan the content a lot more.

Now when I get to work I know that I’m only going to work for a few hours (usually) and quite often it may be several days before I do any more and as a result I have to force myself to concentrate on what’s important rather than feeling as though I have to do everything.

The cool thing is that since I’ve been working less, I’ve been doing better. For a start, I’m actually earning some money now which is nice!

Goals, Plans and All That Stuff

In his article Don says that we should set out each day with goals and that if we don’t we’ll be headed for mediocrity!

I used to be a planaholic! Is that a word? Well anyway, I absolutely loved to make plans and I loved to set goals too. I had pieces of paper with hundreds of goals written on them and I’d make pages and pages of plans on how I was going to achieve them. And then something would change in my circumstances and I’d end up having to re-write a lot of those plans.

To be honest, I spent way more time planning to do something than actually doing it! I was always stuck in what we programmers call ‘Analysis-Paralysis’. It made me feel good to plan, I felt like I was achieving something but I was just kidding myself! Most of the time I wasn’t getting anything done at all!

It’s so different now - I make a few notes such as ideas for blog posts but generally speaking I just take a few minutes to decide what’s important to work on at any particular time and then I just get on with it. I totally go with the flow. I don’t have kind of schedule whatsoever, I just wing-it and it’s working for me.

State of Mind > All Else

Recently I shared my theory of successful blogging and stated that I believe that a blog does well when the writer is true to himself in his writing and doesn’t try to force out posts. I said that the state of mind that you’re in when you blog comes through in the writing and the readers pick up on it. If you blog with passion then your readers will feel passionate too and are more likely to subscribe.

Now I think that this state of mind applies everywhere! Right now, I feel good about my business. I feel that quitting my day job was absolutely the right thing to do and I also feel that I can succeed in business by going with my intuition with regards to work. If I feel like I have been slacking then I’ll take a step back and put more effort into work. If I feel like I am neglecting my personal life then I stop work immediately and go do something else.

I’ve ditched all the plans and schedules in favour of gut feelings and instincts and that’s quite a big thing for me because it’s a huge change in personality.

I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic - both from people who have the luxury of being in business for themselves full time and those that are doing it part time.

You know I think I have found the trick to keeping up with the blogosphere - scanning the content! Everybody scans, nobody reads apparently. Though I am somebody that does actually like to read a post but when I tried to read every post on all the blogs I liked I simply couldn’t keep up. So now I scan headlines, pick out posts I like and then scan the content, sad I guess…

A Deeper Look at Garry Conn

A little while ago I presented a strategy for making money with WordPress using niche sites and I introduced Garry Conn who does something similar (he uses niche blogs) and does very well with it.

While I was poking around his site I found myself reading lots of his stuff and there is gold in those archives! Garry is another WordPress fan and points out that it does not suck. Also Garry is another blogger who provides workable, informative posts such as this guide to the robots.txt file which I really need to absorb and apply myself. Finally, Garry invites his readers to ask him a question.

This Week’s Links

20 Ways to Get Constant Post-Level Links - Inbound links are probably the best way to increase search engine rankings so this two-part article from Wayne Liew is good reading. Don’t miss part 2 also.

The Brilliant Way to Find a Niche Market - I’ve been harping on about niche marketing recently so this in-depth post from Carl Ocab made interesting reading for me.

Google Tells Domain Tasters to Eat Cake - I had never even heard of the practice of domain tasting until reading this article from John Chow. It’s good to be informed of the various practices around.

An Article About Long Tail Keywords - An article from Blogpreneur to help you understand the ‘long tail’ of traffic.

And So It Begins… - This is the very first post from Andrew Stone who has just started a new blog about affiliate marketing. I am giving this a bit of a plug as he’s used my ebook to help him get started

Affiliate Links: To Disclose or Not to Disclose - I picked this post out of my comments from the CommentLuv plugin that I mentioned yesterday. It is from Internet Junkie and gives a good account of the debate over whether or not to disclose affiliate links. In case you were wondering my policy is not to disclose them (kinda obvious on a blog about making money!) but not to hide them either.

Exclusive Interview with Caroline Middlebrook - Shameless self promotion. Thanks to Samantha from What Sells Online for taking the time to interview me.

I am quite fortunate in that I enjoy a lot of reader participation on this blog in the form of blog comments but I’m always looking to improve. I recently discovered a plugin called CommentLuv that extracts the latest blog post of the commenter and links it in with his comment automatically. I’ve been experimenting with it for most of the week…

What the CommentLuv Plugin Does

When leaving comments on a blog, the commenter has the option of putting in a URL which is then linked with his name when the comment is submitted. What the CommentLuv plugin does is look for a blog feed in that URL and if it finds one it extracts the latest post from that feed and links to it as a footer to the original comment. Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action on this blog:

How to Use CommentLuv as a Commenter

When first testing the plugin I mentioned it on Twitter and invited people to come and test it out by leaving a comment on the blog and it looks like several people had some issues with it. For the plugin to work there are several things you need to do:

• Enter a valid URL for the plugin to scan
• Make sure the URL is to your blog home and not an internal page
• Check the “enable CommentLuv plugin” checkbox

Incentives for Commenting

I already use the Top Commentator plugin as an incentive but that plugin is a way of encouraging repeat comments because only the top 10 commenters are shown. When I first installed the plugin I probably only got 10 commenters in one month but now that I have more readers it’s that much more difficult to get on the list. As I write this the person on the bottom of the list has already made 5 comments. Also, the widget is now tucked away at the bottom of the blog so the links are not so prominent.

The CommentLuv plugin encourages all comments, including from first-time readers as it gives the commenter a link with every post and its a very visible link which other readers will see. However, because the link is embedded into the comment and I use the default WordPress settings, those links are no-follow which means that they are for traffic rather than link-juice.

As a blog owner, I love the plugin because it really helps me get to know my readers better. Whenever I see a new name I check out their blog if they have one and have a poke around but I don’t keep checking so it’s actually quite rare that I subscribe to one of my readers blogs. But with this plugin I instantly found myself being drawn to some of the posts and wanting to read them.

Remember in my blog commenting strategy that I said that one of my goals was to get the attention of the blogger? Well if the roles are reversed and I am the blogger that you want to get the attention of then I’m giving you a tip right here - write a post with a compelling title and then leave a good comment on my blog and I’ll be far more likely to notice (and read!) your post!

As an added incentive, I’ve decided that every week in my links roundup I will select at least one post that has been linked from my readers using this plugin.

Php Errors?

The only black mark against the plugin so far has been some pho errors reported by a couple of readers including Kelly Erickson who runs the Maximum Customer Experience blog. Kelly has been very helpful trying to get to the bottom of the problems and has even been in touch with the author.

I’ll keep an eye on it but if you do get problems please do let me know using the contact form. As much as I like the plugin, I’ll remove it if it causes problems for a lot of people and I don’t get a resolution to those problems.

Oooh a new year *bounce* how exciting! What a contrast to December! I’ve had a fantastic month in every way and far exceeded all my goals. So let’s get on with the number crunching…

Blog Stats

RSS Subscribers

Last month I ended just under 1000 and it was my goal to break through that barrier. I far exceeded that ending the month on 1389 subscribers - a growth of about 400 new people! *wave* :-) 

I already showed most of January’s RSS stats in yesterday’s post in which I revealed my theory on the secret of sucessful blogging. In that post I suggested that the reason for increase in subscribers was due to the way in which my writing reflects my personality.

January has been a good month for me personally and this has carried over into my work. I have been feeling really hyped up and enthusiastic, I released my ebook which also gave me a ton of publicity and its quite possible that an unknown number of people have arrived at the blog from the ebook that they have downloaded from elsewhere. The traffic stats reveal more clues about that…

Traffic Stats

For the first few weeks in January the traffic shows a few gentle peaks which is where some of my posts got a bit of attention here and there. You can clearly see the big spike near the end of the month - this is the day after my big email marketing campaign for my ebook.

I actually still haven’t finished that campaign and I sent out emails over a period of several days but on the first day I did almost 100 and that included all of the biggest blogs. What is nice to see is that the traffic levels have stayed high after the spike and I believe this will continue for some time as I still have a lot more marketing to do.

Also, I’ve been writing better posts and these are getting attention from the blogosphere which is always a good thing as that leads to traffic, inbound links, and ultimately new subscribers.

Traffic Sources

This graph is really interesting this month for two reasons. Firstly look at the direct traffic - this is traffic that has come from either a saved bookmark or a link that is not from a website, such as a link embedded in an ebook perhaps? Direct traffic has increased quite dramatically this month accounting for over 4000 visitors!

The second reason this is interesting is that my search engine traffic is also showing a large increase from 7% last month to almost 12% this month. When I first started this blog traffic from search engines accounted for less than 3% and that has risen steadily.

The only reason I can think of is that my PageRank has taken another jump recently, and I am now PR5. Or could it be that because the blog is now 5 months old that it’s coming out of the Google Sandbox? I’m not really an expert on these things but it’s good news anyway as I like to have my traffic sources from multiple streams.

Keywords

I am amazed that 327 visitors came from the keyword “caroline middlebrook”! It astounds me to think of that many people looking for me - does wonders for my ego!

My second highest keyword is “twitter guide” so I had a peek at Google and noticed that I rank number #1 and #2 for that term in the UK at least which is very, very cool.

Something else I noticed - I keep making sales for the Zen to Done ebook even though I reviewed it about 10 weeks ago. When I look through my keywords I am seeing quite a few searches coming to my blog from Google related to “zen to done”. I am now starting to see the power of long term search engine traffic.

Another interesting thing that I saw is that no less than 100 of the searches started with the phrase “how to” and these are obviously people looking for information on how to do something. If I take the time to take a good through that list I’m sure I’ll find lots of inspiration for topics to blog about that would be really useful to people, for example “how to make a Twitter signature”.

Lastly, over 1300 of the keyphrases used to find my blog were used only once, this is true long tail traffic!

Here is my selection of the funny keywords for this month:

such cuteness

Oh I know, what can I say?

big juicy boobs

Haven’t we had this one before??

cheesy millionaire graphics

Hmmm, move along, nothing cheesy to find here!

evil ways to make money online

Um, shouldn’t this one have gone to John Chow?

lolcats look at my balls

Reminds me of when I took a photo of my cat’s balls just before he had ‘em chopped off!

one more pointless blog

Not mine I hope!

yaro, ouch, yaro

That is giving me mental pictures that are not suitable for a family blog like this one! Yaro, what have you been up to?

you tube so far away caroline

So far and yet so near - what??

Referral Traffic Breakdown

Here are my top 10 referrers, I have excluded Google and Bloglines from the list.

1. StumbleUpon (2,932)
2. Twitter (1,292) 
3. Shoemoney (1,078)
4. Techipedia (654)
5. 45n5 (372)
6. Dosh Dosh (337)
7. Lifehacker (290)
8. Courtney Tuttle (248)
9. Search Engine Guide (239)
10. Delicious (227)

It amazes me that I am still getting traffic from the likes of Lifehacker and Search Engine Guide even though those posts were written 2 months ago.!

I’d also like to thank Josh Spaulding, Carl Ocab, Mubin Ahmed, and Yaro Starak for the publicity they have given my ebook - all of them sent a significant amount of traffic my way.

Business Stats

Income 

I’ve been seeing emails coming into my inbox fairly steadily this month telling me that I’ve earned money and it’s been a fantastic feeling! I have been looking forward to adding it all up for about a week now

• BlueHost - $715
• Teaching Sells - $285
• Direct Advertising Sales - $143.25
• Blog Mastermind - $140 
• Zen to Done ebook - $42.75
• SEO Book - $25
• Explosive Cash Flow System - $21.24
• Adsense - $10.26
• DealDotCom - $4.89

Grand Total for January 2008: $1,387.39!

Oh My Gosh! I knew I had hit my $500 target and I estimated that it was about $700 but I did not expect this at all! For starters I totally forgot that Blog Mastermind is a monthly membership so I will continue to get payments for the people I referred for as long as they stay members.

I also found money all over the place unexpectedly and then yesterday I did a bit of an advertising push and got 3 advertisers at the last minute.

Advertising Rates Now Doubled

I announced in yesterdays post that I planned to double my ad rates from today. Note that this has nothing to do with blog stats. Earlier in the month I had an email saying that I had been paid $95 from Teaching Sells. This totally confused me as I haven’t promoted it at all and then I remembered that I plug the free report on the blog in the sidebar.

Similarly, while most of the BlueHost sales come from my WordPress ebook, two of them were not and must have come from the banner that I placed. Note that BlueHost pays out $65 per referral so by charging only $50 for an ad spot, just a single sale would be more than I was earning directly through advertising.

I’ve only got three advertisers right now so I can continue to plug affiliate products and I imagine that their effectiveness will wear off over time but I want to continue to experiment with both methods of monetization.

So from March onwards, sidebar ads will cost $100 each and the top banner will be $140. I’ll update the advertising page accordingly.

Plans For February

I think January will be a tough act to follow because there is no doubt that the bulk of my traffic, subscribers and income has come as a result of my ebook marketing efforts and although there is still more work to be done, I estimate that I have seen the best of it already.

Having said that I have a good feeling in my gut about February, particularly in relation to RSS numbers. I’d really like to hit 2000 subscribers. I know that’s a stretch and I have no idea how I would get over 600 new subscribers in one month but its entirely possible so we’ll see

Other than that, I am totally winging it in February! I have no plans other than quite a lot of blog posts - ideas have just been pouring in from all over the place recently so I have a lot of material ready to go.

A couple of days ago I talked about how difficult it is to make a living online when your business model always relies on knowing the ’secrets’ of the trade.

Blogging is no different - it’s a huge industry and there are many high powered blogs out there with some very wealthy bloggers. So of course many people want to know what the ’secret’ is. Just recently one of my readers asked me how he could write ‘high powered’ posts like me. I have a theory of blogging success, read on to see what it is…

Blogging Success in Terms of RSS Subscribers

Ok first up, for the context of this discussion I am going to refer to the RSS subscriber count as being the measure of success of a blog. There are a ton of other factors but the RSS count is generally accepted as being an important one and its certainly the one that I value most highly.

I use Feedburner to manage my RSS feed and my keeping track of my stats on a monthly basis I can glean all sorts of useful information. Looking at the monthly stats for the months of November, December and January has revealed a startling truth to me but before I tell you what it is, let’s have a look at those stats:

Here is November, notice how it shows growth near the beginning of the month and then after that odd jump in the middle (I still assume this is a feedburner problem not showing proper growth in the middle of the month) it starts to drop off and flatline:

Now the real giveaway is December - the RSS numbers just tick over not really moving at all:

But what’s happening in January? It’s still flatlining at first but after a couple of weeks we start to see signs of life and it grows again. Its grown by over 300 in January!

What Happened to My Subscribers?

In the middle of November I split up with my partner of 10 years (not my choice) and at first I was devastated. I could barely function. I’ve already blogged about this so I wont go over it all again but the effect it had on the blog is that all through the latter part of November and the whole of December I just blogged in maintenance mode.

I didn’t do any real work on any of my projects. I read my emails, responded to comments and managed to find a few affiliate programs to promote but I was basically blogging by the seat of my pants day by day and it showed in the numbers!

In January it started to change. I got back to work, I released my ebook and I started blogging in a way that was more in tune with my usual self and again, this has been reflected in the subscriber numbers!

The growth of my subscribers has been an almost perfect reflection of my personal state of mind. It has nothing to do with post count, or social media or anything else because I kept blogging the whole time!

What Does This Mean?

The conclusion that I draw from it is that the decision to subscribe or not to subscribe comes from something intangible - a feeling, an emotion, a vibe. Somebody comes to your blog, reads the content and if they feel good about it they subscribe and if not they hit the back button.

You can’t fake it - despite blogging all through December, my numbers would not increase. As far as I can tell my writing quality did not suffer in an obvious way, I don’t think somebody could give me a list of things I did wrong with my blog at that time.

I believe that when we write (or speak, or communicate in any way) that we give out the vibes of what we are feeling within ourselves. If we feel good it comes across in the writing. If we feel bad, that comes across too. That is the only explanation that I can think of for why my subscriber numbers came to a complete standstill when the rest of my life was at a standstill and only when I started moving forward on a personal level did my subscriber numbers follow suit!

This is another reason why I keep bashing sleazy marketing tactics. I believe that if I succumb to the sheep methodology and start churning out sales letters or build a list in a way that makes me feel uneasy that the prospective buyers will pick up on my negativity and it will affect the results!

So What’s The Secret Then?

In a nutshell I believe the secret to having a successful blog is to be true to yourself in what you write. Believe in what you are saying, enjoy your writing, appreciate your readers and their comments and it will show through.

If you force yourself to blog, if you write about topics that don’t interest you, if you get irritated having to respond to comments or contact emails you will send out those bad vibes to your audience and your blog will falter!

Be true and succeed

One of my readers Ryan Spegal has read my ebook on creating niche sites in WordPress and followed the process to create his first niche site about vehicular cycling. He wrote to me to ask if I could look over his site and offer and advice / tips, particular in reference to keyword research. One disclaimer here - SEO is probably my weakest area so you are better off reading Aaron Wall’s SEO book instead

A Basic Site Overview

Before I look at the keywords I first want to take a look over the site in general and see how it’s been setup. From the home page it became apparent that Ryan has written the site content using blog posts rather than static pages. This will mean that those posts go into the RSS feed for the site but it also shows the date on each article which is fine for now but may not look so good in a few months time. It’s largely a matter of preference

The home page of the site acts like a regular blog, showing the last few articles that Ryan has written. On the right hand side we can see that a list of articles has been constructed with links to each of the posts which looks nice.

AdSense looks like it is working correctly with lots of ads about cycling being shown in the various ad units on the site. All good so far…

Main Keyword Choice

I’m glad Ryan wrote to me because he might have hit a snag right from the start. I fired up the free Wordtracker tool which is always my first stop for basic research and typed in “vehicular cycling” - no results found! This is very bad news because Wordtracker usually over-estimates on its word counts so for it not to have any results at all for the main keyword in the site can almost guarantee that the pages within this website will not gain any organic traffic from Google whatsoever!

Generally speaking, one does not launch a niche site with the aim of getting much traffic from the main keyword as it is usually too competitive. The most common route is to pick a broad topic as the starting point and then target long-tail phrases that are based on the main phrase. The idea is that the long tail keyword phrases may not be searched for as much but will be easier to rank for and therefore more likely to draw in some traffic. But with the main phrase not having any traffic potential at all, I doubt very much whether any of the long tail phrases will either!

Okay maybe all is not lost. I checked out the article that explains what vehicular cycling is about and I am informed that it is also known as road cycling. Aha, there’s my next starting point for the keyword research. This time Wordtracker brings back a few results but not much at all - nowhere near enough to expect any significant traffic in my opinion.

I think Ryan may have to scrap this particular niche and do some better research before starting the next one. I highly recommend working through the content in the Thirty Day Challenge as that has a huge emphasis on doing good research up front before venturing into a niche.

Post Titles and Post Slugs

Now let’s ignore the traffic problem for now and assume that the main term has plenty of traffic. I think Ryan has still made some mistakes with his choice of titles and post slugs. Let me illustrate:

Article: Common Misconceptions

The title of the article is “Common Misconceptions” which sounds perfectly sensible for the reader but in terms of search engine traffic it is way too vague and worse still, has absolutely nothing to do with vehicular cycling! If the site topic had traffic then I would guess that there was a term such as “vehicular cycling misconceptions” that he could use instead and that would make a much better title and post slug.

He’s done this very well in the following articles:

• Vehicular cycling advocates
• Vehicular cycling alternatives
• Vehicular cycling attitude
• Vehicular cycling education

Unfortunately even though he may have chosen a good title for these articles, he has not used basic SEO on-page techniques on the pages themselves. Admittedly this is not a topic that I covered in the book (as I mentioned earlier, SEO is not my strong point) but the most basic advice is that keyword phrase should appear at least once in the body of the article, preferably near the top.

Let me illustrate with an example from the site. I have taken this excerpt from the article “vehicular cycling alternatives”:

An alternative to vehicular cycling is pedestrian bicycling, or bicycling according to the pedestrian rules of the road.

I would have written this line instead as:

There are vehicular cycling alternatives, such as pedestrian bicycling, which is bicycling according to the pedestrian rules of the world.

Conclusion

The main problem I see here is that Ryan has picked a topic that is unlikely to receive any traffic from Google so no matter how hard he works at developing the site or marketing it, those efforts will be futile as nobody is looking for the term “vehicular cycling”.

This issue highlights the importance on doing research first which is another topic that I did not cover in the ebook. I’ve noticed that since releasing the ebook I am getting quite a few emails asking me for advice on topics of niche sites in general that I did not talk about in the book so perhaps this is telling me that more detail is needed in the future.

I seem to be on a roll at the moment bashing the IM industry in general! Last month I criticized sleazy email lists, last week I warned people not to get sucked in by promises of big bucks, then most recently expressed my dislike of sales letters.

My topic for today? …

Secrets of the Internet Marketing Gurus

A post by Ben Cook prompted me to write this post. Its not often that I disagree with Ben completely! He says that we should learn from the California Gold Rush and SHUT UP when we find something new that could be a powerful tool in our IM arsenal.

Back in October I did my first podcast and I discussed what I intended to blog about. In that podcast I talked about IM gurus who have their little marketing secrets and how it just tires me out to listen to these people harp on about the latest secret which is yours for the sum of just $xyz per month.

My opinion on that hasn’t changed. I’ll give you a concrete example. Ed Dale & Dan Raine. Two great guys - they did the Thirty Day Challenge and they run the membership site The Immediate Edge which I was a member of for two months.

Now anybody who participated in the 30DC will remember that the course was based on getting traffic by hosting content on external sites such as Squidoo and HubPages. For the original challenge a small site called Tumblr was chosen but the challenge was so large that Tumblr could not handle the load, considered many of the blogs as spam and went on a mass deletion frenzy which was later dubbed ‘Tumblrgate’.

Some people will also remember something called the ‘Squidoo Slap’. When Squidoo first came out people discovered that building a Squidoo lens (basically a page about some topic that is hosted by Squidoo) was a great way to get traffic because the lenses ranked highly in Google.

Before long many Internet Marketers (and spammers) jumped on this and Squidoo was flooded with spam lenses and Google subsequently penalised them hence the ’slap’. This is where the whole issue of ’secrets’ comes in. The premise being that you discover a site such as this that works well, you should keep it to yourself because once it becomes public then it will be destroyed.

But you see I think people are missing the point here. One thing that Ed said over and over and over again during the challenge is that Tumblr was not the only platform to use and that there were dozens. If people would only get out there and do a little research of their own then they would be set.

The trouble is that most people won’t do that - they want things handed to them on a plate. Ed only had to mention a particular site to use and literally thousands of people would take his word as gospel and go create pages on that site which inevitably caused problems.

Ed & Dan now profit by offering the Immediate Edge which they charge a monthly fee for and they promise to reveal the latest sites to use to give you an edge over the competition. But the trouble is, that if you work in this way you will always be looking for the latest secret because it will never stay a secret for very long.

Another example - Facebook Flyers. When they first came out there were glitches in the system that allowed a select few affiliate marketers to make literally thousands per day and these guys kept quiet about it until it became more public and then Facebook changed the way things worked.

So for those few who knew how to exploit something then sure, they made a ton of money in that short period of time but it then dried up and then they had to move onto the next thing. If you do that on a consistent basis - find new things before other people, then you’re onto a winner but gosh that sounds like a lot of hard work to me!

I’d be exhausted if I had to find the latest trend or the latest hot niche every week. Last week the young actor Heath Ledger died and I know many Internet Marketers jumped on this news story in order to profit from it. Now I am not debating the morals of that activity here - just the mechanics.

Heath will only die once so those people that managed to rank in the top 10 in Google in the days following his death will certainly have seen some traffic but what next? What will they do next week or next year? My point is that if your business model relies on you finding some hot trend or secret tip then you will be in a constant battle to stay a step ahead of the competition.

In my opion there’s an easier way:

Provide Value - Receive Compensation.

Discuss!

Last week I wrote a review of a product called Explosive Cash Flow and in the review I expressed my dislike of the sales letter with the disclaimer that I really don’t like long form sales letters in general.

Sales Letters Are Effective

In the comments section of the post there ensued a discussion about the effectiveness of these sales letters and many other Internet Marketers will agree that extensive split testing has shown that long-form sales letters produce the best conversion rates.

In other words, compared to other forms of landing pages, you’ll make the most money if you carefully construct a traditional sales letter as seen on many online products.

Work With Your Motives

If your goal is to earn the maximum amount of profit from your product then obviously you would use whatever marketing is the most effective wouldn’t you?

And of course, who would not want to maximise profits? I mean, isn’t that the whole point of doing business online?

See this is where I have difficulties. I don’t like sales letters! I don’t like reading them, I don’t like writing them and I don’t want to sell a product of mine using one. I would have some kind of landing page for a product I wanted to sell, but I wouldn’t follow the standard formula.

Most marketers would laugh at me and say that I am leaving money on the table. This may be true but there is something far more important at stake for me. Quite simply, I want to enjoy my work and be proud of what I produce.

Do You Like What You Do?

I’m sure people will say that I am being naieve but I think of it in much simpler terms. See, I quit my job in order to build a career entirely of my choosing without having a boss over my shoulder or an annoying customer to satisfy and so on.

If I was in this game just for the money I would never have quit my job! So far in around 5 months I have made a little over $1000 and that’s not all profit. I’ve spent a few hundred dollars too so really speaking I’ve been working for free for 5 months. Why? Because I enjoy it! If I was driven purely by money then I would have stayed in my job, continued to work hard and gone for a promotion to a Senior Software Engineer. I probably would have changed companies too because the pay rise they gave me after 1 year sucked lol!

But I’m not driven just by money… Not everybody is like me and that’s ok. I know people who see their work as just a job and they don’t care what they do as long as the money is right. That is fine. But for me personally I find that work has a huge influence on the rest of my life and if I am not happy in my work I am not happy in general.

In recent years my unhappiness due to work related issues has spilled out into my personal life and so for me to be an all-round happy person, I need to enjoy what I do and feel pride in my work and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

A Personal Choice

Just because I don’t like sales letters (or various other IM related things I may have bashed recently) doesn’t make them bad - it’s just my individual preference, that is all. I prefer not to use them.

I suppose there should be some point to this ramble… Well I guess what prompted me to think about it is that I know I have been criticised quite a bit lately for my inability to make much money so far and really, I don’t care! I’m not here to win any competitions, I’m not trying to outdo anybody or prove anything. I’m just doing what I feel like doing and blogging about it, that is all

Matthew Sherbourne saw my posts about the ebook I have written and very kindly offered to send me a free review copy of his own ebook - all about writing ebooks! Of course I jumped at the chance. I really enjoyed the book so this review is quite long!

Instant Money Reports

The book is called Instant Money Reports and sells for $37. It has one of those annoying long sales letters which I dislike but as Matthew kindly sent me the book directly, I didn’t have to read any of it

I did flick through it however and I must say I think the sales letter itself is a little vague. He emphasises a wealth-creating system but almost mentions the ‘reports’ part as an afterthought - it would be easy to miss. I think he would be better off clarifying that this is all about writing reports for profit and talk less about a generic ‘wealth system’.

The reason I say this is that there are many ways of making money online but writing is not for everybody. There are a ton of people out there for whom English is not a first language or they simply find it hard to write. So this is not necessarily a great option if you are one of those people, where as affiliate marketing may be better for example.

Content of the Book

It is a standard PDF-ebook, weighing in at 89 pages, and split into four major sections:

1. Your Report Topic
2. Gathering Information
3. Your Info-Product
4. Make Money

With a fairly long ebook such as this you are not likely to read it in one sitting so it would have been nice if PDF bookmarks had been inserted. You can see these in action in my own WordPress ebook.

Technical niggles aside, I’ll now review the actual content of the book itself:

Part 1 - Your Report Topic

Matthew goes into quite a bit of detail about picking a topic for your reports. He describes the various kinds of topics and the way they tend to generate income (an initial rush vs a steady stream for example) and explains when to use the various kinds of topics.

There is a strong focus on profitability within this ebook. Matthew is touting report writing as a standalone business and encourages you to think about how you can branch out within a niche and eventually dominate it so that you can be regarded as an expert within the niche. This is something I did not really think of with my own ebook - I just got an idea and went with it on the spur of the moment.

He also identifies key ingredients that are necessary in any report, such as popularity and goes into depth to help you ascertain if your chosen topic has these ingredients. This is basically the research phase of your ebook - get it wrong and you may be doing a lot of work for nothing so it’s nice to see this area covered in such detail. For instance, recall how recently I did a case study of a niche site and I pointed out that perhaps the site would not get much traffic due to a poor choice of topic.

At the end of this section there are some practical tests for you to run against your chosen report topic for you to determine whether or not it is a viable one. This is a nice touch which encourages the reader to actually DO something with the information in the book rather than just reading it and then forgetting about it.

Click here to buy Instant Money Reports for $37

Part 2 - Gathering Information

I think one of the golden rules to selling anything online is giving people what they actually want as opposed to what you think they need. I’ve had this message drummed into me a lot recently as I was being told the same thing for the Teaching Sells course that I am working through.

This section of the book gives workable methods for figuring out exactly what it is that your market wants rather than you having to resort to guesswork. This again is something I simply didn’t do with my own ebook.

What I also like about this section is that the methods in here can be applied to all sorts of things such as what to write about on your blog for example, and is not just applicable to writing ebooks. I’m also going to use these methods to determine exactly what to teach in the course I am developing for Teaching Sells. I really need to do a blog post about that shortly…

Once you have figured out what the market wants, Matthew suggests that it is then your job to answer the biggest questions that they have. At this point I think many people can fall over. You see the Internet is full of information - we have an information overload and in all honesty an Internet savvy person could probably find the answer to any question they have absolutely free starting with Google.

So of course some people believe that because the information is freely available that nobody will pay for it. Not true! Most people don’t have time to wade through all the information, to weed out the crap - and that’s where you (and me) come in. The average surfer can’t be bothered to look for it all himself.

What Matthew does in this book is show exactly where to find the information you need to answer the questions being asked by your target market. If research is not your strong point it will be after reading this chapter! I thought I was pretty wise when it comes to the Internet but there is a ton of resources in this chapter that I had never heard of before.

Click here to buy Instant Money Reports for $37

Part 3 - Your Info-Product

This section of the book is all about the physical production of your report. Matthew starts by giving some practical advice on the organisation of the body of the report, ways of dealing with writers block and so on.

He also covers how to write a proper introduction for the report, the conclusion, and various finishing touches such as copyright and disclaimers.

This section also discusses how to increase the perceived value of your ebook and additional monetization via affiliate links.

Next up we have the packaging - how to actually turn your report into downloadable PDF file and then how to grant usage rights to the users. This is something I did not consider with my ebook but as a free offering it is not so important. However, it is very important if you intend to sell your report and Matthew goes into great detail about licensing.

Part 4 - Make Money

This part starts of with the sales message that accompanies your report so it is really lessons in sales copy. For example, apparently its very bad to use the word ‘buy’ in your sales copy which is just what I have done within this review, oops!

There is a lot of information here about appealing to the emotional needs of your audience - giving them what they want rather than what they need. I skimmed over a lot of this stuff as I’m not really likely to be creating long sales letters anytime soon.

I was far more interested in the practical aspects of setting up a secure download page. One of the services that Matthew recommends is called E-Junkie which is spooky because they just so happened to take out an ad with me today! He also explains how to provide instant delivery of your report even if you do not have your own website or blog.

The very last section in this ebook is the most valuable to me - here Matthew shows exactly how to market your report on popular forums such as the Warrior Forum which just happens to be one of the action points that I had in my project page for my ebook. My problem is that I find the Warrior Forum intimidating and you only get one chance to promote something so of course I don’t want to screw it up! The information in this ebook is brilliant here.

As well as forums, he also discusses ebay (another one of my marketing todo’s!), something called Lulu which I had never heard of, classified ad sites such as Craigslist, and again, lots more that I didn’t know about. I will be re-reading part 4 of this book several times over the next couple of weeks as I continue with my ebook marketing.

Click here to buy Instant Money Reports for $37

Action Points to Take Away

I really should have read this book a couple of months back before I started on my own ebook project. The problem is that it was just a spur of the moment idea and I wanted to run with it while the enthusiasm was there. To be honest, it’s been out for quite a few weeks now and has already been updated so many times that I don’t think there is much point in applying what I have learned here to my current ebook. So instead, I will take these action points and apply them to my next one:

• Do better research to determine a good topic - look at profitability potential
• Find out exactly what the market wants to know rather than assuming that I know what they want to read
• Research online sources of information rather than just relying on my own knowledge which may be flawed.
• Add polish to the content thereby increasing perceived value
• Put more effort into crafting a good title for the book
• Write a proper copyright and disclaimer section
• Fully investigate the security options when turning into a PDF file
• Provide a secure downloadable paid ebook and not just a feebie next time!
• Sell the book in forums such as the Warrior Forum
• Sell the book on eBay
• Sell the book on classified ad sites

Conclusion

I was given the book free but if I had paid $37 for it I would be very happy. My favourite part was the last one all about how to market the book and make the most money from it. I didn’t much like the stuff about the sales page but that’s just me, and not because it’s bad information.

I suppose I should also mention the extras. The book has some bonus reports such as a 26-page guide to cashing in on Craigslist which looks interesting and there is a ‘toolbox’ which is basically a PDF with lots of worksheets, diagrams etc to help you clarify your thoughts. This toolbox is referred to throughout the text of the ebook.

There is also a 30 day money back guarantee, as you would expect these days

With my current ebook the main revenue stream is an affiliate link to my hosting company Bluehost which pays out $65 per referral. Obviously just a single extra sale that comes from the information in Matthews book would pay for the book almost twice over.

Over the next few weeks I plan to do a lot more marketing of my ebook (as well as work on some other projects) and I will certainly be referring back to part 4 of Instant Money Reports to make sure I get it right.

I am an affiliate for this ebook so obviously I want you guys to go out and buy it but I really do recommend this one, there is so much information in it that I simply didn’t know and it is written in an extremely practical way so that it can actually be applied.

Click here to buy Instant Money Reports for $37