Affiliate Stories

2009-12-19T15:11:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone and Happy Holidays Looking forward to 2010.

SUPER AFFILIATES

2009-03-06T13:16:00.000-05:00

SUPER List Explode - See Your Email List Suddenly Explode

Overcoming Writer's Block

2008-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Ovecoming Writer's Block

What is writer's block?

Well, I just can't think of a single darn thing to
say. Oh well, I'm outta here!

Sound familiar? No! Oh, get real! We've all
experienced this phenomenon when we absolutely have to
write something, particularly on deadline. I'm talking
about. . . . .uh, I can't think of what the word is .
. . oh, yes, it's on the tip of my tongue . . . it's:

WRITER'S BLOCK!!!!

Whew! I feel better just getting that out of my head
and onto the page!

Writer's block is the patron demon of the blank page.
You may think you know EXACTLY what you're going to
write, but as soon as that evil white screen appears
before you, your mind suddenly goes completely blank.
I'm not talking about Zen meditation
stare-at-the-wall-until-enlightenment-hits kind of
blank.

I'm talking about sweat trickling down the back of
your neck, anguish and panic and suffering kind of
blank. The tighter the deadline, the worse the anguish
of writer's block gets.

Having said that, let me say it again. "The tighter
the deadline, the worse the anguish of writer's block
gets." Now, can you figure out what might possibly be
causing this horrible plunge into speechlessness?

The answer is obvious: FEAR! You are terrified of that
blank page. You are terrified you have absolutely
nothing of value to say. You are afraid of the fear of
writer's block itself!

It doesn?t necessarily matter if you've done a decade
of research and all you have to do is string sentences
you can repeat in your sleep together into coherent
paragraphs. Writer's block can strike anyone at any
time. Based in fear, it raises our doubts about our
own self-worth, but it's sneaky. It's writer's block,
after all, so it doesn't just come and let you know
that. No, it makes you feel like an idiot who just had
your frontal lobes removed through your sinuses. If
you dared to put forth words into the greater world,
they would surely come out as gibberish!

Let's try and be rational with this irrational demon.
Let's make a list of what might possibly be beneath
this terrible and terrifying condition.

1. Perfectionism. You must absolutely produce a
masterpiece of literature straight off in the first
draft. Otherwise, you qualify as a complete failure.

2. Editing instead of composing. There's your
monkey-mind sitting on your shoulder, yelling as soon
as you type "I was born?," no, not that, that's wrong!
That's stupid! Correct correct correct correct?

3. Self-consciousness. How can you think, let alone
write, when all you can manage to do is pry the
fingers of writer's block away from your throat enough
so you can gasp in a few shallow breaths? You're not
focusing on what you're trying to write, your focusing
on those gnarly fingers around your windpipe.

4. Can't get started. It's always the first sentence
that's the hardest. As writers, we all know how
EXTREMELY important the first sentence is. It must be
brilliant! It must be unique! It must hook your
reader's from the start! There's no way we can get
into writing the piece until we get past this
impossible first sentence.

5. Shattered concentration. You're cat is sick. You
suspect your mate is cheating on you. Your electricity
might be turned off any second. You have a crush on
the local UPS deliveryman. You have a dinner party
planned for your in-laws. You . . . Need I say more.
How can you possibly concentrate with all this mental
clutter?

6. Procrastination. It's your favorite hobby. It's
your soul mate. It?s the reason you've knitted 60
argyle sweaters or made 300 bookcases in your garage
workshop. It's the reason you never run out of Brie.

FACE IT ? IT?S ONE OF THE REASONS YOU HAVE WRITER'S
BLOCK!

How to Overcome Writer's Block

Okay. I can hear that herd of you running away from
this article as fast as you can. Absurd! you huff.
Never in a million years, you fume. Writer's block is
absolutely, undeniably, scientifically proven to be
impossible to overcome.

Oh, just get over it! Well, I guess it's not that
easy. So try to sit down for just a few minutes and
listen. All you have to do is listen ? you don't have
to actually write a single word.

Ah, there you all are again. I am beginning to make
you out now that the cloud of dust is settling.

I am here to tell you that WRITER'S BLOCK CAN BE
OVERCOME.

Please, remain seated.

There are ways to trick this nasty demon. Pick one,
pick several, and give them a try. Soon, before you
even have a chance for your heartbeat to accelerate,
guess what? You're writing.

Here are some tried and true methods of overcoming
writer's block:

1. Be prepared. The only thing to fear is fear itself.
(I know, that's a clich?but as soon as you start
writing, feel free to improve on it.) If you spend
some time mulling over your project before you
actually sit down to write, you may be able to
circumvent the worst of the crippling panic.

2. Forget perfectionism. No one ever writes a
masterpiece in the first draft. Don't put any
expectations on your writing at all! In fact, tell
yourself you're going to write absolute garbage, and
then give yourself permission to happily stink up your
writing room.

3. Compose instead of editing. Never, never write your
first draft with your monkey-mind sitting on your
shoulder making snide editorial comments. Composing is
a magical process. It surpasses the conscious mind by
galaxies. It's even incomprehensible to the conscious,
editorial, monkey-mind. So prepare an ambush. Sit down
at your computer or your desk. Take a deep breath and
blow out all your thoughts. Let your finger hover over
your keyboard or pick up your pen. And then pull a
fake: appear to be about to begin to write, but
instead, using your thumb and index finger of your
dominant hand, flick that little annoying ugly monkey
back into the barrel of laughs it came from. Then jump
in ? quickly! Write, scribble, scream, howl, let
everything loose, as long as you do it with a pen or
your computer keyboard.

4. Forget the first sentence. You can sweat over that
all-important one-liner when you've finished your
piece. Skip it! Go for the middle or even the end.
Start wherever you can. Chances are, when you read it
over, the first line will be blinking its little neon
lights right at you from the depths of your
composition.

5. Concentration. This is a hard one. Life throws us
so many curve balls. How about thinking about your
writing time as a little vacation from all those
annoying worries. Banish them! Create a space, perhaps
even a physical one, where nothing exists except the
single present moment. If one of those irritating
worries gets by you, stomp on it like you would an
ugly bug!

6. Stop procrastinating. Write an outline. Keep your
research notes within sight. Use someone else's
writing to get going. Babble incoherently on paper or
on the computer if you have to.

Just do it! (I know, I stole that line from
somewhere?). Tack up anything that could possibly help
you to get going: notes, outlines, pictures of your
grandmother. Put the cookie you will be allowed to eat
when you finish your first draft within sight ? but
out of reach. Then pick up the same type of writing
that you need to write, and read it. Then read it
again. Soon, trust me, the fear will slowly fade away.
As soon as it does, grab your keyboard ? and get
writing!

Why Write an Ebook

2008-05-05T18:51:00.000-04:00

If you read How To Write Your Own ebook your off to a good start so keep checking back in for alot more very special reports like this one.

It's not true that everything that has been said has
already been written. Since that unfortunate axiom
came into use, the whole universe has changed.
Technology has changed, ideas have changed, and the
mindsets of entire nations have changed.

The fact is that this is the perfect time to write an
ebook. What the publishing industry needs are people
who can tap into the world as it is today - innovative
thinkers who can make the leap into the new millennium
and figure out how to solve old problems in a new way.
Ebooks are a new and powerful tool for original
thinkers with fresh ideas to disseminate information
to the millions of people who are struggling to figure
out how to do a plethora of different things.

Let's say you already have a brilliant idea, and the
knowledge to back it up that will enable you to write
an exceptional ebook. You may be sitting at your
computer staring at a blank screen wondering, "Why?
Why should I go through all the trouble of writing my
ebook when it's so impossible to get anything
published these days?

Well, let me assure you that publishing an ebook is
entirely different than publishing a book in print.
Let's look at the specifics of how the print and cyber
publishing industry differ, and the many reasons why
you should take the plunge and get your fingers
tapping across those keyboards!

Submitting a print book to conventional publishing
houses or to agents is similar to wearing a hair shirt
24/7. No matter how good your book actually is, or how
many critique services and mentor writers have told
you that "you've got what it takes," your submitted
manuscript keeps coming back to you as if it is a
boomerang instead of a valuable mine of information.

Perhaps, in desperation, you've checked out
self-publishing and found out just how expensive a
venture it can be. Most "vanity presses" require
minimal print runs of at least 500 copies, and even
that amount will cost you thousands of dollars. Some
presses' minimal run starts at 1,000 to 2,000 copies.
And that's just for the printing and binding. Add in
distribution, shipping, and promotional costs and -
well, you do the math. Even if you wanted to go this
route, you may not have that kind of money to risk.

Let's say you already have an Internet business with a
quality website and a quality product. An ebook is one
of the most powerful ways to promote your business
while educating people with the knowledge you already
possess as a business owner of a specific product or
service.

For example, let's say that you've spent the last
twenty-five years growing and training bonsai trees,
and now you're ready to share your knowledge and
experience. An ebook is the perfect way to reach the
largest audience of bonsai enthusiasts.

Ebooks will not only promote your business - they will
help you make a name for yourself and your company,
and establish you as an expert in your field. You may
even find that you have enough to say to warrant a
series of ebooks. Specific businesses are complicated
and often require the different aspects to be divided
in order for the reader to get the full story.

Perhaps your goals are more finely tuned in terms of
the ebook scene. You may want to build a whole
business around writing and publishing ebooks.
Essentially, you want to start an e-business. You are
thinking of setting up a website to promote and market
your ebooks. Maybe you're even thinking of producing
an ezine.

One of the most prevalent reasons people read ebooks
is to find information about how to turn their
Internet businesses into a profit-making machine. And
these people are looking to the writers of ebooks to
provide them with new ideas and strategies because
writers of ebooks are usually people who understand
the new cyberspace world we now live in. Ebook writers
are experts in Internet marketing campaigns and the
strategies of promoting and distributing ebooks. The
cyberspace community needs its ebooks to be successful
so that more and more ebooks will be written.

You may want to create affiliate programs that will
also market your ebook. Affiliates can be people or
businesses worldwide that will all be working to sell
your ebooks. Think about this? Do you see a formula
for success here?

Figure out what your subject matter is, and then
narrow it down. Your goal is to aim for specificity.
Research what's out there already, and try to find a
void that your ebook might fill.

What about an ebook about a wedding cake business? Or
an ebook about caring for elderly pets? How about the
fine points of collecting ancient pottery?

You don't have to have three masters degrees to write
about your subject. People need advice that is easy to
read and easily understood. Parents need advice for
dealing with their teenagers. College students need to
learn good study skills - quickly. The possibilities
are endless.

After you've writtten your ebook

Getting your ebook out is going to be your focus once
you've finished writing it, just as it is with print
books. People will hesitate to buy any book from an
author they've never heard of. Wouldn't you?

The answer is simple: give it away! You will see
profits in the form of promoting your own business and
getting your name out. You will find affiliates who
will ask you to place their links within your ebook,
and these affiliates will in turn go out and make your
name known. Almost every single famous ebook author
has started out this way.

Another powerful tool to attract people to your ebook
is to make it interactive. Invent something for them
to do within the book rather than just producing pages
that contain static text. Let your readers fill out
questionnaires, forms, even crossword puzzles geared
to testing their knowledge on a particular subject.
Have your readers hit a link that will allow them to
recommend your book to their friends and associates.
Or include an actual order form so at the end of their
reading journey, they can eagerly buy your product.

When people interact with books, they become a part of
the world of that book. The fact is just as true for
books in print as it is for ebooks.

That's why ebooks are so essential. Not only do they
provide a forum for people to learn and make sense of
their own thoughts, but they can also serve to promote
your business at the same time.

Ever Wanted to Know How to Write Your Own Ebook.

2008-04-13T20:50:00.000-04:00

The hardest part of writing is the first sentence.
When you look at the whole project, it seems like an
impossible task. That's why you have to break it down
into manageable tasks. Think of climbing a mountain.
You are standing at the foot of it and looking up at
its summit vanishing into the clouds. How can you
possibly scale such an immense and dangerous mountain?

There is only one way to climb a mountain ? step by
step.

Now think of writing your ebook in the same light. You
must create it step by step, and one day, you will
take that last step and find yourself standing on the
summit with your head in the clouds.

The first thing you have to do, as if you actually
were a mountain climber, is to get organized. Instead
of climbing gear, however, you must organize your
thoughts. There are some steps you should take before
you begin. Once you've gone through the following
list, you will be ready to actually begin writing your
ebook.

Beginning Steps to Writing an ebook

First, figure out your ebook's working title. Jot down
a few different titles, and eventually, you'll find
that one that will grow on you. Titles help you to
focus your writing on your topic; they guide you in
anticipating and answering your reader's queries. Many
non-fiction books also have subtitles. Aim for clarity
in your titles, but cleverness always helps to sell
books ? as long as it's not too cute. For example,
Remedies for Insomnia: twenty different ways to count
sheep. Or: Get off that couch: fifteen exercise plans
to whip you into shape.

Next, write out a thesis statement. Your thesis is a
sentence or two stating exactly what problem you are
addressing and how your book will solve that problem.
All chapters spring forth from your thesis statement.
Once you've got your thesis statement fine-tuned,
you've built your foundation. From that foundation,
your book will grow, chapter by chapter.

Your thesis will keep you focused while you write your
ebook. Remember: all chapters must support your thesis
statement. If they don't, they don't belong in your
book. For example, your thesis statement could read:
We've all experienced insomnia at times in our lives,
but there are twenty proven techniques and methods to
give you back a good night's sleep.

Once you have your thesis, before you start to write,
make sure there is a good reason to write your book.
Ask yourself some questions:

* Does your book present useful information and is
that information currently relevant?

* Will you book positively affect the lives of your
readers?

* Is your book dynamic and will it keep the reader's
attention?

* Does you book answer questions that are meaningful
and significant?

If you can answer yes to these questions, you can feel
confident about the potential of your ebook.

Another important step is to figure out who your
target audience is. It is this group of people you
will be writing to, and this group will dictate many
elements of your book, such as style, tone, diction,
and even length. Figure out the age range of your
readers, their general gender, what they are most
interested in, and even the socio-economic group they
primarily come from. Are they people who read fashion
magazines or book reviews? Do they write letters in
longhand or spend hours every day online. The more you
can pin down your target audience, the easier it will
be to write your book for them.

Next, make a list of the reasons you are writing your
ebook. Do you want to promote your business? Do you
want to bring quality traffic to your website? Do you
want to enhance your reputation?

Then write down your goals in terms of publishing. Do
you want to sell it as a product on your website, or
do you want to offer it as a free gift for filling out
a survey or for ordering a product? Do you want to use
the chapters to create an e-course, or use your ebook
to attract affiliates around the world? The more you
know upfront, the easier the actual writing will be.

Decide on the format of your chapters. In non-fiction,
keep the format from chapter to chapter fairly
consistent. Perhaps you plan to use an introduction to
your chapter topic, and then divide it into four
subhead topics. Or you may plan to divide it into five
parts, each one beginning with a relevant anecdote.

How to make your ebook "user friendly"

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging.
Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photos,
graphs, advice, and tips will keep the reader turning
the pages. Sidebars are useful for quick, accessible
information, and they break up the density of the
page.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a
formal tone such as textbook diction. Reader's respond
to the feeling that you are having a conversation with
them. Break up the length and structure of your
sentences so you don?t hypnotize your readers into
sleep. Sentences that are all the same length and
structure tend to be a good aid for insomnia!

Good writing takes practice. It takes lots and lots of
practice. Make a schedule to write at least a page a
day. Read books and magazines about the process of
writing, and jot down tips that jump out at you. The
art of writing is a lifetime process; the more you
write (and read), the better your writing will become.
The better your writing becomes, the bigger your sales
figures.

In an ebook that is read on the screen, be aware that
you must give your reader's eye a break. You can do
this by utilizing white space. In art classes, white
space is usually referred to as "negative space."
Reader's eyes need to rest in the cool white oasises
you create on your page. If your page is too dense,
your reader will quit out of it as soon as their eyes
begin to tear.

Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This
makes your information easy to absorb, and gives the
reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs
one after the other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font
that's easy on the eyes, and stick to that font
family. Using dozens of fonts will only tire your
readers out before they've gotten past your
introduction. Use at least one and a half line
spacing, and text large enough to be read easily on
the screen, but small enough so that the whole page
can be seen on a computer screen. You will have to
experiment with this to find the right combination.

Of course, don't forget to run a spell and grammar
check. You are judged by something as minor as correct
punctuation, so don?t mess up a great book by tossing
out semicolons randomly, or stringing sentences
together with commas. (By the way, that's called a
"comma splice.")

Last of all, create an index and a bibliography.
That's it! You've written a book! Now all you have to
do is publish your ebook online, and wait for download...Did this help you?
request from your website visitors.

Confidential Guide "To Your Future"

2008-04-03T17:26:00.000-04:00

How To Make $1,000 In 48 Hours

Confidential Guide

Jeff:
Right, okay, now let me ask you another question, a little bit next part of the topic here, if
somebody needed to make emergency money.

Shawn:
Okay?

Jeff:
There may be people on this call today that have been in that situation or I know that
myself, I’ve been in that situation plenty of times. Let’s say to make a thousand dollars in
forty-eight hours, could you just quickly walk us through the steps that you would go
through to make that kind of emergency money based on all the stuff we just talked
about?

Shawn:
Sure. Well, the first thing I would do, I’m just going to assume that people have very
little money to spend, that they’re not experts, that they’re not comfortable being an
expert, they’re not going to write a killer sales letter over night or anything else. We’re
not going to give anybody any great credit for the moment, which means that if you’re
good at all that stuff it’s just going to be even easier. But, the first thing you got to decide
is if you’re going to make money fast, we’re going to come straight back to the basics
which is we’ve got to find something that’s hot, something that’s a great target market.

Jeff:
The market first.

Shawn:
The market first, because the markets going to determine what we want to sell them. At
the same time, however, you’re going to be thinking in the back of your head who do I
know that’s an expert that might have something that a target market would be interested
in. For instance, you might live next door to the woman who has grown the prize-winning
roses in the Atlanta garden club, seventy-two years in a row. She’s a stone cold expert,
got fifty-seven blue ribbons, and everything else that you want. You say, I know
somebody I can interview who’s a rose gardening expert, how hard is it to make a
product now? Not hard, I can walk next door with a tape recorder and go let me ask you
questions for the next hour, do you mind? Even if you do it for a hundred bucks, buy her
a beer, something. Finding experts is easy, finding people who like to talk is easy, just
listen to us. I would, as a combination of those two things, start to quickly brainstorm
about what are hot target markets I can think of, and what are people that I have easy
access to because you want to make this easy, that might have some expertise, it might be
a guy who’s brilliant, who’s a brilliant golf instructor, it might be anybody because we’re
not looking to make a fortune here, but this is the same cool way we can create a product
really quickly. Which is, all we got to do is think about okay, what do we got that people
might be really excited about, and if you’re doing this in a seasonal basis, you want to
think how can I tie this into the seasons because, or not the seasons, but whatever is
happening at the moment. If it’s Valentines Day, or Easter, or whatever, or it’s time to
plant roses, something that makes this maybe more timely. Let’s say I’m going to use this
rose gardening person, I find the rose gardening person, and she agrees that she’ll let me
interview her and create this product. Well the easiest way to do this, as far as I’m

concerned, is to set up a teleseminar because we can do this and we don’t even have to, in
advance have created a product to deliver. Alright, in fact, well let me jump back, you
could actually sell the product and tell people it’s coming in a week and give them an
early bird discount, but let’s assume you don’t even want to do that. We just want to
deliver on the spot. We can go, and I don’t want to make this too complicated, but you
can go instantly to somebody like pay pal, who is not a great long-term place necessarily
to have a merchant account. But you can set up a business and be able to collect credit
card money, and check money and everything else from pay pal instantly so we can
instantly be able to collect money. And we can go and we can set up a web page with
some basic bullets and headline and everything else that, we’re having a one time only
special teleseminar with Hazel rose growing person. So, set up a page, tell people we’re
going to charge nineteen bucks to this teleseminar and then we can just run out, we can
go to gold automation dot com because you can use it free for a month, right? So no more
cost there, set up a quick affiliate program just follow the little steps, and go out and start
emailing, or better yet calling everybody we can find that has either a newsletter on roses
or a website with rose stuff, and say listen, I’m doing this teleseminar, I’ll give you half,
this is going to be really cool, we’re going to have a lot of fun, we’re going to have
people ask questions, this women has been doing this for fifty years, she has a great
personality, people love her, here’s all accolades, blah, blah, blah, blah. Most people are
going to say no, but you don’t need everybody, you just need a few people. You’re going
to find a few people to promote this, and people will come to the website, people will
sign up, you go do the teleseminar, you make money. You get your thousand bucks; you
need sixty, seventy, eighty people depending on how much you’re paying out the
affiliates commissions. If you record this teleseminar, you have a product because now
you have an audio file, you can get that transcribed and turned into a book. You not only
have, this is a very simplified version obviously, but you not only have money, you also
made a product. It is that easy. So, I hope I didn’t go through that too quickly.

Jeff:
No, you didn’t at all; I mean I’m just listening to what you’re saying here and again it all
focuses around having the right target market.

Shawn:
Right.

Jeff:
So the thing that you described would not work, like Shawn if you were trying weight
loss for example.

Shawn:
Mmhmm?

Jeff:
Like what you just said, it would be very difficult to do because it’s not really a target
market; I mean it’s like everybody.

Shawn:
Right, it’s everybody, right. You just can’t go out and find the weight loss list that easily,
right.

Jeff:
Well, but I’m saying is weight loss is so general.

Shawn:
Right.

Jeff:
And you’re competing. If you go pay per clicks search engines to see what companies are
paying for leads for weight loss, like weight watchers, and you can’t go up against weight
watchers.

Shawn:
No, no!

Jeff:
But I’m saying what you described is if somebody finds a niche, hot target market, you
don’t need one, what you want is one that is very, very rabid and passionate about the
topic.

Shawn:
Right.

Jeff:
And, like your using your rose growing, I don’t know anything about it but I bet you any
amount of money there’s people and lots of them, that you can find online who this is
their passion.

Shawn:
Oh, there’s no doubt!

Jim:
It’s so much easier these days with the Internet, I mean, in the old mail order business
that I learned to do from you Jeff, I did this very same thing with and as you know, I was
in very small niche of heating and air conditioning contractors. And there’s such a thing
as a service agreement that you get on your appliances, and you get on your furnaces, and
it’s a hot topic for contractors to sell these service agreements. And there were about six
people in the industry selling the best information, and I did interview all six of those and
I ended up having a six tape set program to sell all of my customers. It took me about
three days to put it together.

Jeff:
And it’s not a huge market, but it’s a very, very passionate market about that topic.

Shawn:
Right.

Jim:
Yeah, but ninety thousand dollars doing that, and there was no information of my own in
there. And that was the hard way, I had to hook up tape recorders, and I had to use
cassettes and I mean now you can use conference lines, you can actually get free
conference lines online you can sign up for, there’s no cost to anything. You can take a
cord and go from your computer to your tape set or record it into your computer, a cord
from your computer to your phone, you’ve got digital files and your ready to go.

Shawn:
Yeah, and in terms of cost, if you just want to set up a teleseminar one time and get it
recorded, you’re not going to spend more than two hundred bucks. And they’ll send you
a cd with a digital file on it. You don’t even have to be skilled.

Jim:
And that’s if you wanted to go as streamlined as possible, like we all do.

Shawn:
Right.

Jim:
We don’t want to have to hook up a cord to anything.

Shawn:
No.

Jim:
So, we use a conference call company, we let them record the call, we let them put it in a
digital file, and send it to us. But if you are on a budget you can go out there and search
Google for free conference calls, and you can find some services that will let you do it for
free, but they’ll limit the amount of people you have on the call. Well, if you’re just doing
an interview that’s okay. If you’re doing a call like this where you might have a couple
hundred people or whatever then you can’t necessarily use these free services. If you’re
going to do an interview you can get it done for virtually nothing if you search hard
enough. You got a few bucks; you can get it done a little quicker.

Shawn:
Yep.

Jeff:
Okay, Shawn, let me ask you about affiliate programs, what relates to this whole issue.
Do you sell other people’s products through their affiliate programs?

Shawn:
Oh, absolutely! One of the things we do in back-end marketing, and this is where the
Internet has made my life so simple. In the old days, pre-Internet, if you had a customer
base and you wanted to sell more products and services you basically had to go make
them, own them, create them, warehouse them, everything. With the Internet, you can
think of everything your customer might possibly want to buy, related to your target
market and make offers to them through affiliate programs. Let me give you a couple
quick ideas. Let’s go back to rose gardening, and I just popped into overtures free tool
and between rose garden and rose gardening, there were thirty thousand people that
searched those two terms last month on overture. You can probably double that at least,
and figure there’s sixty, seven, sixty or seventy thousand people looking for that online.
And you can bet those people aren’t randomly doing it, so it’s probably pretty, you know,
rabid marketplace. If somebody buys a book on rose gardening, we know that they’re
interested in rose gardening. We also know that they’re going to want to buy stuff related
to rose gardening besides the book. They’re going to want to buy roses; they’re going to
want to buy gloves, shears, and fertilizer, besides more stuff about rose gardening. And
maybe other kinds of gardening stuff because if they have roses they might have sixteen
other things growing in their yard that they’re going to want to know about. So, we can
think of everything that anybody on our target market might want to buy, and go out and
find affiliate programs so we can sell those products to those people. Here’s the thing,
this rose gardening person, Jeff, is going to buy stuff from somebody. If you refer them to
good, quality products and services, they but through your affiliate link, you just get
money. You don’t do any additional work. So, can you, in your e-book, make
recommendations when your talking about pruning that these are the best pruning shears
that you ever found. Yeah, and some people are going to go buy stuff. Can you do it in
your customer member area? Sure. Can you do it in follow-up email series? Sure.

Jeff:
You say you put these links directly in the book?

Shawn:
You can put them right in the book.

Jeff:
Okay.

Shawn:
Yeah, so you can put a link right in the book when you’re talking about the best way to
prune a rose, and you tell people look, if you don’t have the right shears, you know, if

they’re not sharp you’re going to… everything else, and if you don’t listen, click this link
go get the right shears. You know, these are the best available on the market, go here.
And not everybody’s going to click on the link, but everybody who does gets free money.

Jeff:
Right, so you’re saying you put the link actually in the product.

Shawn:
Sure.

Jeff:
Then you also put them in whatever other things you’re offering like a member website
or other?

Shawn:
Yeah.

Jeff:
Then also, to of course send out follow-up emails, now do a lot of affiliate programs give
you emails to send out where they’re already good emails and stuff?

Shawn:
Well, some of them do, most of them don’t.

Jeff:
Okay.

Shawn:
Most affiliate programs are not geared towards the information concept of direct selling.
Most affiliate programs will give you like banner ads and stuff, so they’re really
worthless. So you’ll have to figure out a little bit of direct response selling in order to
make good referrals.

Jeff:
Okay, now, one more question, and then Jim we can go to q and a. One question, you
said you don’t write your own products anymore, like you said it was like sucking blood
out of you to write the first book.

Shawn:
God, I hate that!

Jeff:
Now, do you have other people do your products for you now when you come up with
new products or how does that work?

Shawn:
Well, now, from my marketplace, I don’t because I personally hold myself out to be a
marketing expert, so I’m not going to go out and have somebody ghost write my products
for me. Because I don’t think that would be fair, and probably wouldn’t be as well, the
content wouldn’t be as strong as it could be. What I do instead to create my particular
products, and I’ll tell you some other easy things in a second, is that I record stuff.
Whether as I do it as an interview format, in a teleseminar, or I simply when I want to
create something or write something make myself a quick outline and I just sit down at
my computer and record audio files. Which I can do way faster than I can write, and
there’s like a writer’s block between your head and you head, but there’s not between
your head and your mouth. Just think about how many things we’ve all said that they
never should have said. There’s no block, you can talk forever most people, especially if
there’s no audience, there’s no reason to be afraid. So you can literally, I use a program
called shoot, I’ll tell you in one second because it’s on my desktop, you can buy this
online, it’s called, it’s made by a company called acoustica, it’s their mp three audio
mixer. It’s just a little, it’s like twenty-nine bucks, you download it, and install it, and you

can record audio files that are mp threes or wave files, the kind of files that play on your
computer, and they’re real easy to edit. But I just talk, and if I talk for two hours, I talk
for two hours, and then I just, I have somebody transcribe the file for me. Then all I’ve
got to do is just roll through it, make a couple quick edits, and I’ve gotten the written
version of whatever I wanted to write. And editing costs you, you can buy it cheaper than
this, but the most expensive you should pay is a dollar a minute. So, if I talk for two
hours it costs me a hundred twenty dollars for somebody to edit, for someone to
transcribe it into words. And it saves me days of pain.

Jeff:
Do you have a transcription service or person?

Shawn:
Actually we have some outsource customer service people that we use, but I’m going to
recommend people if you don’t know who to use, there’s, man, there’s one that has a
really good website name that I know of, people use, but I can’t think of the...

Shawn:
But I mean, you can also go to e lance dot com, which I’m going to recommend in terms
of getting people to even create products for you. Which is simply e-l-a-n-c-e dot com.
You go there, sign up for a free account, and you can place any project you want to have
people do up on this service. And that includes getting stuff transcribed that includes
getting books written. My sister sells a book on downs syndrome, babies first year of
downs syndrome, that book was actually written by somebody with great technical
writing skills, we looked at samples ahead of time before the book was written. This
person lived in India, wrote this book, turned over all author’s rights to my sister’s book,
it’s like a hundred sixty pages long with footnotes, five hundred bucks. Written to her
specifications, she’s now the author, she owns it, so it was essentially ghost written by
somebody else.

Jeff:
Okay, and how much do you think you should pay for transcription you said?

Shawn:
Not more than a dollar a minute.

Jeff:
Okay, so like sixty bucks for an hour?

Shawn:
Right, sixty bucks for an hour max.

Jeff:
Okay, all right, Jim do you have any questions for Shawn before we open it up?

Jim:
No, what we’ll do is we got some of those resources, we’ll get Shawn’s too, and we’ll get
those transcription resources to the Internet.

Jeff:
Okay, good. All right Shawn, this is really, really helpful. And I appreciate you taking the
time to walk us through this in painful detail like this.

Shawn:
Sure.

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