As they have gotten older, our adventures have changed but I feel it is essential to continue to find different ways to connect with each of them. And now that my oldest is only a few short years away from driving age (damn that is a scary realization), what better way to bond than, as Bob Barker would have said…
A brand new car!
Well, maybe not a brand new car – as you will see shortly – but a car that we can enjoy together.
Growing up I never really thought about cars much, other than begging my parents to borrow theirs once I turned 16 and wanted to head out with my buddies. But as I finished up college, and now have two kids of my own, I look back and wish that my dad and I had shared a bond over cars.
Out in the hot, dusty garage with the hood popped open. Learning about tools (and life), and how no job would be complete until you skinned at least one knuckle.
The Choice Is Theirs
From the time I tried my damnedest to convince my dad to let me buy a 1972 Olds Cutlass when I was 16, I have wanted to own a classic car. Not a show car though, but rather a car that could be an every day driver. One that needs work, and one that I won’t blow a gasket over if it gets a scratch.
The search was over when I found my 1950 Ford Custom.
Without question, some will look at it and turn their nose. Or ask me when I am going to fully restore the car to show quality. But that isn’t what I want.
For me, this car fit my desire to find a rat rod style cruiser that I can drive anywhere and everywhere I want, but at the same time have a laundry list of things to work on and customizations to make. By no means am I an extremely skilled mechanic, but having a good running car means I have an opportunity to learn and have fun.
Ideally, my two boys will see me working on the car and it will pique their interest enough to get greasy and help me. And maybe it will be something that they can then pass on to their kids, from one generation to the next.
But even if all they want to do is hop in the seat next to me and take it out for a joy ride, that is fine by me too!
With that all said, I hope you enjoy the eye candy as much as I do:
As you surely know, the Kindle is one of the hottest markets right now for entrepreneurs looking to make their mark and build an income online. So naturally, my product is targeted for that market and is something I used in boosting my own book to Best Seller status.
With that said, I am proud to present to you…
Kindle Buyer Booster
The new product is called Kindle Buyer Booster and is targeted as a supplement to all the information people are learning about selling Kindle books.
I’ve bought quite a few products myself from people that promise the world when it comes to success with Kindle books. There have been some that have really great information, but many others that completely miss the mark with what they are teaching.
But one thing that has been consistent across all of them is that they don’t cover the tips that I have provided in Kindle Buyer Booster.
The key ninja secret sauce is something really easy to implement, but it adds social proof to your book instantly that boosts your book up the rankings and puts it in front of more eyeballs on Amazon. I’ve made this super affordable so everyone can reap the benefit too!
Head on over to the Warrior Forum to pick up a copy now!
After the initial announcement about the book, I didn’t do a whole lot with it outside of tell some family and friends about it. Then I kind of let it sit on Amazon, hoping that people would buy it and like it. They would talk about it and more people would buy it, and before long I’d be retiring. Right!
Well, as you can imagine the book didn’t do too much.
Sold a few copies here and there, but generally was not the golden nest egg I dreamed about.
Until now…
#1 Bestseller
At this moment my book is now the #1 Bestseller in the Fatherhood category on the Kindle!
Yeah, you heard me right…see for yourself.
Zoinks!
As much as I’d like to take credit for nailing the #1 spot all on my own, I do owe a great deal to a Kindle Ninja that I was fortunate it enough to meet recently and he allowed me to pick his brain a little.
Combined with some ninja secret sauce of my own, I crushed it!
Have you bought a copy yet?
You can buy it here!
Oh, and leave me a review!;)
Maybe it has something to do with the adrenaline of starting a new year, but I am at it again and will be releasing my next info product in the very near future.
Tell us more!
While I don’t want to reveal the topic of the info product just yet, there have been a few hints here and there that you should be able to piece together to get a pretty good idea of what I am doing.
Keeping in mind the lessons I learned on the first time around, I am most definitely keeping it simple and zeroing in on the target audience. Like my first product, there should be minimal need for customer support because what I am sharing is really straight-forward and easy to understand.
When you see it, you’re probably going to slap yourself in the forehead with the proverbial “Doh!” moment.
Honestly, in all of the products that I have seen on this topic, I have yet to see one of them mention this super ninja tactic that will have you absolutely crushing it.
But most importantly, I am having fun!
Alright, that’s all for now…
What fun would it be if I told you everything right now?
I’ve learned a thing or two about how to build anticipation, so I need to keep some things a secret until the product has been launched.
It shouldn’t be long now, I’m hoping to get some feedback from a Goliath in this niche and then I will be making final revisions in preparation for release.
A’ight deuces! (That’s for my son.)
When we discussed how Amazon Author Central can help you improve the testing of your book, I mentioned that there are four areas that can have a significant impact on the sales of your book.
- Title of the book
- Cover
- Price
- Reviews and Description
Most of the items above are things that can be controlled by you, the author.
Out of your control, kind of…
The one item that cannot be controlled by the author is the book reviews. Now, the author can feature reviews in the description by utilizing Author Central, but actually obtaining the reviews is dependent on the readers of your book actually posting a review.
So, there’s nothing we can do to get reviews, right?
Yes and no.
Clearly we cannot force a reader to leave a review. Unless of course you plan to personally visit each and every reader and strong-arm them into publishing a review for your book. But that’s probably not the best approach.
Instead, think outside the box and get creative.
And in all reality, if you’re familiar with marketing, you will see that there is a way to get reviews that people and companies use on a regular basis to solicit reviews.
People love free
Look around the Interweb and you will see any number of brands offering their product for free in exchange for feedback. Or you will see bloggers that obtained a free product in order to evaluate the product and write a review.
Guess what?
You can do the same thing with your Kindle book.
If you’ve read anything about publishing books for the Kindle, you’ve likely encountered more than a few people that encourage you to go to places like Fiverr to buy reviews of your book.
Do that if you like, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Amazon frowns upon buying reviews, or posting reviews that are not authentic. They’ve even implemented a feature that identifies reviews as coming from an Amazon verified purchase in an effort to weed out people pumping dummy reviews into their books.
What do I recommend?
Give away review (free) copies of your book and in exchange request that the recipient provide an honest review on Amazon. Keep in mind that there is nothing that guarantees the recipient will actually write you a review, but the practice is compliant per Amazon’s guidelines.
Looking at the Amazon Customer Review Guidelines, we see:
Full disclosure: If you received a free product in exchange for your review, please clearly and conspicuously disclose that that you received the product free of charge.
…
What’s Not Allowed
– Reviews written for any form of compensation other than a free copy of the product
Do tread carefully though
While Amazon supports providing free review copies of your book, you do need to be careful that you’re not providing the book for free to everyone.
Amazon states that they reserve the right to price match your title to the lowest price that the book is being made available. If you’re listing your book for free on your website to every visitor, you may very well find that Amazon equates this to your book being available for free and thus lowers the listing price on your book.
Rather than openly providing the book for free to anyone and everyone that happens along, put forth an offer to your community that you would be happy to provide a free review copy to interested parties.
Speaking of which…
If you would like to receive a review copy of my book, give me a shout!
Welcome to Blogging 2012.
The first rule of Blogging 2012 is: you do not talk about Blogging 2012.
The second rule of Blogging 2012 is: you DO NOT talk about Blogging 2012!
All joking aside, let me welcome you to 2012 and wish you and yours a truly happy and prosperous year ahead!
Now, based on what I want to share with you today, a more appropriate title might have been Welcome to Blogging 1999. But seeing as I don’t have a time machine, I simply need to acknowledge my mistakes and move forward from the present day.
Mistakes? What mistakes?
What is one of the mantras that just about every blogger has heard 4,357,892 times yet probably at least 50% of them hasn’t followed through on to this day?
Building a list.
Build a list, build a list, build a list.
Every blogger has heard it.
Every blogger knows that they need to do it.
But…
How many of them do?
Hanging my head in shame
I started blogging back in 2006 and have a dozen or more blogs that I’ve created since that time. Up until recently, not a single one of them included a list. Not a single one.
Shame on me.
That doesn’t mean that I haven’t understood the importance of building a list. It is just that I’ve never actually followed through and built the damn list. Well, as part of rediscovering my focus with this blog and working on building relationships that is about to change.
If you take a look over at the top of the sidebar to the right, you will see the new signup form to join my list and connect with me.
Where’s the freebie?
Take a look around the Interweb and you’ll see that a lot of sites offer a cool freebie as a thank you for joining their list. To be honest, that is one of the things that has held me back from creating a list for so long.
I don’t know what to offer as a freebie.
Sure, I could slap some rubbish into a PDF and call it a free guide–which is what far too many people do from what I have seen. Or I could grab some free public domain content to regurgitate to you as my “super special bonus report”.
But that would go as well as a turd in the punch bowl.
At the end of the day, I want you to join my list because you’re interested in the content that I share here and you want to stay connected to the community.
Hopefully you enjoy the quality of the content here, and know that I will be sharing some of that content only with my list and not here on the blog. So I don’t have a freebie to send you right away for signing up to my list, but if you like what you see here I ask that you go ahead and sign up!
Have you started your list?
Don’t worry, I’m happy to help answer any questions as I’ve done a handful now. By the way, I use and highly recommend Aweber but there are other options too. The important thing is to get started, it’s never too late.
Remember, do not talk about Blogging 2012!
Photo credit: stockerre
But what else can you do for your Kindle books?
As you might imagine, your odds for booming sales increase as the number of people that discover your book increase. So wouldn’t it be nice if you could get your book in front of an audience that averages more than 130 million unique visitors per month.
Facebook fan page
Yep, Facebook is that site averaging millions upon millions of visitors each and every month. Granted you will not be able to get your book in front of all of those people by creating a Facebook fan page, but even if you get 10, 20, or more new pair of eyes on your book you increase awareness.
Not only will a Facebook fan page provide more visibility for your book, but it also gives you an additional opportunity to connect with your readers.
Just the other day we talked about the importance of building relationships and connecting with people.
Guess what?
Making a connection with even one or two people via your Facebook fan page is more than worth the effort. One of the most efficient means of marketing is by word of mouth. If you have a positive impact on one person, that person will tell their family and friends who will tell their family and friends, and so on.
Success does not come over night
No doubt this all sounds great, but don’t think that you can rush on over to Facebook to create a fan page today and think that you’re going to have 25,000 fans by tomorrow.
As a matter of fact, building your fan page will take time as you cannot simply “friend” or “like” people as you can with a personal profile. At first it might feel like your fan page will never get discovered by the millions of Facebookians (if that isn’t a word, I’m coining it here and now) but don’t get discouraged.
Use your personal profile and Twitter account to promote your new Facebook fan page.
Add a Facebook social plugin to your blog to raise awareness of your fan page. By the way, you may have noticed that I’ve just recently added this to my sidebar in an effort to build my fan page.
Follow along
Speaking of my fan page, you are welcome to follow along and see how I begin to build my Facebook fan page for my book.
You might notice that my book was published in June 2011 and here it is six months later and my fan page barely has a pulse.
True, I am guilty of not utilizing this promotional tool up until recently.
But that means you can Like my page and follow along to see exactly how I approach adding new fans, building relationships, and providing helpful information. As a matter of full disclosure, by no means am I an expert when it comes to Facebook so I will be learning as I go.
As of right now, my Facebook fan page cannot get much more basic than it is but that means there is a lot that we have to do. Heck, my page only has two Likes right now. One of those is yours truly, and the other is a friend–I haven’t even convinced my wife to Like my page yet.
Do you have a Facebook fan page?
Let me know if you have a Facebook fan page already so I can check it out and learn more about you. If you don’t have one yet, jump in and create one so we can go through this process together.
For those that are familiar with Internet Marketing, you understand the concept of continuously testing. Whether it be testing different titles, ad copy, images, colors, or any combination of items, testing is essential to your success.
The same holds true when publishing eBooks on the Kindle.
Testing your Kindle books
When it comes to testing your Kindle books, there are a handful of items that you will want to focus your efforts on as you look for that sweet spot of daily sales.
Here are a few of the critical items you will want to test as you work on marketing your book and building your sales:
- Title of the book
- Cover image
- Price point
- Reviews and description
Generally speaking, all of these are relatively obvious areas that you will want to test. For instance, you’ve published your book and sales have been lagging for a month or two. Evaluate the areas above and select one that you want to use as a test case.
Will you get more sales at $1.99 than you have been getting at $0.99? Would a more professional cover boost your sales? Is your description grabbing buyers?
Testing is good, but tedious
Unfortunately, when it comes to testing on the Kindle Direct Publishing website things can be rather slow and tiresome to test.
Unlike when you have your own website or blog that you can update instantly and test small changes, you are at the mercy of Amazon when it comes to updating your Kindle books. Once your book is published, making changes to items such as the price, title, and cover can take between 12 and 48 hours to be reviewed and updated.
The same holds true for the description of your book.
Unless you use the following tip!
Amazon provides a service, or site, called Author Central that allows authors to create their own personal profile. The profile allows you to share personal information, including things such as your latest tweets, directly on Amazon.
Author Central also provides authors with the ability to edit information on each of their books.
It doesn’t cover all of the areas that you want to test as an author, but it does allow you to update the description of your book and also allows you to highlight reviews. You can also add special sections such as “From the Author” and an assortment of Book Extras.
So you might be thinking, big deal, I can do that on KDP too.
While that is true, updates made via Author Central are applied to your book’s page on Amazon almost instantly as opposed to the 12-48 hours it takes via the Direct Publishing interface.
Not only that, but it also provides you with some advanced (well, more advanced than KDP anyways) editing controls such as the ability to include bold and italic text as well as ordered and unordered lists. Okay, so that isn’t earth shattering–but it is better than being limited to just plain text.
Improve efficiency and set yourself apart
Sign up for Author Central if you haven’t already so you can begin leveraging these benefits within your own testing. At a minimum, being able to create your own author profile page provides you an opportunity to promote yourself on one of the most visited websites.
Utilizing it for your testing will also allow you to get quicker results on your changes, and allow you to set yourself apart from all of the authors using plain text.
Give this Kindle publishing tip a try and let me know how your testing improves your sales!
For those that are still on the fence or scared by all the work involved with publishing on the Kindle, don’t forget you can get in touch with me at Teague Publishing for help with becoming a published author.
In terms of this blog, I was doing a bit of analysis via Google Analytics to get a feel for what is bringing readers to the site via the search engines. While this doesn’t necessarily give an accurate picture of the most visited content, it does provide some insight on what terms other people are using to find the site.
Based on the most popular search terms, the focus of this site should be the following in 2012:
Now clearly that does not fit with the original intention of this blog, which was meant to be a resource to provide tips and tricks on building your own blog; share lessons learned with regard to affiliate marketing; drill down into what worked and didn’t work when it comes to making money with a blog; and discuss how building a social media presence leads to increased traffic, which leads to more opportunities to leverage your blog into bigger and better offers.
However, I do think there is still something to learn from knowing that roughly 72% of the top search terms being used to drop people on this blog are related to the two topics above.
What is there to learn?
Basically that the purpose of this blog was really to build a community. Yes, much of that community had a shared interest in blogging and learning how to make money from their blogs. But it was equally important to learn about connecting with people beyond the blog as well.
It was about sharing words of wisdom from my 10 year old son. Or showing a few pictures of my wife’s handmade jewelry.
I shared personal accounts of what I was doing to be a better husband, while also taking time to highlight the success of the community as a whole.
What does all of this mean?
Ultimately, at the core, the success of a blog has less to do with the topic of the content and more to do with sharing yourself with your readers.
Building relationships.
Connecting with other people.
Speaking openly and honestly about any topic.
Now that doesn’t mean that the topic of the content is not also important. But often times we as bloggers seem to get a little hung up on trying to come up with the perfect niche, or even more granular the perfect post.
Share yourself with your readers and build a rapport with them on a personal level.
That is probably one of the things that I miss the most from when this blog was clicking on all cylinders. The days when the comments on each post were a conversation between regular readers of the blog, some people who I’ve met in person and others that I have yet to meet.
And that is my focus for 2012.
Begin to use this as a vehicle to share my voice without limiting myself to specific topics. Maybe “begin” isn’t really the right word. Rediscover? Revisit?
That doesn’t mean any of the people that were part of that original community will find their way back, but I look forward to that possibility while also being excited about the opportunity to build a new community with new people as well.
While I hope to connect with you over the course of the coming year, let me start by asking you, what is your focus for 2012?
Efficient scheduling of time should be the main focus of successful project management. You should also pay attention to delegating the perfect amount of tasks to each time slot. The ratio of balance you achieve between your efforts, available time, and realistic expectations, might translate into either significant profits or considerable losses.
Why am I talking about project management?
Well, there’s a point…
Blogging is a vital project that requires all these aspects of project management. Your very first step towards professional blog management is your blog planning. You can delegate the day’s schedule orientation as the first task or the wrap up task of the day. However, even better is instead of per day basis blog planning, you put aside a day per week to review your blog’s success and shortcomings.
This is a more concentrated way of planning your blog and needless to mention, it proves to be quite efficient. However, do not underestimate the enormity of this approach and take to the appropriate method to increase its effectiveness.
Scope out your blog
You cannot understand what is working for your blog and what constitute as shortcomings without analyzing every aspect of your blogging process. Scoping out your blog will give you relevant insight in to the way your posts and pages are being perceived by your readers.
Start by creating heat zone maps for your each of your blogâ€
s pages; to demarcate the zones that get more click-through-rates.
Use analytical tools to get the statistics of your posts, reader activity on vital areas of your blog as well as per day performance of your blog. All these bits of information, pieced together will give you a full accountability report on your blog’s performance for a sustained period.
Check your promotion plan
A significant fraction of your blogging process, and its eventual success, will depend on an efficient marketing plan for your blog. Fortunately, with the rise of the social marketing sites, networking and blog promotion methods are more far reaching now, than ever. However, it depends on how effectively you employ these methods for your blogâ€s promotion.
Start out by picking the most likely social media sites that have the potential to support your marketing campaign. Create attractive profiles and pages on these sites. Follow the correct protocol to get a grip on the particular site’s promotion scene before you begin to employ individual creative ideas that give you an edge over the crowd.
Always make sure you have plug-in(s) for all your social media pages on your blog. Promote your most popular blog posts (get them sticky!) all over your social media promotional campaigns.
De-clutter and audit your blog
You can delegate this step as a monthly responsibility rather than working on it at frequent intervals. However, skipping the step entirely can ruin the effectiveness of the other measures you take and bring down your blog’s efficiency.
We audit our discount coupon blog that features weight watchers and nutrisystem discount deals once in a fortnight and declutter any broken links, expired coupons and also do SEO of old blog posts.
Schedule a time slot to audit your blog’s search engine optimization techniques. Compare the outcome of the existing techniques with the estimate of any new technique that you intend to put through with your blog.
Follow up responses for comments and emails
It is essential to cultivate your network over the Internet. Regularly responding to the comments and emails that you receive will take you one-step further in this quest. Delegate this responsibility as a part of your blog planning day to adjust the frequency. This way you will accumulate a certain number of comments and queries to get in your inbox, before you start responding to them.
Also, use this time to sift through the biggest competitors in your niche and link with them. This will improve your position in the niche and have a domino effect to improve the quality of your blog posts.
You should also make some time to specially help new readers get acquainted with your blog. This is a simple gesture but it will help the new readers to relate to your blog and build their trust on your expertise.
Send in a word of thanks to fellow bloggers or readers who might have inspired any of your ideas for a new post or mentioned you flatteringly over the Internet.
Your blog planning day is not restricted to brainstorming about creative posts. While, that still remains an integral part of the day, you have to distribute your attention in relation to priority, to each of the above mentioned aspects of blogging. However, the expected outcome of the total exercise is a smooth running, successful blog; so, the efforts are worth all of the time you put in to them.
About the Author
Jane has used the above steps to plan her day and effectively promote her diet blog WeightLossTriumph.com where she shares Weight Watchers codes. She also publishes reviews of women and men who lost weight with proven diet plans like Nutrisystem. Weight Watchers is a diet program backed by more peer reviewed scientific papers than any other weight loss program. Nutrisystem is a popular meal delivery diet.
Photo credit: Ghirson