Writing and Self-Publishing section added to bookstore

August 24, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 4 Comments
Filed under: Act On Your Dream!, Affiliate Marketing, Books, Lulu, Marketing, Promote Yourself, Self-Publishing, Writing 

Ever since I read Make Your Knowledge Sell! several years ago, I’ve known that I wanted to write a series of reports and ebooks with several goals in mind…

  • To share the knowledge I’ve learned over years of researching affiliate marketing and from the daily practice of it
  • To enhance my reputation as being someone with integrity who offers good advice about online marketing
  • To provide information that will help you avoid the pitfalls I’ve traversed and to make more money with affiliate marketing
  • To do more of something I enjoy doing: writing

About a thousand years ago, Nicki Fink and I wrote a textbook we used for teaching our students how to use Macintosh computers and several of the more popular applications that were in use at the time.

Knowing nothing about writing a book, we just did it.

Our first couple of editions were printed on a laser printer and we did all the collation and comb-binding ourselves.

When we finally approached a publisher, we had a pretty good book that was helping our students learn how to use Macs by completing a series of projects.

I submitted the entire book to Addison Wesley and instead of getting a rejection notice, as everyone had advised me to expect, we got an offer from Addison Wesley and Benjamin Cummings.

Addison Wesley wanted to get it into print quickly and Benjamin Cummings wanted a complete rewrite along with reviews by several colleges and academies before publishing it.

We made the mistake of going with Benjamin Cummings and added about another year to the project in addition to having several disagreements with the editor about the direction we wanted to go with the book.

Eventually the book was published and we received a few thousand dollars in advance royalties.

I was happy to have a published book that was helping some people learn how to use their Macs better, but the entire experience was less than satisfactory. I swore that the next book I wrote would be self-published.

Now, in the 21st century, a lot of things have changed. Books and reports can be released as ebooks and offered in downloadable PDF format. Tools and applications for doing this are becoming more popular and affordable.

Additionally, if you take the time to format that PDF ebook correctly, you can have it printed and sold at places like Lulu.com, CafePress.com, and many other print-on-demand publishers.

(I’ve started a Lulu.com storefront where I’ll be promoting reports, ebooks, and books in the coming months, as I have time to research and write them. Currently, there is one free downloadable copy of my Act On Your Dream! newsletter.)

Since writing and self-publishing have moved up higher on my to-do list, I researched these topics on Amazon.com this evening. As a result, I’ve added a new section to my Amazon store for Writing and Self-Publishing Books.

I have an older copy of Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual and I’m looking forward to buying and reading his latest edition.

Most people who dream of being a writer don’t know that writing is only one part of the job. Perhaps more important than writing a good book is promoting and publicizing it. If nobody knows about it, you won’t sell very many copies!

I added a few books about writing non-fiction, but most of the books in the new section are about promoting, publicizing, and networking. After all, if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably interested in affiliate marketing and other topics related to online marketing, so I’m sure you will find books of interest in this new section of my bookstore.

I’m always interested in your comments and recommendations. If you know of an excellent book about writing, self-publishing, or promoting books, I hope you’ll share with us.

Act on your dream!

JD

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Where do you promote your blog?

August 22, 2008 by John Dilbeck · 7 Comments
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blog Directories, Blogging, Business Networking, Forums, Promote Yourself, RSS Syndication, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses, Twitter 

You’ve taken the time to research a topic for your new blog and decided there should be enough interest to make it worth the effort.

Then, you created the blog, chose a theme, modified the theme, selected plugins and widgets, and now you are ready to write great articles on all the topics you researched before starting.

Right?

Hopefully, that was your approach.

I think most bloggers throw up a blog and then look for something to write about. I know I did that on some of my first blogs.

I was a lot more focused and took more time to research what I was going to do before I started this blog.

Either way, now you have a blog, you’ve been writing on it for some time, and you want people to find you and read what you have to say.

Ideally, they’ll also post great comments so you and your readers can learn even more about the topic of the article.

So, where do you promote your blog?

There are lots of ways to promote your blog, and I’m sure you know of many that I’ve never used. I hope you’ll share them with us.

Let’s start with some that work well for me.

Create a lens about your blog on Squidoo

My main place to promote my blog is on Squidoo. For instance, I created a lens especially for this blog at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

Syndicate your RSS feed on your other blogs

I syndicate the RSS newsfeed from this blog on several other Squidoo lenses and some of my other blogs, such as you’ll see in the sidebar of my Marketing With Squidoo blog.

Create a community for your blog on MyBlogLog.com

I also registered this blog on MyBlogLog.com and created a community for it at 21st Century Affiliate Marketing.

There are several benefits of creating a community for your blog there. First, it syndicates your RSS feed as headlines on the page. Second, it makes it easy to increase your business networking as people join your community. Third, they offer widgets so you can see who has visited you lately. This makes it easy to visit their sites and/or make contact with them on other social networking services.

You can see this in action towards the bottom of the left column of this blog. Look at the Recent Visitors widget. If you hover your mouse over the visitor’s face, you should see a fly-out that lists the blogs and sites for which they have created communities on MyBloglog.com. It also makes it easy to join their communities and increase your business networking.

About half-way down every page on this blog, in the right column, you’ll see a section called “New with John Dilbeck.” In that section is a widget provided by MyBlogLog that shows my latest activities on this blog and other sites and blogs I author. It also shows what I’ve been doing on several networking services such as Twitter, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and others.

It has taken a long time to set all of this up, but now, whenever I do something on one of my blogs, websites, or forums, that action is recorded in the RSS feed and is automatically syndicated on multiple other sites. I get visitors from a wide variety of sites as a result.

You can see another example of this at work on my profile page at the Squidoo Marketing community I created. In the right column of the page (and every other page of the site), you’ll see the Recent Visitors widget for the MyBlogLog community I created for that social networking site. In the center column, you’ll see the wider widget from MyBlogLog that shows my activities on my sites and the social networking services I use regularly.

Syndicate your blog’s RSS feed as widely as you can

Syndicating the RSS feed from your blog on multiple sites is a good way to get your writing noticed by both new readers and the search engines.

Should you tweet your blog on Twitter?

I use a plugin called Twitter Tools to post an announcement about new blog postings to my twitter profile.

At first I was unsure about this and created a Squidoo lens called Should You Tweet Your Blog? to learn what other people think about the idea of automatically tweeting new blog posts. I’d welcome your opinions and feedback either on that lens or by leaving a comment here.

Link to your blog on forums and in comments on other blogs

I’ve talked about my blog on various forums and in comments on others’ blogs.

Be sure to add value when you post to the forums or comment on someone’s blog. As long as you’re adding to the conversation and helping others, the link to your blog will be welcome, or, at least, tolerated.

If you just jump in and write a post or comment about your blog that doesn’t add any value to the discussion, it will probably be deleted. At the very least, you’ll look like a spammer, and I know you don’t want to do that.

One good place to list your blog is in the thread started by Michael Galante on the ConquerYourNiche forum, Share your active blog here. I’ve found several blogs there that I’ll be reading and I’ve subscribed to a couple of their RSS feeds.

Another good place to link to your blog, especially if it is related to Internet marketing, is in the Members, show off your blogs! thread on Lynn Terry’s Self-Starters Weekly Tips forum.

(By the way, I’m one of the moderators of the SMO: Social Marketing & Social Media section of Lynn’s forum, and I invite you to come and share your knowledge and experiences about social networking with us.)

I have links to this blog in my signature file on a number of other forums where I’m active. Each post I make to those forums will link back to this blog.

Make good comments on other blogs

One way you can promote your blog is to make good comments on this one.

WordPress, by default, uses “nofollow” links so the search engines won’t follow links to the site you list when making your comment.

I’ve installed the DoFollow plugin so you’ll get some linklove when you post a good comment here. I also installed CommentLuv, which will try to find the last post you wrote on your blog and will link to it below your comment.

Additionally, SezWho is active on this blog and it will keep track of the comments you make on blogs with SezWho installed. It’s a pretty cool tool and I think we’ll be seeing more blogs using this nice tool as time goes by.

I hope you’ll make use of the rating feature SezWho provides to express your opinion of what I write and the comments others leave. By rating what we say, it will go into the multi-site comment aggregator that SezWho maintains and we can raise (or lower) our reputation based on the quality of our writing.

Now, I welcome substantive comments that are on-topic and I look forward to talking about affiliate marketing with you in any discussions that develop here.

However, I’ll delete your comment if it doesn’t contain anything worthwhile or is off-topic. So, don’t bother leaving a comment that says something like, “you have a good point,” or “that’s great.” I’ll delete ‘em in a heartbeat.

Don’t spam something I write with an off-topic comment full of advertising. Poof! Gone.

But, if you write something about the topic that adds to our understanding of your viewpoint or which offers links to on-topic resources, then I welcome what you have to say.

Do you comment on blogs?

My friend Mitch posted an interesting article called Why Don’t More People Comment On Blogs? on his blog a few days ago.

Do you have any thoughts on that subject?

In Summary

I mainly use Squidoo lenses, Twitter, a community on MyBlogLog, sig files on other forums, and comments on blogs to promote this blog.

How do you promote your blog?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Have you updated your new Squidoo lensmaster bio page?

August 20, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Business Networking, Promote Yourself, Social Networking, Squidoo Lenses 

Yesterday, while looking for something (I don’t remember what), I looked at my lensmaster bio page at Squidoo and was surprised to see that it didn’t look anything like it did the last time I saw it.

What!?

I don’t like surprises and I generally react negatively when one of my pages changes without my knowledge or approval. So, I didn’t really like the new appearance of the page.

But, I tried to keep an open mind about it.

I went searching for more information about the change and found an active thread in the Lensmasters Lounge at SquidU.com.

Then I found Megan Casey’s post on the SquidBlog: New lensmaster bio page, live now!

That’s were I learned that what I was seeing was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of potential information the page could show.

I immediately edited the profile page on my Squidoo dashboard, and you can edit your profile, too:

http://www.squidoo.com/member/profile

I was able to add links to my blogs, websites, social networking profiles, and more. There’s even the ability to feature up to five of your favorite lenses right in the middle of the page.

It took all of a few minutes and now my lensmaster bio page is much more useful to me and I hope to any readers who find it.

I still don’t like surprises, but I do like the features in our new bio pages.

Have you updated your profile, yet?

Act on your dream!

JD

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Do you have a blog at SquidTop.com?

August 5, 2008 by John Dilbeck · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Marketing, Promote Yourself, Squidoo Lenses, Squidoo Marketing, WordPress 

Earlier this morning, I learned about SquidTop.com.

According to the SquidTop lens, Squidtop – Blogs for Squidoo Lensmasters, “Squidtop is a blog platform built on the WordPress system that allows squidoo lensmasters to create their own blogs to promote themselves, their projects, and their lenses.”

Well, that sounds just like me. I love promoting myself, my projects, and my lenses, so I immediately signed up for a new blog there: Marketing with Squidoo.

Since it is so new, there isn’t much there yet, but there will be as time allows and inspiration motivates.

Marketing with Squidoo will be concerned with marketing with Squidoo lenses, specifically. There may be a little overlap now and then with this blog.

I’ll be promoting my Squidoo lenses and our Squidoo Marketing Community on the new blog.

Act on your dream!

JD

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