EBook Writing and Marketing Secrets

If you have been thinking about setting up a membership site, I encourage you to take a look at Extreme Member. One of my students, Charles Parker, mentioned it to me last week, so I had to investigate further. They are offering 200 trial memberships for $2.95 for the first 15 days. If you have any interest in this at all, give it a try. There is no further obligation, and if it will build your business it may be the fastest and easiest way to start.

Extreme Member is run by several people in Australia and appears to be a high quality platform that is reasonably priced. After seeing what others have gone through with their membership software I had been reluctant to jump in, but this appears to be a viable solution to all of the technology issues. Extreme Member has a user friendly dashboard and can be set up easily. Take a look and decide if this is something you want to try. Charter memberships are always the best way to go, beacuse the price will never be as low again when they open it up to new people in the future.

Pinging your blog after each post is important to your overall SEO (search engine optimization) strategy. Each time you ping your blog post, many blog directories are notified that you have some new, fresh content. They, in turn, send out their spiders to see what you have written and index your post.

Both Pingoat and Pingomatic have been down for a couple of weeks now. But they are not the only sites that offer this type of pinging service. Technorati offers the best service, mainly because they are the largest blog directory in the world. If you haven’t already, go over to Technorati and claim your blog. You will see your traffic to your blog increase dramatically when you do so, because more people from around the world will now be able to find you online through your keywords.

I have also started using Ping.in and KPing.com. These are two sites that offer a similar service to that offered by Pingoat and Pingomatic.

So keep on posting and pinging, and do no worry about which sites provide this service to you.

Today’s Tuesday technology tip will cover trackbacks. A trackback is used to let another blogger know that you have written something about one of their posts. It is the only way the other blogger would find out that you had referred to him or his post, unless you used his name or something that he had a Google Alert set for.

If I am writing a post and want to discuss someone or something from another blog, I send a trackback ping when I publish my post. For a WordPress blog, the trackback url is simply the permalink with /trackback after it. On Typepad, you can click on the word ‘trackback’ at the end of the post and you will be given the trackback url, which is a long string of numbers.

Using trakbacks is a great way to connect with other bloggers and let them know you think their post will be helpful and interesting to your readers.

I am often asked to give my opinion on which blogging platform is the best. The truth is, I use both WordPress and Typepad, and believe they both have some good and bad points.

Typepad is user friendly and is hosted by Six Apart. In the three years I have been with them, their service has always been available, unlike some other companies with servers that go down regularly. Typepad’s customer service is also outstanding. You can start for as little as $4.95 per month, but I have the Pro plan, which gives me unlimited blogs and all of the features. This runs $14.95 per month, or $149 per year.

Hosted WordPress, available for no charge at WordPress.org, offers thousands of themes to choose from. However, you must upload the them you choose to your hosting company, and then do all of the technical part and plug-ins yourself, or hire someone to do it.

Both Typepad and WordPress blogs do well with the search engines, so I have done well with both.

What is your opinion on this? It reminds me of the time when we used to argue over which car manufacturer was best - Chevy or Ford. Back then I had a distinct opinion, but I was much younger in those days

I found out that most of you stay on this blog about one minutes, thirty four seconds and almost 70% of you would be long gone before reading the second sentence. Google Analytics tells you all this and much, much more when you sign up for their free service. You must know what is happening on your blog and website if you are going to build an online business.

You simply register for an account, enter your blog or website url, and then they give you the code needed to find out all of the details. On your website you will want to add the code just above the </body> tag, and be sure to do that for each page of your site.

So how will this help you sell more of your eBook or other product or service? Once you know what people are doing when they come to your site, and where they come from in the first place, you can make the necessary changes to get more people to visit and stay longer. Sign up for my weekly teleseminars and I will cover this in more detail in the near future.

PayPal is the easiest way to get started with selling your eBook and other products online. There used to be a stigma attached to using PayPal, but that is long gone, thanks to great work on PayPal’s part to make sure they offer a safe and secure service to their members.

When you sign up for an account at PayPal, make sure to get a business account and to verify it as soon as you can. This makes it easier to transfer money from your PayPal account into your checking account, and to use the other services they also provide to their business customers. I also use a debit card from them so that I can use my money anywhere I happen to be, such as the stationery store or other business related location.

Each month I print out a list of my transactions for the previous month. This gives me a record of what I made in sales for the month, as well as what I transferred into my bank account and what I spent on business related expenses. If you are just starting out online, PayPal is the least expensive way to accept money from people all over the world.

After you have written your eBook, short report, or any other writing you want to sell or share online, your next step will be to convert it to PDF format. PDF stands for portable document format, and makes it easier to get your information to others through a more stable and standardized format. But converting it to PDF is just the first step.

You must then close your Word document, or whatever program you have used to write your information, and also close the PDF document you have just created. Then open up your Adobe Acrobat program and open your converted file again from here.

Once you have opened up your document, you can then set the security settings to make sure people cannot copy your eBook or other content and make changes to it. I always allow people to print out my PDF’s, but I do not allow them to make changes, or cut and paste any part of my work.

You may want to think twice before password protecting your document for someone to open it. People lose or misplace the password you give them and you will have to be ready to provide customer service when this happens. Take a look at what you have written and determine if a password is truly necessary. I am using Adobe Acrobat Standard because I do not need the additional features included in the Professional version. You can visit Adobe’s website and see what is right for your needs.