Tag: internet marketing
Steal this Ebook
An ebook can be useful for those with an interest for decent search engine ranking. In order to please the search engines and acquire deep indexing, high relevance and top ranking, a lot of relevant content must be written (or copied)…
The hippie bible “Steal this book” was an anti-capitalism manifesto, widely remembered because of its creative and aggressive title plus its subvertive message.
Paper books like that one were not easy to steal, because of the guards in the bookstores and the costly effort of retyping, mastering, printing, binding and distributing. In the digital era you can get an ebook, crack or OCR it if protected, and copy-pasting it.
The main client for ebook-stealing tools are webmasters, in particular those with an interest for decent search engine ranking. In order to please the search engines and acquire deep indexing, high relevance and top ranking, a lot of relevant content must be written (or copied).
When I was into science there was a phrase “Publish or perish”, that expressed more or less the same. Quantity instead of quality. I guess most of us would like to have time to write short and juicy articles instead of Goog-friendly mumbo-jumbo.
Machine-writing is a relatively new activity. And I am not talking of simple copy-pasting, but a more sophisticated text-generation breed of specialized software. Some simple programs take a number of words and just mix them, like Ktumbler. Others can generate random English-like phrases, like the “Web Economy Bullshit Generator”, or sensible good English phrases by the thousand, like Phrase Generator in Synonymizer.
But phrases are not substitute for longer text, and many lazy or greedy webmasters are tempted to copy-paste from the web, which is easier and faster than thinking. A much criticized brand of website ranking systems, Cloaking, copies large amounts of relevant, well ranked text from the web, and shows it to the search engine spiders. In this way, they pretend to have more and better content than any other site. And the best of it, when the visitor is a human, they hide the stolen goods and show some innocent words. Cloaking refers to that ability, and it is achieved by IP detection and comparison with known spider data.
Finally, the synonymizing and text-mixing tools modify the original texts beyond recognition. Like facial surgery after committing a crime.
However, I am afraid that there is a little copyright issue… The problem is that nobody knows exactly what are the limits for automated text surgery.
To synonymize or otherwise disguise a source text is morally wrong, most of us would agree. But it has limits. If I say “My Kingdom for an equine”, or “After me, the big rain”, or “Let’s there be illumination”, you will understand that synonyms cannot be forbiden. There are also many situations in which overprotective legislation blocks creativity and innovation.
I am tempted to emulate Abbie Hoffman and discuss the morality of copyright and the whole issue of intellectual property. However, those are deep waters.
My point is that there is no established parameter to define plagiarism in texts. What if I substitute “2” for “two” and Goog for Google, as I do to avoid being noticed by them? And Yah for Yahoo, not to forget the pioneer?. Or if I change just one word in a phrase? What if I just mix the phrases in a text? Goog will probably still consider that the keyword density is correct for top ranking, minus a correction to account for the fact than the start of a file is more important than the end.
Many Plagiarism Detection services can compare any submitted text with a large library (mostly, the WWW) and decide if there is enough similarity with a certain source. They usually do not disclose their algorithm, but assure ìit comprises proprietary technologyî and ìdetects digital signature of the authorsî. A leader in this field says “Copyscape looks for pages containing sizeable chunks of identical text”. Nobody knows how that translates into numbers.
Google and the other search engines are against “duplicated content”, but they do not define it.
The availability of “text de-authoring tools” makes the intellectual property issue very blurry to any attorney willing to evaluate the existence of a crime. And as a collateral effect, the modified text will not be detected by the anti-plagiarism tools, which mostly search for exact text coincidences.
I started to examine some Plagiarism Detection sites, and I noticed that the better ones require some kind of a fee. Of course, it is not easy to compare a student term paper with the whole Library of Congress and the whole Web, plus the old Web Archives in the Wayback Machine. Others like Ferret are free and let you compare your file with another, but you need to provide BOTH files.
So, without hiding my condition of SEO Tool maker, I declare the need for a public algorithm that will establish if a text is the un-ethical or immoral or illegal derivative of a web source. It is necessary either for nailing plagiarists or to help writers and webmasters to define the limits for near-plagiarism and near-plagiarism devices
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— How to Write an Ebook —
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 your book positively affect the lives of your readers?
* Is your book dynamic and will it keep the reader’s attention?
* Does your 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 request from your website visitors.
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The Deepest Secrets To E-books
The deepest Secrets behind e-books finally revealed. If you want to know how they make it, you’ll definitely need to know what they’re doing.
So what is ebook really all about? The following report includes some fascinating information about ebook–info you can use, not just the old stuff they used to tell you.
Ebooks are part of the new frontier of cyberspace. They are an entirely new medium for sharing marketing information, ideas, techniques, and expert knowledge.
Each day the number of people accessing the Internet grows, causing the exposure of your ebook to increase incrementally. It’s obvious why electronic self-publishing has become so popular so quickly.
The publishing industry, I hope, does not intend to forever banish the printed word to the dustbin of history. Books in print have their own special qualities and merits, and the world would be diminished by their disappearance.
Having said that, let’s look at what makes ebooks so important and so unique. Ebooks have certain abilities and qualities that other mediums do not possess.
For example, ebooks are fairly easy to produce, and their production cost is inexpensive. Just think about it: you don’t need a publisher, an agent, a printing press, offset film, ink, paper, or even a distributor. You just need a great concept, the ability to write it or to hire a writer, and the right software.
Additionally, ebooks are easily and rapidly distributed online. They are also easily updated; they do not require a second print run. All you need is to go into your original creation and modify the text or graphics. Because of this flexibility, ebooks can change and grow as fast as you can type.
Ebooks are also immediately obtainable. You don’t have to go to a bookstore or search through endless titles at an online bookstore. All you have to do is download it from a website, and presto! It’s on your computer, ready to be read.
Ebooks are interactive. This is one of the most unique and specific qualities that ebooks offer. You can add surveys that need to be filled out, order forms for customers to purchase your products or goods, sound and video that draw your reader into the virtual world of your ebook, even direct links to relevant sites that will expand your ebook outward.
The potential is virtually limitless.
Ebooks have a particular kind of permanence that other mediums do not possess. Television shows and radio shows air once, and then may rerun a few times. Ebooks remain on your computer for as long as your choose, and they can be read and reread whenever you choose to. They can even be printed out and stored on the
shelves of your traditional home library.
Another wonderful quality is that ebooks have no barriers in terms of publishing. You don’t need to go
through the endless process of submitting your manuscript over and over again, and then once you land an agent, having the agent submit your manuscript over and over again. Nor do you have to shell out thousands of dollars for printing a self-published book.
All ebooks require is a writer and appropriate software. Figure out your market, write your book, post it on
your website, and with the right business savvy, your audience will come to you.
The best time to learn about ebook is before you’re in the thick of things. Wise readers will keep reading to earn some valuable ebook experience while it’s still free.
Finally, you have creative control over your ebook. You don?t have to compromise with an editor or the publishing trends of the time. You don’t have to haggle with a designer or wait for copyedited galleys to arrive by snail mail. You are in complete control of the design and the text.
How to Use ebooks for Marketing and Promotion:
There are innumerable ways to use ebooks to promote your business and drive quality traffic to your website. Once posted on your site, you can turn them into a daily course, which brings your customer back to read the next chapter.
You can use them as a free gift for making a purchase or for filling out a survey. Put your ebook on a disc, and you will have an innovative brochure. Blow your competition away by inserting the disc into your sales packages.
The most effective marketing products are those that are unique. Copyright your ebook, and immediately, you
have a powerful tool that you, and you alone, can offer to the public. People will have to visit your site to acquire your ebook, which increases the flow of quality traffic and the potential of sales and affiliate contacts.
Make sure that you keep your ebook current. Update it frequently as the market and trends change. Add new advice and techniques to show your prospects how your goods or services can enrich their lives. By constantly keeping abreast of new trends and techniques, you can continue to see profits from your ebook for years after your original creation.
Another phenomenal advantage of ebooks is that you can test their marketing potential without putting out hardly any cash at all. You can even produce an ebook one copy at a time, each time you receive an order, eliminating the need for storage and inventory. By this method, you can gauge the saleablity of your ebook, and make adjustments as necessary until the orders start pouring in.
Ebooks allow you to learn about your market and customer habits and motivation over a period of time, without risking your precious financial resources. They also provide you with an invaluable way to gather marketing information, which you can use in many different facets of your business.
Use your ebook to discover what the specific goals and problems are in your specific industry. Then figure out how to solve these problems, and publish an ebook with this invaluable information. This will increase the value of your business, upgrade your reputation, and get you known as an expert in your field.
You can extend the value of single ebook by breaking the book down into chapters for a serial course, into special reports available on your website, or into audio or visual tapes. Ebooks can be broken down into several different promotional materials by excepting some of the articles and using them to promote your
product.
You can include a catalog in your ebook to promote all the products or services you sell. You can include a thank-you note for reading your book and an invitation to download a trial version of your product. Or you can include a form for your audience to contact you for further information or with questions, thereby building your business relationships and your mailing list.
Using ebooks in this manner helps to cut the cost of individually producing separate promotional materials. You can use a single ebook to entice new prospects and to sell new products to your current customers.
No other medium has this kind of flexibility and ability for expansion. Think of your ebook like a spider spinning a beautiful and intricate web. Now go and create that web, and see how many customers and prospects you can catch!
The day will come when you can use something you read about here to have a beneficial impact. Then you’ll be glad you took the time to learn more about ebook.
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The Power Behind E-books
I can remember the excitement of buying my first downloadable-book. It was back in the late 1990ís and although I cannot remember the title of the e-book I do recall that the seller lived in Georgia, USA and within ten minutes of buying it I was printing it out in rural Wiltshire in the West of England.
Since those early days I must have purchased hundreds of such books. I have had everything from 300+ page manuals right down to 2 or 3 page ‘reports’. But the trouble is that over half of them end up either part or totally unread.
I believe that for most people there are two basic problems with e-books., they are not easy to read on screen and if you print them out this can take time and be expensive on ink.
Despite all the dire predictions profits of doom I believe the future for e-books and information products in general is very good. However, writers must understand the requirements of their readers. To be honest if a subject needs more than 100 pages to get its message across perhaps a downloadable file is not the best way to provide the information.
eBay is a great example, there are hundreds if not thousands of e-books on the subject ranging in price from a few cents up to some costing hundreds of dollars, The average price for a ‘How to Make Money on eBay’ type book seems to be around $67 but go to Amazon or Barns and Nobel and you will find print books with far more information for around $20. So why do we pay more for less?
The answer is ‘immediacy’. We want it and we want it now.
And if the reader wants the e-book now, he or she also wants the information straight away. What they do not want to is to have to wade through hundreds of pages to find what they are looking for. In other words the ideal e-book should contain the basic facts or methods with as little padding as possible. Ideally a person should be able to read the contents of an e-book at one sitting And in my opinion the ideal length for an e-book is around 30 pages but anywhere between 20 and forty is fine. For most subjects the important points can be included within that page range.
The advantage for the author is that it is a lot easier to write a 40-page book than one with 200 pages. There is also a greater chance of the reader actually clicking on your affiliate or other links within your book if he or she actually reads it all. If the writer feels that it will take 200 pages to cover the subject why not cut it down to 5 or 6 smaller e-books selling at say $15 each.
The current trend of pile it high sell it cheap is driving many people out of the information market and some might say that is not a bad thing. But there will always be a market for value for money and easily digestible information products on subjects of interest to the customer. So if you are a writer please cut the padding, just give me the facts, just the facts.
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Learn why over 80% of all e-Books that come with reproduction rights are worthless.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for a product to sell, I bet you’ve considered buying an E-Book with reproduction rights, or maybe even a set of E-Books with reproduction rights.
For those of you not familiar with what an E-Book is, an E-Book is simply an electronic book (E-Book) that is transferred to you within an electronic file and you read it directly from your computer. The concept is great, and there are many great E-Books out there, however there are also many useless E-Books out there as well.
If you were to look at 10 advertisements offering E-Books with reproduction rights, it is very likely that most (probably 8 or more) of these offers have products that are either:
1) Severely out-of-date. In this popular scenario, the vendor will typically sell you an informational product that has been floating around the Internet for far too long. As a result, the information is typically out-of-date and worthless. Another common practice is to attach a new enticing title to old content and try to sell it as new material.
2) Hidden advertisements with very little actual content. This scenario is also very popular and is beginning to appear much more often. Here the vendor sells a new (or what looks to be new) informational product. There is usually a flashy title that seems like it would have a high degree of marketability. However, once you read through the content, you notice that the information is simply an advertisement directing you to other money making offers.
The typical marketing ploy that you will find associated with E-Books promises to sell you a collection of the hottest-selling E-Books with full reproduction rights that allow you to reproduce (copy) and resell the product. The term “reproduction rights” sounds very valuable to a beginning entrepreneur. The mere thought of having a ready-made product which you do not have to continuously purchase is very enticing. However, in many situations, this is just a ploy to get you to purchase the product. Why would you want reproduction and resale rights to out-dated material, or a big book of advertisements?
The real goal in Internet marketing is to make your customers happy. Why? First, it’s the ethical thing to do, and second, because happy customers are repeat customers. To be successful in Internet marketing, you really need to have repeat customers that value your service and trust the quality of the products you offer. So don’t promote anything that you don’t have confidence in – make your customers happy and they will continue to buy from you, which will make you happy!
How Can You Find the “Good” E-Books?
Study the market and product carefully when buying E-Books (or any info course) for informational or resale purposes. If you’re thinking about buying a particular E-Book, try going to Google and typing in the name of the E-Book, along with the author name and the word “forum”. Then run your search.
Here’s an example of what you could type into Google for your search:
“John’s Excellent Car Tips” “John Smith” forum
You can also try these additional search strings:
“ever tried” or “ever used” or “anyone tried” or “anyone used”
Google will then return listings that match the above criteria. Many of these listings will be forums (one of your search words). These forums typically contain real users (not advertisers) discussing the product. This is great way to get unbiased feedback of a particular product. If the product is offering resell rights, you’ll typically find the users discussing that as well. You can also use one of the additional search strings (like “ever tried”) listed above. This will increase your chances of finding a forum question that is asking if anyone “ever tried” the product.
Keep in mind, there are some awesome E-Book publishers out there. In fact, I buy E-Books on all sorts of marketing topics on a weekly basis – and I have been doing so for years. If I don’t know the author, I will use the same technique described above to research the author/product. However, you can run into someone that doesn’t have much exposure but still has a great product, so you may not find out much about them in your research. But it is still very valuable to know that there isn’t any negative information about them floating around the net.
Remember, E-Books can be some of the best learning tools if the information is up-to-date, accurate and useful. And there are many of these types of E-Books out there; you just need to do a little research to find them. Once you find an E-Book that has proved to be useful to you, inquire with the other on an arrangement to allow you to sell the E-Book to others. The author may very well have an affiliate program where you can advertise their E-Book and make a percentage of the profit on each sale.
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Why should you protect your eBook?
With so many people beginning to realize the value in writing and creating an eBook, there comes along another kind of personÖthe eBook pirate! They, too, see the value behind eBooks and the income potential, but they also know that most eBook writers have one fatal flaw.
They don’t protect their eBooks from theft!
Imagine you are walking around town pulling a small wagon. This is no ordinary wagon, but it is a wagon filled with gold coins! Everyone notices you and wants to talk to you, take their picture with you, and so on. Most people just marvel at your boldness to walk around like you do. You had to work hard to get all these coins and you want to show them to everyone.
Well, every so often, when you don’t realize it, someone takes a handful of coins. It’s only a little at a time, so you barely even notice, and even when you do, you don’t think much of it because there’s still so much more left.
At the end of the day, to your dismay, you look back and see that only a few coins are left!! You’ve been getting ripped off all day long and, now, what you had worked so hard for is gone! To make matters worse, you see lots of other people with their own wagons, pulling along their gold coins!
This is what happens when you don’t protect your eBook. Did you know that when you write an eBook it is your copyrighted property and no one can take it legally? But people do it all the time. If you just publish your eBook in a MS Word file or even a PDF file, you are like the poor fellow and his wagon of gold. People can take info from these files and turn around and pretend it belongs to them!
Now, what if this wagon-puller had an attack dog with him that prevented people from stealing his gold? Do you think anyone in their right mind would take any? Well, a few might try, but they’d soon realize that there is no point. The pain outweighs the gain.
The same goes for eBooks. Find a way to protect your eBooks and you’ll stop getting ripped off by eBook thieves!
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