Tag: computer

 
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The Business of Publishing

The truth about publishing is really stranger than fiction and the truth is: getting published is only half the battle. The other half is to keep your reality check in balance so it doesn’t bounce.

Congratulations, you’re published! But what exactly does it mean to be “published”? Besides the fact that your work is finally in print and your college alumni has asked to interview you for their newsletter it also means fame and fortune, right? Well, ok, maybe not on the level of J. K. Rowling, but at the very least you can expect a call from Oprah, right? I hate to be the one to break it to you but you’re probably not even on her radar screen. The truth about publishing is really stranger than fiction and the truth is: getting published is only half the battle. The other half is to keep your reality check in balance so it doesn’t bounce.

While publishing is all about creative expression, it’s also about business and it’s those business savvy authors who will succeed in the end. Now you don’t have to be an MBA to be a keen business person, you simply have to understand that the choices you make relative to your books future should be based on strategies that will enhance sales not just drain your pocketbook. So, how do you do this? First, take a long, hard look at your reader.

At Author Marketing Experts, we always create a reader profile for each book we promote. This reader profile will tell us where to find buyers for the books we represent. Taking this first step helps us sort through our choices when it comes to book promotion and make decisions on behalf of our authors that are sound and will help leverage sales.
There are times when it’s a waste of resources to do a nationwide radio or TV promotion. In fact, some of our programs don’t include any outreach to broadcast media. Why? Because as alluring as it might seem to appear on the Today Show, what’s the point if your audience doesn’t watch morning TV? And, if your audience isn’t watching this show, the chances are slim they’ll even consider you anyway. What? More rejection? Who needs it!

As you embark on or continue your campaign, ask yourself a few tough questions. First, what’s your ultimate goal for this book? If it’s just to give away at family reunions, that’s great! But then you’ll probably want to nix any marketing. If your book is an arm of your business and you have speaking engagements lined up through the end of the year. You probably don’t need to spend a lot on marketing since most of your sales will come from your speaking engagements (i.e. back of the room sales). On the other hand, if you wrote this book to grow your business or to leverage your credibility then you will probably want to dial yourself into your industry through enhanced media exposure.

For fiction authors this area becomes a little tricky. First, you need to determine your long term goals. By long term we mean: do you want to stay in this business or was this book just “something you wanted to do.” If it’s a hobby, then treat it as such but if this is going to be your career, then you need to keep your message out there on a continual basis, through venues such as author events, talks, signings, print and broadcast media.

Make sure the choices you make, make sense for your book and aren’t just made because you’ve always dreamt of being on Oprah. I’ve known authors lured into inappropriate marketing plans by big, flashy names and promises of stardom, wasting thousands of valuable marketing dollars and heading in a direction that wasn’t right for them. If you’re serious about your work, ready to let go of your muse and face the task at hand with some business savvy, then you’re really ready to get published. Below are some guidelines that will help further your success!

1) Reader profile: create one of these at the beginning of your marketing campaign and keep refining it as you move through the process. Refine and redefine who and where your audience is and how to get to them.

2) Time commitment: determine what you can and can’t reasonably do. If you have a full time job it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to commit yourself to forty hours of marketing a week unless your boss is on vacation.

3) Investment: how much are you willing to invest in your future? Are you willing to invest money without seeing much in return knowing that you are building a foundation or do you want to see immediate monetary results? Most authors don’t see a return on their investment for a year or more. Are you committed enough to yourself or your project to keep this investment going?

4) Reality check: what’s realistic for the industry you’re in? Are you latching onto a fad or something with more longevity? Are you getting into a brand new market that will require lots of reader education? Or are you trying to go mainstream with a non-mainstream topic? While this is an admirable goal, it can be like swimming upstream.

5) Budget: while we encourage authors to invest in their future, we’ve also seen a number of people go into heavy debt, quit their jobs and even sell their homes just to promote their book. While that kind of dedication is certainly admirable, remember that although you have the potential to make a great deal of money it’s not going to be overnight. The lure here is of course that “If I stick with it, this next sale will make me famous.” Well, maybe or maybe not. If you’ve been plugging away for a while without any significant success get a professional to give you some honest, constructive feedback about your plan, your market, and your book. It might be that a poorly designed cover is the reason you’re not making sales, or a topic that’s fallen off of the public’s radar screen. In the meantime as you’re waiting to hit the big time you’ll still need a place to sleep and Uncle Vinnie’s couch will get old real quick.

6) Burnout: we hear this term often, even to the point of being overused. What we’re really talking about here is author burnout. We’ve found that the average author only markets their book for ninety days. That means ninety days of day and night marketing, radio interviews at 3am and a book signing every weekend. On day ninety-one they are so tired, so discouraged and so broke they quit. You can avoid this by giving yourself realistic goals and a realistic timeframe in which to complete them. There’s nothing in the world like seeing your book in print. If approached realistically, objectively and with sound business sense, it can be one of the most exciting times in your life.

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Weakness in Safe List and using Free Reports

Would you like to send your commercial emails to people you do not know, but are expecting to receive such mail from you? That does not sound right. How can this be?

It is simple, if you know what is really going on. Everybody who is on these lists, also known as safe lists, knows that they will be receiving mail from other members. This is possible because that is one of the conditions of their ìsafe listî membership.

And those who join these lists are willing to agree to this condition because they themselves would want to send out their own commercial emails to the others on the list.

The result: everyone is sending emails to each other but no one is reading them!

It gets worse when some savvy members sign up for the membership using a free or less-frequently-used account to store the useless emails they will never bother to open and read.

Having said that, it is always wiser to start your own mailing list and build it with opt-in subscribers, no matter how tempting safe lists can be or how many members there are in a safe list.

Using Free Reports to Build Your List. Aside from pre-selling your products and affiliated offers, the other purpose of your free viral report should be to build your mailing list.

This is because if you are unable to pre-sell, let alone sell, the products and services featured in your free report, the last ditch effort should be to collect leads. In short, if you cannot convert the reader into a ready buyer, you should then attempt to convert him or her into your subscriber.

In that manner, you can still follow up with your reader on future offers and have a chance at converting him or her into your customer, preferably lifetime.

You can do so by offering a lifetime update to your report or a unique notification list your reader will be interested in subscribing to, which leads to having him or her subscribed to your mailing list.

One of the few success factors in viral marketing of your free report is quality. If your readers find your information worth sharing, and you encourage them to do so by giving them the right to give your report away for free, you will be able to have your name, status and links within the report passed around without any effort on your part ñ simply because others are willing to do so for you!

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Will I make money online?

This is the number one question people ask when they are looking for profits on the internet. Will I make money online? 95% of the people who start to look for ways to make money online fail eventually. The classic story is – start looking for information then a flood of misleading information hits you and you drown. You will try this then try that but fail at all of them and soon you will quit. Just to find yourself in that old crumpy day job you wanted to run away from to begin with. Today I will try to stop this and do a little mind arranging and show you one door to success.

I am not intending to prattle here and waist your time, lets get directly to the point. Making money online is actually based on one simple very basic formula:

Find a hungry crowd-> Find what they want -> Give it to them

Thatís it there you have it, in a nut shell the whole internet marketing big philosophy purified in one short sentence.

OK, you think to yourself this is real nice but how do I manage all this? I will give you one way, among endless ways, to your success today. But before that you must remember the most important thing in internet marketing: What ever it is you choose to do, keep doing it and doing it and doing it. Do not jump from one program to another program, failing them all. Choose one path and keep moving forward, for this is the only way you will ever, manage to make money online.

Now letís break the formula into few basic steps you can start performing today.

Find a hungry crowed

You must find what people are searching for to be able to supply it. This is the ìWhat should I sell online?î question everyone asks. Technically you can use search engines and find popular search terms ñ but remember to look for something people want but not too popular. Another way is using any free keyword suggestion tool, simply look for these exact words, to find what people are looking for online.

Find what they want

Now you now what people are looking for but what will you give them? Letís say that you have found that people are looking for solution to some medical problem, you can give them information on how to solve their problem or products: pills, instruments, etc.
One more sample: if they are looking for ways to keep their dog from barking, give them a book which tells them exactly how they should train their dog. Finding what they want is all about finding specific solution to a certain problem.

Give it to them

Now you think: I have to look for what people need, find out what can solve their problem and then give it to them. But how will I find it? I donít have it at home, or at my car. Should I start create solutions? Writing a book? Build a real sophisticated machine? No you donít!!! This part is actually taken care for you, along with the entire customer handling.
The answer is Affiliates programs. They are free to join. And you will find almost any thing you can think of. They take care of creating, shipping, and customer support for you. All you need is to bring home the hungry crowd in because dinner is already served!

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Webmasters Improve Your Adsense Earnings, Monetize Income

Webmasters who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the ìgeniusesî of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as ìadsense textî, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

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Search Engine Optimization And Why You need It

The web is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many websites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Letís just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your siteís existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your siteís content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

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Seven Secrets of Writing a Book That Sells

Ensuring the success of a book is something even the biggest publishers have never been able to guarantee. Mitigating circumstances, flash trends, and world events will all affect buyer preferences. That said, there are still ways to leverage the sales-factor in your favor and here’s how you do it.

It’s one thing to write a book, it’s an entirely different thing to write one that’s a saleable, viable, marketable product. Ensuring the success of a book is something even the biggest publishers have never been able to guarantee. Mitigating circumstances, flash trends, and world events will all affect buyer preferences. That said, there are still ways to leverage the sales-factor in your favor and here’s how you do it.

1. Know your readers. We’re not just talking about whether your readers are male or female. You’ll want to know myriad factors about your audience. How old are your readers (age range)? Are readers married, single, or divorced? Where do your readers live (generally)? What do your readers do for a living? What other books/publications do they read? Develop a profile that includes where they shop, what clubs they belong to, etc.

These elements will help you incorporate these aspects into your book *and* help you unearth salient marketing opportunities (i.e., publications and stores).

2. Know your market. What’s the market like for your book? Is there a trend out there you’re positioning yourself toward? Are you reading all the publications related to this topic/trend? Are there any “holes” out there your book could fill? What’s the future for this market/topic? For example, let’s say you’re a fiction writer looking to publish chick lit. Go to any bookstore and you can’t help but spot the cutsie, pink, cartoonish covers. Many thought this trend was dying out, but it has recently seen another surge. What do you know about trends related to your book/topic/audience?

3. Similar books. What else has been published on your topic? Have you read all ten books in your category? If you haven’t, you should. You’ll want to know everything you can about what’s out there and how it’s being perceived in the marketplace. It’s never a problem having a similar topic. When I published No More Rejections – Get Published Today, I knew there were other books out there on marketing. I read them all–then angled my book differently.

4. Getting and staying current. What’s going on in your industry today? What are some hot buttons? What are people looking for? What’s next on the horizon for this topic/audience? If you can’t seem to gather this information through traditional channels, why not survey your target audience? There are a number of places to run free surveys, Survey Monkey is one of them: https://www.surveymonkey.com

5. Follow the media. What’s the media talking about these days? Keep track of media buzz–what they’re paying attention to and what they’re writing about. Delve beyond the front page of your paper to the second or third page and see what’s filling the pages. If you can get your hands on out-of-state papers, do a comparative review. Do you see a trend in coverage? Is there something that seems to be getting more buzz even if it’s on page six?

6. Talk, teach, listen. One of the best ways I’ve found to get in touch with my audience was to teach a class and do speaking engagements. When I was putting together my book, Get Published Today, I found that the classes I taught provided valuable information for creating a great book because they put me directly in touch with my audience!

7. Timing is everything. When do you plan to release your tome? Are you releasing around a holiday or anniversary? Could you take advantage of any upcoming event and/or holiday for your book launch?

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