I’ve never been happier to see $50 than the PayPal payment I got on Sunday.

If you have the 2009 edition of Desperate Buyers Only then you know that I talk about an e-book I’ve been giving away. I don’t sell anything in the e-book. No affiliate links and all that jazz. I just give it away like free hugs.

I decided to give it away because it’s a spiritually based topic. And people seem to think that it’s difficult to make money from spiritual topics. Well at least that’s what I’ve heard for the past umpteen years.

Well you know me… I don’t believe jack shit until I’ve put all the theories on the chopping block and, well, minced the suckers with my stainless steel machete. Because I know from doing this stuff and watching all the chit chatting in the forums that marketers can be, well, kinda irrational – you know.

One person has a sob sorry, and all of sudden it can’t be done. All of sudden this doesn’t work, or that’s outdated.

But success – or even lack of success – means nothing to me. I have to see things for myself, because, well, we all have different strengths. So I needed to know… are spiritual topics a waste of time? Hmmmm… where the heck is my machete?

Anyway I started giving this e-book away a while back. And in it I share some Law of Attraction methods that worked for me. Some secret weaponry type stuff that I use on a regular basis. A wee bit woo-woo, but it works for me.

There are no affiliate links in the e-book. I’m not hawking any upgrades because quite frankly I don’t have much more to say about the topic.

But I do ask for a voluntary donation. And therein lies the secret to my success with this particular e-book.

Set It and Forget It

I wasn’t sure if the whole donation shenanigans would pan out for this particular title. But I know that I’ve donated to a bunch of sites that I’ve gleaned information from. And I figured I couldn’t be the only micro philanthropist on the Net, so I decided – “Why not?”

And that brings me to my $50 on Sunday.

I normally receive $5 or $10 donations… sometimes an occasional $20. And the donations come in fairly consistently. It’s like lunch money from the Universe.

But on Sunday one of my readers donated a whopping $50.

“Wow!” I exclaimed. “$50 for me? A $50 donation for me-e-e-e-e?!?”

Now you’re probably chuckling to yourself, “Oh that Alexis… she gets so excited over the little things, tsk-tsk. Show me a picture of her on top of a Rolls with a pair of thongs on, and I’ll be impressed.”

You’re right, I do get worked up.

It means that you can share the things that you’re passionate about, be a lazy ass and not write a sales letter, give away your e-book, and still enjoy financial benefits.

And look, your e-book doesn’t have to be a big production. It took me all of 2.5 days to write that 38-page ditty. I let it sit on my hard drive for a good six months before I even started giving it away. I couldn’t decide what the heck to do with it.

Is that YOU?

Here’s the big ho-ho message that I hope you’ll take me up on.

I know that many of you have stuff that you’ve written that you’re not doing anything with. I know it because if you’re reading this blog you’re probably like me. You start a whole bunch of projects and you finish maybe some of it. So you’ve got something in the percolation stage to work with.

Dig it out. Dust it off. Get a photo off of iStockphoto and make a quickie cover. Set up a donation page in your e-book. Set up a donation link through PayPal. PDF it. Get a domain. Upload it. Make a quickie landing page. Promote it the DBO way.

And this is important… don’t spend more than a day doing all of this. I mean except for the marketing. You can be consistent with that.

So honestly, I don’t get $50 donations all the time. I may not ever get another one. And hey, let’s not be coy here… even ten bucks a day is pocket change. But if you’ve got some leftover goodies and they’re not earning you anything, then ten bucks a day is genuine, spendable-everywhere-you-go income.

At least that’s the way I look at it, and I’m as capitalist as they come.

What do you think? I’m curious to know if anyone else has made the donation model work for them.

BTW… here’s the e-book that generates donations.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been quietly giving away a little 8-page report to my clients. It explains a very simple technique for locating potential e-book topics, but it can be used for a variety of purposes. (Blog posts, freebie reports, chapters in your e-book, etc.)

It’s one of those evergreen techniques that you’ll be able to use damn near forever.

And I’m giving it away as a Halloween treat today.

If you like it, leave me a comment.

Listen Up!

So I was talking about article marketing the other day with Isabella (who frequently comments here). She told me that she noticed a lot of people who were once trying to get all the low ball $2 article writers, were now waking up to the realization that they couldn’t use that tired, re-hashed content everywhere anymore.

People are looking for quality content – and they’re willing to pay for it. But why?

Why the sudden a change from 250 words of fluff, to “can you make this sound really professional?”

Clues From the Larger Article Directories

I recently started hearing some rumbling over at eHow. eHow is an article site that offers an Adsense revenue share arrangement to its contributors. Whenever someone clicks on an Adsense ad in your article, you get a cut.

Anyway, eHow has been taking drastic efforts to clear the site of spammy, poorly written articles. They have a certain guideline that you have to work within, and if you deviate, they’ll delete the article. Yeah… even if said article is making a shit load of money.

When I started seeing eHow getting progressively tougher, a little signal went off in my mind. eHow makes a ton of cash from Adsense clicks.

So if they’re cleaning house it’s because:

1. They want their articles to continue to rank well in Google. Quality content means consistent ranking for a long time.
2. By maintaining quality content they keep people on the site longer, and they keep people coming back. More Adsense clicks.
3. They can outdistance themselves from the other schmuck article directories that aren’t maintaining quality control. They want to be known as a no BS quality article site. Period.

So I wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear that a couple of days ago Chris Knight – owner of EzineArticles.com – announced that they’re cracking the quality whip a lot harder over there.

EzineArticles, like eHow, is Adsense dependent. Though because EzineArticles was a lot more lenient in what they accepted, the site basically degenerated over the years. Articles used to get Google rank in a matter of hours at EzineArticles. That’s not been the case over the past few years.

But they’re waking up now. Perhaps they too are watching eHow’s evolvement, and deciding that they must up the ante significantly if they don’t want their Adsense cash cow to be slowly lured away by the sexy eHow bull.

Now EzineArticles wants submissions to be 400-600 words. They don’t want short and sweet anymore. All of those little 250 word hit-and-run articles that don’t say anything – no more!

I’m personally ECSTATIC to see these changes.

Happy as a lark, you hear me!

It means that you’re going to see a resurgence in the way Google treats sites that are self policing themselves. I already see it with eHow.

It means that you’re going to see the value of your articles going up again.

It means less competition.

It means SEO content writers will have to change to match these higher standards. And if you do write SEO content, now’s the time to make sure you understand all these new rules so you can be prepared to tell your clients.

What you’re about see happen in article marketing is the exact same thing that happened with the dot com crash.

More on this later…