I never thought I’d be sitting here telling you all this. But I’m a married woman – again.

To one of my blog readers, nonetheless. (How about THAT for a “where the hell you been?”)

We met about two years, initially by telephone. What started off as a 30 minute consultation that fateful day, turned into a 2 hour telephone meeting of the souls — he the sexy surgeon with a love for wintry backyard BBQ’s, I the “bringing-home-the-bacon” single mom who could nary let the grass grow under my pedicured feet.

The attraction blossomed rather instantly, or should I say insanely, because I was stark, raving crazy for this guy.

For our first date he put me on the back of his Harley and took me to a bookstore on the other side of town.

A BOOKSTORE, for the love of pete’s sake! I’m the woman who would rather eat ramen noodles for a month, than give up my Amazon Prime membership.

I knew from that moment I could never let this lovely helmeted creature go. And I didn’t. Luckily for me the attraction wasn’t lopsided. As cool as we both tried to play it, we loved each other from “hello” and never stopped. (Cue the “Aawww!” sound now.)

Last October I sold off Desperate Buyers Only, wrote my own vows, and settled in to a perpetual honeymoon as Mrs. Dawes.

After I sold off Desperate Buyers–

I opened up a little bike (bicycle) shop… something I’d been contemplating for a couple of years.

From week one it was a serious success, which I must say I DIDN’T expect. I mean I’d been doing the online thing for so long that I wasn’t sure what would happen offline.

But I live in a bike-friendly city, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. I found  a niche that worked and I worked my niche.

One evening Mr. Dawes and I were buying some used bikes from a dealer outside of the city. We soon discovered that barnyard bike dealer was looking for a stable retail location in the city proper.

After a few weeks of negotiation, I ended up selling the bike shop to the used bike dealer, turning a super sweet profit on my initial investment. Not bad for a few months of work.

And then…

I became Alexis the Housewife – or more appropriately, Alexis “bored-out-of-my-mind-with-no-business-to-run” Dawes.

Why did I sell the damn bike shop, with nothing else to occupy my busy little mind is beyond my comprehension.

I’m used to juggling motherhood, writing, marketing, laundry, groceries and 500 other tasks in a 24 hour time period. But with a larger household income, I simply didn’t have all the same pressures that I did before. (Yeah, woe is me, right.)

I dunno what kind of insane workaholic gene I’ve got coursing through my veins, but I’m not happy sitting still for long. I love the challenge of solving problems.

I called my half-sister, Dahlia, who’d been doing pretty well with Amazon affiliate review sites, to see if she needed any help. An e-book perhaps? Two e-books? Twelve e-books?

“No, no, no,” says this little hippie. Dahlia explained that there had been a rush of people writing these do biz on Amazon ebooks, so that topic wasn’t desperate enough. (I’d obviously been out of the loop!)

Fortunately I must have lit a creative flame under her ass, because the following week she tells me that she came up with an e-book idea anyway. Perhaps you’ve seen it. It’s called The BIG LIST of Amazon Products.

Hey, what the????

From the day she launched that ebook this chick starts having crazy success. She’s making out like a bandit. Doin’ it, and doin’ it and doin’ it well, to quote LL Cool J.

“Alexis, log in to my PayPal account and have a look see,” she says.

“Alexis, I can’t believe I slept on this ebook thing for so long,” she says.

Sheesh!

EVERYBODY sleeps on the ebook thing

Until they realize it ain’t no joke!

I mean how else can you generate perpetual cash in your bank account for work you did months or years ago? If you know how to write and sell ebooks, you can basically dictate your lifestyle.

My husband is always trying to get me to go through a regular publisher, and I’m always like, “Duuuude… I don’t care about people buying my stuff in a bookstore.”

I have a special love for the ebook business and I simply wouldn’t get the same buzz-filled excitement dealing with an acquisitions editor – unless of course it came with a sizable advance. (I didn’t say I was stupid!)

Anyhoo, so Dahlia and I are having lunch one day and she tells me that she’s going to crack the ebook sales code. She’s hooked. She understands why I was able to gallivant off around the world, while she was whopping it up (ha, ha!) selling jewelry supplies at home. (Though to give her credit, she did do very well with it.)

“Crack it like what?” I asked.

“Crack it like I want to figure out why people impulse buy ebooks,” she said.

At that moment, I heard a ringing in my ears

School was suddenly in session for me.

This girl was always smart. But at that moment I realized she was brilliant.

“Dang D, what made you think of THAT?”

“It came to me while I was on a website the other day.”

At that time she broke down what she thought made an ebook sell. I listened intently with a big cuckoo-for-coco puffs smile on my face.

Selling to desperate buyers works because somebody, somewhere is always desperate to solve a problem.

Selling to impulse buyers isn’t quite the same thing. Impulse buyers don’t have to be searching for a solution in order to buy an ebook. Dahlia taught me that it’s better if they’re not searching for a solution in any way, shape or form.

Huh?

Yeah!

The surprise of finding a particular ebook when they’re not looking for it is what makes people want to impulse buy. She’s got an entire theory behind this stuff, and the shit makes uber sense.

Needless to say, having an expert in the family fueled my interest in ebooks again

So after a long hiatus I’m off to challenge myself in the ebook industry again – but this time adapting a different strategy. I’m using Dahlia’s ideas to target impulse buyers.

I love the whole feel of her techniques. She laid out this mind mapping scenario that I’ve never seen anyone else teach before. This thing spanks booty when it comes to figuring out ebook ideas.

Dahlia abhors the Google Keyword Tool (in all but one situation), but she gives a pretty persuasive case against it. Her reasons certainly made me rethink my reliance on it.

She also found all these super little marketing resources for promoting your ebook. Like Business2Blogger.com, a website where you can submit your ebook to be reviewed by bloggers in your niche. And it’s free, though they do have a paid option too. Better still, she tells how to use that review in a power move sort of way.

Alexis Dawes back in the ebook biz?

This should be interesting!

P.S.- Check out Dahlia’s “Creating E-books that are Impulse Buyer Magnets.”

P.P.S. – Can you believe I married a reader of this blog?!? No shit! (Hi baby!)

Hey folks! Hope all is going swimmingly well in your online empire.

I had a really great summer. Though I didn’t do much traveling, my daughter went to my cousins house for almost the entire summer, which provided some serious “me” time.

In 8 years, I’d never had a break like that before. I was initially baffled by all the free time I had! The first week I woke up with butterflies in my stomach every morning. I was actually nervous not having my kid around.

I hardly remember what my life was like before child rearing as a single parent. But I quickly grew to appreciate the no cooking and no grocery shopping perks. Plus I got to see so much of the city at night! Woo-hoo!

Eventually I did some work. Created a bunch of new infoproducts, yada, yada, yada.

By August I grew achy from my newfound freedom and was glad to see mini-me come back home. What will I do when Miss Independent ships off to college in 10 years? Uuuugh… I don’t even wanna think about it.

Anyway, I had a few really good infoproduct launches over the summer. I had a couple nice ones in the spring also. And there were two cursory duds thrown into the mix. You can’t win ‘em all, ya know.

Business overall has been sweet though. I’ve been doing this desperate e-book stuff for several years now and I have to admit that I’m still amazed at how it supports my little family.

Case in point…

I have 8 “actively producing cash” websites in the online atmosphere right now.

I’m talking about sites that generate anywhere from $500-$8K a month. (The highest producer is an Internet marketing product that I’ve written under a pen name.)

In the past year I’ve quietly sold off another 4 “actively producing cash” websites. As you may recall (or not) I used to sell turnkey websites, and even wrote a pretty comprehensive e-book about it around 9 years ago. (Don’t even ask me where that thing is.)

I may not be the bestest blogger out there – (Ha, ha!). But I do know how to generate consistent income by writing something once and selling the shit out of it. That’s why you don’t hear much complaining from Alexis Dawes.

Hard work really does pay off.

And that brings me to the purpose of this post… My hard work could be your part-time income.

Desperate Buyers Only has been on the market since 2006.

I have done virtually NO promotion for it over the past 14 months. And yet it sells, and sells, and sells. Lemme show my sales figures for the past year:

August 2010 – $2,425

July 2010 – $2,910

June 2010 – $3,033

May 2010 – $3,031

April 2010 – $2,162

March 2010 – $1,964

February 2010 – $3,830

January 2010 – $3,322

December 2009 – $3,460

November 2009 – $3,977

October 2009 – $3,783

September 2009 – $3,201

TOTAL: $37,098 over the previous 12 months

The money I’ve made from this ONE e-book is a full-time income for A LOT of people out there.

And that’s from a year of no promotion from me. If I’d be a little kinder in the marketing department, I have no doubt that I’d be doing $5K a month in sales from it.

But then again, that’s the beauty of knowing how to write and sell e-books.

When I get bored with one project, I can move on to something else and still make money. Heck, there’s no use in being in business for yourself if you can’t enjoy everything that you do.

If you’re an entrepreneur who feels unhappily forced to do anything that doesn’t please you, then you might as well go get a 9 to 5. That’s my philosophy.

In any case, I’m bored with DBO. Yes, it’s successful. But it kinda just lingers in my portfolio. And I don’t want it to linger because it really is a great concept, and it’s evergreen. As long as people have problems, they’re going to be desperate to solve those problems.

I want to hand DBO off to someone who’s excited about it. Someone who believes in the DBO premise and wants to blog about these concepts. Someone who can nurture it and just really keep it going. I’d LOVE to see someone else make a mint from this project like I have.

Would YOU like to be the new owner of Desperate Buyers Only?

Would YOU like to have super affiliates like Brian Clark from Copyblogger and Yaro Starak from Entrepreneurs Journey on your team?

Would YOU like to have an “actively producing cash” website that has proven sales copy, and actual longevity in the market?

If so, drop me an e-mail – travelwithme AT gmail DOT com.

I’m planning on starting an auction on Flippa later this afternoon, but I’d really, really love to see it go to a reader who can appreciate it.

Are you that person?

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.