Okay so sales from No More Smelly House have begun to pick up. The only thing I can attribute it to are my AdWords advertisements.

As you can see from my No More Smelly House blog, I haven’t been very diligent about posting there. Oh well, I had good intentions. But like most of you, I also have other demands.

I’m not saying I’m done with the blog. At this point I probably just need to hire someone to create the content. When time ain’t on your side, hire someone else to do the work, and let it ride. That’s my new motto for the minute. You like?

Anyway, today I’m going to show you the article that I’ve written to promote No More Smelly House.

The title, Help! My Neighbor’s Stench is Invading My Apartment was born from my own apartment living experiences. I read that smells in apartments is the second biggest complaint amongst apartment dwellers. Noisy neighbors was of course the first.

After having just spent a year in Montréal – and experiencing the stench of cigarette smoke rising through my living room vents every morning, I know what a problem this can be.

(BTW… I’m not anti-cigarette smoker. Live and let live. I just don’t like the smell being in my house because of a downstairs neighbor.)

So here’s the article. I am distributing it to the sites I mentioned a couple of days ago, as well as a few article directories.

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Help! My Neighbor’s Stench is Invading My Apartment

If you can manage to live in an apartment without getting any residual smells from your neighbors’ cooking or smoking, consider yourself blessed. Most of the time this isn’t the case. Smells from neighbors’ are the second most frequent complaint among apartment dwellers – right behind noise.

The simple fact of the matter is that all apartment buildings breathe. Your vents tie into your neighbors’ vents. If you have a crack in your floor’s baseboard, and your neighbor has one in his, smells from your apartment will waft to his and vice versa. That’s just a part of living in an apartment building. It happens in both cheap and super expensive apartments. No one is exempt.

So what can you do to fix the problem? Try these solutions:

1) Spray some foam insulator (available at your local home building or hardware store) into those cracks around the floor and baseboard. Look for other open areas, especially around pipes, electrical outlets, and light fixtures, and spray foam insulation around those areas as well.

The foam insulation will dry hard. But sometimes it’s not enough. You may also have to further seal the insulation with caulk.

2) If you notice odors – like cigarette smoke – coming through your vents, you may want to run a HEPA air purifier near the offending vent.

Also for smoky smells, try spraying an odor neutralizer directly onto the vent. I personally like Nok-Out.

3) Use a window fan to pull odors outside.

Window fans work like the fans in your bathroom. Instead of blowing cool air, as a regular fan does, it pulls the air from the space around, and pushes it outside.

4) And finally, let fresh air be your friend. Give your apartment a good 15 to 20 minute airing out twice a day.

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Alexis Dawes is the author of No More Smelly House: The Ultimate Guide to Neutralizing and Eliminating Stinky Odors From Your Living Quarters available at (http://www.NoMoreSmellyHouse.com).

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I’ll keep you up to date as far as the traffic I receive from the article.

Comments? Post away!

Sales have been trickling in ever so slowly since I began selling the No More Smelly House book a couple of weeks ago.

That’s been my fault though. I’ve been working overtime on Desperate Sellers Only. I’m estimating that when it’s all said and done I’ll have more than 200 pages. (Come on, I have to upstage Desperate Buyers Only by a LONG shot!)

In any case, so far my Adwords advertisements have been the holy grail for No More Smelly House. Here are the keywords I’m currently running:

bad smell in house
smell in house
musty smell in house
sewage smell in house
sewer smell in house
how to get smoke smell out of a house
how to remove smoke smell from a house
smoke smell out of a house

I’m pleased… I mean it’s not a total bust. But I know I can do a lot better.

So today I’ve begun a quest to locate websites where I can submit articles related to No More Smelly House.

Someone suggested that my book would be appropriate for a home sellers. I agree – especially with the current direction of the US real estate market.

A home seller needs every advantage available to complete or even initiate a sale. And a discernible advantage is being able to have an odor-free home.

So I begin my search at Google, with:

“selling a home” articles

I did find a few sites that accepted real estate related articles. However, these sites were looking for contributing editors, more so than freelance submissions.

If I don’t find anything else, I can always keep these sites in mind.

I decide to re-focus my search. This time I try:

“Selling a home” articles submit

On the first page of results I found the Real Estate Reading Room.

And then I discovered:

Real Estate Investment Articles

REI (Real Estate Investors) Depot (Real estate investors… that’s another potential audience.)

Oh and then I ran across The Money Pit, a syndicated home improvement radio show. Once the print version of No More Smelly House is ready, I can propose myself as a guest.

The Home Buyers Handbook

Treasure Valley Real Estate Guide

Home Renovation Guide

Now I’m up to page 13, so I decide to try a new search term:

“sell a home” articles submit

The first page worth of results were all basically article directory sites. Started on the second page I found:

Classifieds Realtor

Homeownership Resource Directory

I go all the way up to page 10 and there’s nothing else.

So what I’m finding here is that the article directories are dominating the search results. I will have to submit both directly to real estate related websites, and the article directories.

Tomorrow I’ll show you the article that I’m sending out.

Yes, it’s been a while.

We finally made it back to the US – after an unexpected year in Montreal. (We went for a summer vacation, and never came back! Ha!)

We decided to settle in New York City this go around. So I’ve been neighborhood hopping, apartment shopping, etc.

And I’ve been writing my fingers to the bone. Seriously.

I have a new title coming out soon… Desperate Sellers Only. More about that later.

Let’s pick up where we last left off, shall we?

No More Smelly House – the object of this Walking The Task segment – is complete, fully edited and indexed.

But as I said when I launched this little experiment, I have had some snafus.

The Layout & Index…

Print books are completely different animals than e-books.

So my initial intention was to find someone who could both index and typeset my book. Someone who had experience with print books.

I had found several very competent people to do the task.

But I decided to try and save a few dollars by having some providers bid on the job at eLance.

(I figured since I’d be reporting my results here, I’d try to make it as economical as possible.)

The gentleman I chose bid $250 for the complete job – layout and index. Quite a deal. Normally a job like this would be ‘at least’ $500-$700.

The first index he sent me was like 2 pages long.

At the time I had 130+ 8.5×11 pages. We’re talking 12 pt font, single spaces. There’s NO WAY you can distill that much information into 2 pages.

So I sent an e-mail saying it was a good start, but that there was a lot missing.

He replied with a request. Could I send him a list of words and phrases that I wanted to use for the index.

I replied “No.” I told him that I didn’t have the time to do that. That’s part of the indexing job – to find all the terms of significance. I told him that if he didn’t think he could do a good job, let’s revise the quote he gave me.

He told me that he could do it.

Several days later, he sent me the index. It was 13 pages long. He rose to the occasion indeed!

The layout, on the other hand, was adequate. But it really wasn’t ready for print quality.

Darn.

The Layout & Index – Part 2…

I’m re-e-e-eally tired of waiting now. I want to start selling this darn book.

So I decided to put it on the market as an e-book, just to get the ball rolling.

However, I had to have the layout re-done and index re-numbered.

Why? Because the layout the eLance provider did was sized 6×9. I needed to have it reformatted for 8.5×11.

I took one afternoon and did the layout myself. Six hours it took me.

Then I posted a project on Rentacoder for someone to re-paginate the table of contents and the index. I wanted the project completed in 3 days. And I specifically stated that I needed 100% accuracy.

I chose a company for $50.

When he sent the final version it was riddled with page errors in the index.

I sent the provider the error list and he revised them. But in the process, some of the layout got thrown off. It’s not horrific. Just some really minor stuff. But still.

The Cover…

This part provided the least amount of stress.

I went back to eLance and posted a project for an ebook cover.

Fifteen or so bids later, I chose a designer. He completed the project in a day. Then he did the header the following day.

The original cost for the cover was $80. The header was $20.

The End Result…

So the No More Smelly House e-book is finally up for sale.

I’ve just started doing some advertising. I’ll let you know about that later this week.

Whew!