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?

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.

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!

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…

I was lying in the bed… exhausted, sweating from head to toe, and I kept feeling like I was floating away to my vacation home at 125 Heaven Blvd.

Seems like the seasonal flu is making its rounds early on this side of town. The school nurse called me on Monday to ask about my daughters symptoms. She had been running a fever all weekend, and I kept her home for the past three days. Almost a dozen other kids in her class were also absent. All with flu-like conditions.

In any case, that’s just the side note to tonight’s post. But I had to tell you cause it’s kind of essential to the overall message.

You see, the thing that I found really odd about these past five sick days is that I got a lot more orders than usual.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not totally off-base to get a sudden surge of orders for one book. But a sudden surge for several books all at once is a bit more eyebrow raising – especially because I’ve barely had the energy to raise my head from the freaking pillow. (Meaning I haven’t done a lick of work since last week.)

Why does this happen?

Why do great things happen when you’re not concentrating on making great things happen?

And how can you use this secret to increase your business? (I had to throw that last part in!)

A Watched Pot Never Boils

You’ve heard that phrase before.

According to the folks over at The Free Dictionary it means, “Something you are waiting for will not happen while you are concentrating on it.”

I strongly believe my relationships are ruled by the Watched Pot theory. If I wanted a relationship, I’d never get what I wanted. I’d be as sweet as apple pie, but nothing would ever happen. As soon as I don’t give a shit anymore – BOOM – I’ll meet 5 guys who’ll swear I’m their soul mate and pledge undying love.

If it didn’t happen so often I’d be inclined to think it was a fluke. But it happens with such regularity that it’s really difficult to call it random. Maybe it’s some type of mental pheromone I’m kicking off.

But it’s the same thing with business. Sometimes you have to take your mind away from a project to-

#1… Allow the pot to boil. Testing is a necessary evil when it comes to successfully marketing online. But there comes a time when you have to take your hands off the keyboard.

I think we all know when that time comes. I mean have you ever felt the need to just turn the computer off, but then you just keep working because you’re so PRESSED to make something – anything – happen?

I’m guilty of this one. We often feel like we have to stay busy to make sales happen. But that’s not always the case. It’s often when you throw your hands up in total frustration and turn off the computer that the sales finally come in – not while you’re hitting refresh 100 times. (I know this from experience!)

#2… Gain insights that only time away from the computer can give you. People who tell me that they can’t get e-book ideas are usually the ones who are online 24-7. The Internet is fun. I make a living being online.

But the real world is color, sights, sounds, real people, dog, cows, greenery, cars, trains, buses, restaurants, bums, BMW’s and everything in between. It goes back to the title of this post… not thinking about money is usually the one thing that can help you make more money. Stepping away from the Internet and any projects that seem to be causing you grief can be just what you need to generate those winning ideas.

It doesn’t appear that way when you’re all in the mix. But it is that way.

Don’t Buy It – Just Try It

Not everything requires a $97 fix.

Not everything requires a fix at all.

Sometimes you just need to turn it all off, and let your mind NOT think. If you leave the kitchen, the pot will boil.

You can stop all other forms of marketing… the web can evolve from 2.0 to 3.0 and beyond… and if you’ve done your content right, your infoproduct business can sustain itself through all upcoming changes and trends. For free, might I add.

So I like fiddling around with different article directories and content marketing tools. This past month I decided to give Article Marketing Automation a try.

Now in case you’re not familiar with it, Article Marketing Automation (hereby referred to as AMA) is a web based tool that takes your articles and distributes them to targeted blogs. That’s the simple explanation.

What AMA Really Does

It actually allows you to spin the words or sentences within your article, so that each blogger gets a different version of the article. For example, if you’re writing a piece on dog training, you may have one sentence that reads like this:

If you want your shih tzu to perform tricks, you must find out what motivates them.

The sentence can be spun to look like this:

If you want your shih tzu to do tricks, you must discover what motivates them.

Most of you probably know about the whole article spinning thing as it’s a well-known online marketing technique.

But for those of you who don’t know, when you spin your content it helps site owners feel more comfortable about running your article, because it’s not the same thing that appears on dozens of other web sites.

So Article Marketing Automation allows you to spin your articles, and it offers those different versions to a list of targeted blog owners. You don’t know what blogs they are. And each blogger has the option of accepting or declining your article.

With AMA you’re not supposed to include a resource box at the end of the article. However you can include up to three links within the actual article.

No biggie to me. A link is a link. That’s all I’m concerned with.

Two Week Results

I decided to give Article Marketing Automation a fresh test with one of my reader’s e-books. I became an affiliate of hers, and wrote an article to promote her $97 e-book. The e-book centers around a rarely used online marketing tactic.

I uploaded the article to AMA on September 30, and 31% of the 475-word article was spun.

As of today, the article has been accepted on 12 blogs, which represents 41% of the total number of bloggers it has been presented to.

According to the AMA handbook if your acceptance percentage is below 50%, you should probably add something more to the article. But I’m not going to change it just yet, as that percentage has come up significantly over the past five days, and there are still bloggers who haven’t made a decision yet. (The article is trickled out… it’s not presented to all targeted bloggers at once.)

From those 12 blogs, I’ve gotten a total of 42 clicks and 0 sales for the month of October. Now keep in mind that I haven’t promoted this e-book using any other marketing techniques, so all those clicks are a direct result of AMA.

Will I continue my $47 a month subscription?

Definitely. In fact, I’m going to add another article to promote that e-book.

That test article hasn’t even generated 100 clicks yet. I like to see at least 100 clicks under my belt, and preferably 200 before I start tweaking. For example, if at 100 clicks I don’t see any sales, I might add a landing page between the article and the e-book sales page.

And although I haven’t gotten any sales for this particular e-book just yet, I have gotten four sales for another one also promoted through an AMA-run article.

Actually I’m pleasantly surprised by the results either way. Sometimes you can submit to dozens of article directories and not get the same number of clicks within a two-week span for a single article.

Have you used Article Marketing Automation? I’m curious to know what your experiences have been.

As much as I’ve tried to embrace the whole social marketing scene, I just can’t get into tweeting and whatnunt.

My cousin lives on Facebook, and she doesn’t even do business online. It boggles my brain cells to the n’th degree. I’m like a dreadlocked hippie in a world of suits and ties.

But you know what… screw it. I do article/content marketing because I’m really good at it. I make money from it. It pays the bills.

Sometimes you gotta do what you’re good at, and not try to be all fancy pants magnifico with everything that pops up.

2) Sometimes you need time.

What’s the one thing experienced and newbie infoproduct creators have in common?

Impatience.

I’ve had readers e-mail me after 48 hours, terrified that they weren’t going to generate any sales. I mean like insane, oh crap, my career as an infoproduct creator is OVER, crazy talk. They’ve got like three AdWords ads up and one article up somewhere.

Oh gosh, I’m the same way. I get super squirreled up if I don’t get a sale within the first hour.

My kid can always tell when I did a product launch because I’m like an exposed electrical wire for three days, tweaking ads and writing content and hitting refresh on Gmail like 2,964 times, even though I damn well know that it refreshes itself.

Unfortunately this feeling of anticipation hasn’t gone away after all this time.

But I do fully acknowledge that you almost always need some time before you start seeing your labor pay off.

I don’t know ahead of time which ads are going to pan out. I don’t know which articles are going to rock. I don’t know which blog comment is going to send hoards of customers to a site. Though once you get that floodgate open, you forget all the nervous, sweaty drama.

3) See the magic in the seemingly un-magical.

My daughter can pick up an acorn off the sidewalk and have two good hours of playtime with it, a stick and piece of gum wrapper from the bottom of my purse. I’m amazed by her ability to McGuyver ordinary sidewalk paraphernalia into toys.

(On the McGuyver television show, he used to make bombs from shoelaces, a few eyelashes, some old beer and a toenail clipping. You remember that?)

Well I had to discover that good things do exist in very ordinary marketing tools.

4) Failure is okay.

Every time I create a new product, I intend for it to be a winner. But that’s not always the case.

My problem? Clarity in the wrong way.

It’s like wrapping a tissue around a car key and using it to clean your ears out. Sure you can clean your ears out that way. But it’s far more efficient to do it with a cotton swab.

I used to despise failure. Each time I thought I was losing my mojo.

Then I sat and had lunch one afternoon next to a guy who was a seasoned online marketer. Actually his wife and I were having major girl talk before he arrived, and she told me all about his failed projects. (Gotta love those three Martini lunches with complete strangers!)

He had a bunch of bad deals go down. And yet, he was still very successful.

From there on, I changed. I stopped feeling so bad about failure and just accepted it as a part of the process.

Now I talk about my failed projects in Desperate Buyers Only, and it helps people. Failure is only bad when you don’t learn from it and move on.

5) Good grammar is a necessary evil.

I never got an “A” in English. I dropped out of English Literature 101 as soon as they assigned Frankenstein. (No lie!)

So I’ve always felt a secretive sense of smugness about making a living with my words, despite having rather atrocious grammatical skills. It got so bad that I used to get e-mails from editors and proofreaders whose retinas were searing after reading my work. (That still makes me chuckle when I think about it!)

Then I started writing content for a big-wig client and I realized that (oh crap!) I needed to improve my grammar skills. They were judging me on my (gasp) dangling participles. I suddenly became prey to the dreaded red pencil.

My grammatical education is still a day-by-day learning experience. I’m currently working through Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing.

And yes – to all of you who have damaged their retinas on my grammatically incorrect writing – you win. I do see the value in being a good communicator on all fronts.

(P.S.- The kings English may occasionally become butchered on this blog. I’m still learning!)

“When are you going to update your blog? Where are you Waldo?”

I’m here. I’m here! And jeez, it’s been a long time.

In the past year since we last spoke, I…

* Came out with the 2009 edition of Desperate Buyers Only. It’s got all new content, including an actual copy of a desperate product.

* Added another 4 e-books to my desperate e-book repertoire.

* Have written hundreds of web content articles. Hundreds! Most of them ghostwritten. Many of them centered around (get this) health and medical topics. I like writing health content. It almost made me want to become a doctor. Ha – NOT! It’s a noble occupation and all, but I’m not the college type.

In other words, I’m still making money with my words.

And in that time I’ve learned that any competent writer can thrive — even during a recession.

Not just survive. I said thrive. Live a comfy, cozy, ‘fly-to-the-French-Rivera-for-the-weekend’ type of thriving.

When I step away from this blog for an extended period of time, sometimes I am sitting on my duff, drinking wine and people watching at the French bistro downstairs. Sometimes I’m frolicking at the beach or doing the Disney World thing.

But most of the time I’m tinkering with success strategies. You know I have a hard time saying “Do this,” to my readers if I haven’t personally done it. It’s just not my style. So I’m constantly testing new money making ideas.

And the most important lesson I learned within the past few months is that, there is NO SUBSTITUTE for being able to research and write content fast.

If you can write fast, and you can write fairly well, you don’t have to be broke. Period!

At the absolute lowest end of the totem pole you can get $15 an article gigs like the positions at Demand Studios.

If you can write fast and follow their style guidelines, you can write seven articles a day and clear an easy $105 every single day. Right now, today they’ve got 50,210 articles waiting to be written. On every topic you can imagine, nonetheless. You make a guaranteed $100 a day and still have time to write your own e-books.

(If you don’t currently write for Demand Studios, and you’re interested, wait. I’m writing a report that’ll show you how to get hired, and earn $100-$150 a day. You get paid twice a week at DS, so if you’re currently caught in the recession shuffle, this is an easy-peasy way to keep your head comfortably above water.)

And if you think you’re too special for Demand Studios (we all are from time to time), you can get $25+ an article gigs from private clients who are literally waiting for good web content writers to show up. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to compete with the low ball writers who charge $1 per hundred words, unless you want to.

If you can write fast, you can create your own authority sites, and benefit from Adsense revenue and affiliate sales. Ten articles a day on a topic you absolutely love isn’t a stretch IF you can write fast.

There’s NO REASON to be a starving writer nowadays.

Not even during a recession. And I simply don’t subscribe to that notion that you’ve gotta pay some bullshit dues or have an English degree or chase some magazine editor to make money as a writer.

You don’t. Really.

If you have inside knowledge into the way things work, you just show up in the right places and do your part. Unfortunately (or fortunately) most people don’t have inside knowledge. And if they do have it, they don’t use it.

For example, if you have a copy of The Good and Fast Content Creation formula (which I currently include with Desperate Buyers Only), and you’re not using it, you’re missing out on an opportunity to possibly double your income.

Last month I cranked out close to 200 articles at 350-500 words a piece. A good bulk of the medical articles ranged from $35-$50 a pop. And by golly, I follow my own Good and Fast Content Creation Formula advice!

I’ve got my desperate e-books bringing in passive income. I’ve got web content clients that I write for. And if my entire online empire should collapse, I’ve got Demand Studios giving me $15 for an article that takes 20-30 minutes to write.

I’m not bored because I can write about whatever I want to write about at any given time, and it’s going to make me some money. And if I don’t feel like writing anything, I can live off my e-book income. This is a sweet time to have good writing skills!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be revealing some great stuff I’ve picked up over the past year. But in the mean time, heed my word. You will make a lot more money if you just get faster.

Stay tuned!

He was stumped.

Stumped because he’d followed the DBO criteria to a tee – but try as he might, he was having a doozy of a time generating sales. He even split tested giving away a part of the e-book, and selling the other half. Still nothing.

I told him that I would relay the advice I gave him (leaving out the actual topic) because I thought it would be of interest to other DBO readers.

The reader – let’s call him “Phil” – was targeting a well-known niche. A niche that had received A LOT of offline publicity over the past 5 years. I’m talking heavy rotation on everything from your local morning news to CNN and everything in between.

Needless to say, we (as in every reader of this blog) would recognize this problem if I mentioned it.

Anyway, Phil had been in this worrisome situation. He stressed and sweated through it. And in the end he came out okay. So what did Phil do?

He packaged his experiences and decided to sell his intimate knowledge on how to solve this desperate problem.

Seems Ideal, Huh?

Aaaaaah… a niche with lots of media publicity. Everybody knows the problem is in fact a problem. Easy sell, right?

Wrong. And that’s why Phil and I were exchanging pleasantries at 9:30am this morning.

The Problem (I Told Phil)…

Was that the niche had been exploited SO MUCH over the past several years that more people were looking to prevent the problem, rather than solve it.

When I ran the traffic numbers through Google, it was like 5,000 searches a month for solving the problem – but 1 million searches for preventing it.

In all actuality, I would target a niche that had 5K searches a month because I realize a lot of low performance e-books can add up to big numbers over the years.

But Phil Had Another Strike Against Him

The media had done such a good job at educating the general public, that most sufferers of the problem already had a built in Pavlovian response to solving the problem. In other words, if you had this problem, there are a whole series of steps you’d most likely undertake BEFORE getting online.

My guess is that most people wouldn’t care that much about looking online to solve the problem because they equated the solution with offline actions.

However Just Because the Niche Had Been Super-Publicized, Didn’t Mean it was Dead

On the contrary.

What I suggested to Phil was that he could still target the niche. But instead of selling a solution to the problem, he should focus on selling prevention to people who were most desperate to prevent the problem.

In this situation, I found that the problem was affecting children now. (This hadn’t been the case a few years ago.) Your 3-year old could have this problem, and it could be extremely harmful for them in the long run.

Now it’s one thing if I have a problem. I’m an adult. I can take care of myself.

But it’s an entirely different ball of wax when your kid is at the receiving end of the unsanctioned whipping post. As a parent it’s your job to prevent your child from being harmed. And if you’re truly about your job, you’re going to do your darndest to prevent your child from being hurt.

Parents are inherently desperate people.

And that desperation level can go from 10 to 100, depending on the risk involved. That’s a good thing, in a DBO kind-of-way.

You Don’t Necessarily Have to Solve an Existing Problem. You Can Also Show People with Naturally Desperate Tendencies How to PREVENT a Problem.

For example, competitive body builders have naturally desperate tendencies. If you’re an amateur and you want to go pro, you don’t want to get any injuries that are going to stop you from competing.

And if you know that 50% of amateur bodybuilders get an injury that halts their career, you’re going to eat 100 eggs in 10 seconds to learn the secrets for preventing that injury. You have naturally desperate tendencies. And you’re RIPE for selling to.

Can you think of anyone with naturally desperate tendencies?

Will that be in the next DBO?

Perhaps.