Last night I swear I died.

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.

From my last post you probably figured out that I like content marketing. I like it because I’ve learned how to write like a bloody speed demon. Plus content is an everlasting legacy online.

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.

1) Learn your strengths, use your strengths, f*&k the rest.

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!)