“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!

I did a consultation with a DBO reader today.

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.

I was sitting here this evening counting down the days for my daughters return to school. She attended art camp for a good part of the summer. However for the past couple of weeks, she has been at home with me.

In between cooking, cleaning, going to the zoo, school shopping, grocery shopping, and taking my 83-year old neighbor out to dinner, my days are FULL.

I normally like to begin my work day at 8:30pm. But lately I haven’t been able to get started until midnight at the earliest. That only gives me 4 hours of work time a day.

My only saving grace is that I have trained myself in a writing skill that ALL WRITERS (yes, even you seasoned pro’s) need to covet.

Four hours doesn’t look like a lot of time to get any sort of serious writing done.

But if you have a game plan for writing fast, you can get A LOT done in only four hours.

Let’s say you can crank out 1,200 words an hour.

In four hours that’s 4,800 words.

A 25,000 word manual (around 80-90 pages) would only take you 7 days – if you factor in writing, research time and bathroom breaks.

And that’s the point of today’s blog post. Learning how to write faster is a skill that will empower you beyond your wildest beliefs.

If you can DOUBLE your writing speed, you open yourself up to far more profit opportunities.

You already know that I create information products for a living.

But I bet you didn’t know that for a while (this year, in fact) I actually moonlighted as a SEO content creator.

Not because I needed to. I wanted to test out my fast writing techniques to see if I could actually handle a deadlined work load (a deadline that wasn’t my own).

The fast writing techniques worked so well that I was clearing $25-$45 per 400-600 word article.

I got so busy that I had to stop accepting assignments.

All I was doing was writing article after article, all night long. I’d turn in 4 and get 8 more. Not a bad position to be in!

But I’ll be honest with you… my information publishing business is far more lucrative. So that’s what I chose to stick with.

Though I did learn a valuable lesson.

I learned that knowing how to write fast is an extremely underrated skill – especially if you’re a content creator, or you aspire to be one.

And you have even more at stake if you write books, e-books and reports for a living.

One e-book, (or even a simple report as DBO readers know from my own experience), can easily translate into $20K-$50K a year – if you choose your topic carefully.

Now imagine if you doubled or tripled your writing speed, and worked hard for 6 months to create as many information products as you possibly could. That could easily equal 2-4 new product A MONTH, if you’re working at an optimum speed.

You’d only need 3-4 of those products to become cash cows in order to take a mini-retirement over the next 6 months.

And that’s exactly what I do!

I hustle my butt off for 6 months. (Not always 6 consecutive months.) And then I spend the other 6 months fulfilling my spiritual needs, I do hospice volunteer work, I take up new hobbies to write about, I catch up on my reading, I take classes, and so on.

Of course I could be a helluva lot richer if I worked my butt off the entire year like most other information publishers.

Then again, I make no apologies for enjoying the fruits of my labor. I work hard, I play hard. The end.

And once again, that’s part of the hidden pleasure of increasing your writing speed. You’re not sitting at the keyboard for 6 long months slaving over a single e-book. When your output increases, you can afford to recharge more often.

My latest title – The Good and Fast Content Creation Formula – is a guidebook to the techniques I use for fast writing.

Though it’s not just about fast writing.

It’s also about choosing a topic, and researching the topic, and being able to put the research together to write your content quickly.

What I did was examine every part of the writing process to see where I was getting stuck. I asked many DBO readers about their writing issues during their free consultation sessions.

Then I went through each step to figure out what I could do to make the process go more smoothly.

That was one of the reasons why I created Rack and Write. I used to have a hard time coming up with article ideas when I wanted to use article marketing to promote my titles. Rack and Write simplifies that process, thus making the writing process go a lot faster.

And that’s only one of the tricks that I’ve been using to increase my writing speed.

Would you like to see the rest?

Get the full scoop on The Good and Fast Content Creation Formula …