How I Developed My First e-Book

Creating your first e-book can be a very daunting task – and rightly so. But with a bit of structure and a clear approach it's not so bad. I would start off by identifying your purpose. Why are you creating an e-Book? I decided to create one for two reasons; 1. To inform my readers about blogging from a business standpoint. 2. To create my first information product. Originally, the content of the e-book was meant to be a series of guest posts on other blogs, but decided package it as my first product. As a result my email subscriber opt-in rate exploded. The Story Since the e-book was blogging based, I needed to have a story. People generally relate well to stories and practical examples. I simply incorporated my interest which was music to the everyday blogging practices. This brought about Build a superstar blog. The book looks at blogging from a music angle and they are some great analogies in this book - That was my story. I was not interested in putting out regurgitated stuff. I wanted to do something different. The Approach I approached this e-book by jotting down all my ideas on papers. At the end I ended up with a story board that illustrated flow of events. From this exercise, I drew up chapter titles that relates to the story, action points, backstage access for further learning e.t.c. Start Writing They best way to start is in small chucks. I broke the story down to chapters, so in a given day, I would tackle a chapter. I used voice recognition software to help transcribe my voice into words, a product called Dragon Naturally Speaking. In each chapter, I spoke from three different angles, from the bloggers, Musician and a Superstar angle. This meant recording three times. Since this isn’t a blog post but a takeaway e-book, I adjusted my writing approach slightly. Although I wanted to maintain a conversational style of writing, I felt it needed to be less chatty and a little bit polished – only slightly. Flow of events It’s important to keep the reader interested. I tried to make the chapters interesting and progressive. I was also keen on keep the book short and to the point. Based on my initial survey a larger majority of readers would be reading from screen – I didn’t want to bore them. Based on the number of pages I had initially I was quite impressed to have brought it down to 25 pages, there many pages and chapters that I had to sacrifice. Proof reading Make sure the material you are putting out is of good quality. It may seem good in your eyes but probably not in the eyes of others. In my case, I gave it to a few people to proof read – It was the best move ever. They were able to point out things I had missed and gave me new ideas too. Time taken: It took  just over a month to put together after the idea was given birth to four months prior– procrastination is a killer The book was in a half complete state for a long time, moving further and further down my priority list. I finally took action by setting myself a deadline, which I announce publicly on the blog. I even installed a countdown for all to see and it worked - I got it done Story and Concept: On going Book Design: 0.5 days Writing: 3 weeks Proof Reading: 5 days Micro-site and Aweber configuration: 2 days Tools I used: Book Design: Adobe InDesign Transcribers tool: Dragon Naturally speaking Micro-site Design: Click covers Google Docs used for proof reading collaboration

PopUp Domination

You know the saying, build your list, money is in the list…. Well, for the past couple of days, I have been playing around with a fantastic Wordpress plugin called PopUp Domination. It is a very slick looking popUp opt-in box which is guaranteed to boost your opt-in rate significantly. It’s being created and developed by a fellow blogger Michael Dunlop over at Income diary, which uses on his own blog. What’s different about this tool is the ability to customise its look and feel to match your blog. Plus it has a high impact feel about it – which means more subscribers. There are 4 templates to choose from which can be altered to suit your taste. Popup domination is also compatible with the major email marketing providers such as Aweber and many more. The plugin provided the following configuration options: Look and feel - Choose template - Pick buttons and layout colours, Mailing list HTML - Choose your Email marketing provider i.e. Aweber Template fields - Input your content List Points - Highlight important messages using bullet lists. Schedule - control PopUp timing sequence. …and more There’s a video tutorial of this plugin. See it in action >> Start converting your readers into email subscribers using PopUp Domination. You can pick up this amazing plugin for only $37 – a complete bargain if you ask me. Get yours now!

Connect With Your Audience

Just like you would engage with your friends in a comfortable relaxing mode is the same way you ought to find the same zone with your readers. For most, time with friends is enjoyable and fulfilling, there's no reason why that shouldn't be the case with your audience whether you own a blog or a website. Understand them Treat your audiences/readers as friends, as a result of this you'll be able to build a relationship with them. (more...)

Google Lets You View and Manage Your Web Activities

Fellow Googlers!! I may be the only person on the planet who isn't aware of this - but Google gives you a history of web activities performed on their services. You can track and manage activities such as, Google searches, visited web pages, images, videos, maps and more. So far, I have activities dating back to two years ago - bizarre! Simply visit www.google.com/history to access yours. (You will need a google account to view this) My apologies if you're already aware of this, I just had to share my latest discovery :-) We sure are moving into the cloud computing age.

12 Ways To Optimize Your Blog For Better Performance

Is your blog’s performance beginning to dip? Does it takes ages to do the simplest of tasks? Chances are, your blog needs a health check. With a growing blog, comes the responsibility to meet its needs and demands. Blogging platforms are great, however, they also tend to use up a lot of resources as they grow - it's just their nature. So therefore, to keep the ship steady, regular maintenance is essential. On this blog, I've had a few blackout moments, when everything grinds to a halt, nothing seems to work, and in most cases, I've had my hosting company to thank, for placing me on a dodgy server (145) hmmm. It's still an on-going process in my quest for better performance. Why is My Blog Running Slow? There could be many reasons for this : Traffic Levels. Growth/size of your blog. The size of your images. Badly written codes. Too many components. What is Slowing Down my Blog? Well, the answer to this is relative. It really depends on your setup. That said, there are tools that can help you identify some problem areas. Pingdom is free service that provides information of how long your web page takes to load, and also breaks down what actions are being performed and the time taken. This detailed stats would give you some indication of areas that may need attention. (more...)