new blog 1

  I have recently self-published my book and looked into how to market a self-published book online, which I know a little about anyway but I thought the research wouldn’t hurt, and I discovered that marketing a book online is in no way different to marketing anything else – a business, a product, an affiliate product etc. So I thought I would put together some useful information on how to market a self-published book online that you might find useful: Publishers Weekly recommends you build a web presence and mailing list. They also recommend you target blogs and prominent sites who discuss the topics outlined in your book. If your book is a story that focuses on getting over divorce, for example, they will be many bloggers who write about that topic who may be willing to review your book (if you send them a free copy) or you may be able to buy advertising space on their blog if they offer that. The book Designer  – recommends you build an author platform and that you sta...

  Appearances are everything, even in business . If you are perceived to be an expert in your field, people will respect your opinion, you can charge more and you will be in more demand. Of course, you need to deliver excellently because that is the proof of all that you say about yourself. But even when you deliver an excellent service, appearances are important. Delivering excellently alone won’t help you get very far if you are failing in the appearance department. Imagine you have a huge garden badly in need of timing you are right home one day to find that it’s all trimmed and beautifully landscaped and you immediately demand to know who the skilled garderner behind this work is, so that you can hire him to tend to the upkeep of your gardens from now on. Upon your request, the gardener turns up and he turns out to be hideous, unkempt, smelly, and worse. What do you do? It’s very hard to overcome our natural instincts and reason with logic when we are repulsed in some way about...

 Arnold Schwarzenegger is alleged to have said that he doesn’t do sequels when it comes to films, but that he made an exception for Terminator. Well, this post is a sequel to How to completely take over a niche and how my local taxi firm is driving me mad. What’s more, it’s a fantastic sequel because it proves the point I made in the original post perfectly. To recap, my local taxi firm is a joke. They run a 24-hour ’service’ in a one horse town and can’t manage to get at taxi to my door at 5:30 AM. The problem is not overbooking, nor is it traffic on the road. The problem my local taxi firm has is one of management: they have a poor system in place, and are too lazy to fix it. Maybe part of their laziness is due to complacency, because no other local taxi firm offers a 24-hour service, which makes them the only fish in a small pond. They have a monopoly, and they are failing to deliver an excellent service. In fact, they deliver an appalling service, one that I’ve had the mis...

 The Federal Trade Commission’s new ruling on the use of testimonials came into effect on the 1st Dec 09. If you use testimonials in your business, you need to read this. On 1st dec 2009 the rules that set out how you use testimonials in your business as a selling and advertising tool changed. Typically, most companies out there show their best testimonials to advertise and sell their products and services. It makes sense to do so, of course (why would you show complaints or anything less than your best feedback?) However, The Federal Trade Commission has decided that this is (or can create) misleading advertising. The problem is that  the testimonials don’t always reflect the average user experience.  For example, if you searched the Internet (before today) for an online course in Marketing, you’d probably find dozens of websites with fantastic testimonials plastered everywhere showing how people who took the course became very wealthy as a result. And here is where the ...

  Once you have your   WordPress Website   set up there are plenty of things you can do to help it help your business. As well as using it to attract new clients and stay in touch with existing ones you can also use it to earn an additional income for your business. One that is passively made so you can continue to run your business. 13 blog revenue streams   Sell an eBook.  This is the first choice for most business experts. You are an expert on your business and how you help your customers/clients so why not put that into an eBook and sell it on your website. Once the eBook has been written and added your shopping cart takes care of collecting the money and delivering the product to your customers. This can happen day or night and around the world. Self-publish a book.  Similar to selling an eBook except you will have to deal with posting your book out when orders come in. Develop an information product.  An information product is more than just an e...

 A couple of posts ago I talked about information overload and how to cope with it, and whilst there are various ways to overload on the old ‘info’, this subject would not be complete without giving due credit to the single biggest facilitator of information overload in the digital age: e-mail. Notice that I didn’t say culprit. It’s much to easy to blame e-mail for wasting your time, but that’s otherwise known as a  shift of responsibility … and that attitude is not going to get you far in business or in life. E-mail can’t make you stop and read e-mail. Once we’ve taken responsibility for wasting time, we can actually take a look at ways to stop this from happening, or at least make it happen less often. Clear desk, clear mind A good friend of mine used to tell me that a clear desk produced a clear mind. He would clear his desk on a Friday afternoon before leaving the office, giving it a good wipe with some polisher and a cloth, and each Monday morning he would find a cle...

 In fact, everything boils down to time management: you’re either using your time wisely or you’re not. In business, being effective often starts by doing the things you need to do faster and better. This requires organisation: you have to be ale to organise yourself and your day effectively to get the most out of your time. Technology comes in handy here: there is a treasure-trove of tools that can automate repetitive tasks and even help you do those tasks that are unique (in other words, the ones you can’t automate) much faster than you otherwise would, whilst reducing the potential for error. Even if your field is manual-intensive, for instance if you’re a garden landscaper, you can – and must – use technology wherever you can to support and improve the tasks that you do. Always being on the lookout for tools that can help you organise your tasks will make you into a more effective time manager. Whatever business you’re in, you should adopt the mentality that there are better wa...