“Sure an e book sounds like a really great idea, but hey I can’t Write and worse still can’t Spell and well the Grass needs cutting so I just wouldn’t have the time!”
“I mean doesn’t it take months to write a book? And then there are all those pages being tossed into the waste basket and Writers Block and Power cuts in the winter and so on… Ever tried to write in the dark? NO… this doesn’t sound like such a good idea after all. Sorry gotta go pick up the kids from Paintball class! Does this sound familiar? Well if they’re not into paintball it’s bound to be Trumpet Lessons or Ballet or both!

STOP RIGHT NOW…
Being the Author of an E Book doesn’t necessarily mean you have to glue yourself to your office seat—there are several alternatives to actually physically typing the Manuscript. We’ll leave the discussion of these magical mystery tools for another article. And no you don’t have to major in telepathy or become a hypnotist; and even if you did I am sure there is an E Book out there just waiting for you.

There are probably still some weird niches out there waiting to be discovered and unleashed on an unsuspecting public in E Book format!

“Gourmet Cooking for Lefft Handied Dyslexxics”
“Rid yourself of Click Here Syndrome in just 14 days”
“Build your own Hen House for Free out of Cereal Boxes (empty of course!) and so on…

OK Here’s the deal…if you want to take advantage of the unlimited possibilities of using your newfound E Book strategies to further your business before you reach the grand old age of 108 then time is of the essence! An e book in the hand is worth 365 in your head believe me. I should know.

So what’s required to get the ideas and information out of your head and onto your web server. Don’t know what a web server is? or even how to get one? Be patient that’s in another article we are not trying to solve all your problems in one teensie weeny article!

What’s required is help from an expert, preferably one who can write and who has heard all the aforementioned problems before so you won’t get away with excuses!

The right mentor will nudge and cajole you so that all that valuable expertise of yours can be shared with an adoring audience and in record time. Shall we say seven days? Well a week sounds a little less intimidating!

“Hey that’s all very well but what about all that techie stuff?…I hear you need a website and a web server and a Merchant account and shed loads of money for those Web designers and…I’m dizzy …I need a Náp!”

Forget the techie stuff for now. That’ll all slot into place once you have the book written. I mean does a 747 Pilot need to know every last detail of what every passenger had for breakfast to get to the destination safe and sound?
You don’t need to know all this techie stuff at the outset that will come in good time when you have the compilation out of the way. What about the marketing? What do we do about that?

OK let’s stop here and give ourselves a well earned break for a coffee and see if there are any experts out there in Website land who have been through all this torture and lived to tell the tale.

Better still lets crank up the PC right now and go search for someone who really talks the talk and walks the walk. Gotta be an E Book out there to tell us how to do it all without having to lock ourselves away from the world for a whole year while we learn all this stuff. So lets get searchin’n’clickin and see what we come up with OK?

This Baby Boomer has been online with a web presence (sort of!) for a decade and is now sharing his expertise and experiences both positive and negative with his adoring followers. The Rise and Rise of the E Book Phenomenon shows no sign of abating any time soon so why aren’t you participating in this excellent strategy for business dominance.
Get your e book strategy off to a flying start by at least sharpening your pencil and come up with a Title you’ll be glad you did

This Article first published on Ezine Articles.com

in June 2005 but still appropriate today.

A Guide for Newbies to get under the Radar of the ever increasing mountain of technophobia that faces a Web site owner starting off.

There is of course a huge amount to learn in setting up and running a Web Site, which is why, I believe, that most newcomers tend to put their trust in a web designer, aka webmaster and leave them to get on with things hoping that all will go well. Big Mistake!

It’s only when, having spent quite a lot of money, you find out that your pride and joy is not giving you the results that you imagined, that alarm bells can start to ring. In my own case this took approximately four years to sink in. After a promising start, with some enquiries from the other side of the world, things not only didn’t get any better but got worse!

Of course, if you are running and developing a new business, which takes a colossal amount of time and commitment, you don’t initially have time to worry too much about the success of your web site. After all, a web site will make you a zillionaire quicker than you can spell the long version of SEO! Big Mistake!

I believe it is just as important to designate sufficient time to understanding how a web site is developed, promoted and maintained as it is to spend time on all the other many facets of a fledgling business.

Many new business owners, myself included, thought in the past that just by having a web site and on-line presence AND a webmaster, that everything would be fine. Visitors and sales would surely follow and increase exponentially. Not So!

Probably the pace of change on-line is more rapid than most businesses realise and therefore if you are going to build a site AND do some reasonable level of commerce from it, you have got to study and learn a number of basics.

1. Key word research should really begin before you set about building your site, because it can help with the choice of a suitable Domain name and continue to assist in the titles and scope of your eventual articles.

2. Original and fresh content related to your prospective field is a necessity, and needs to be uploaded on a very regular basis. Unless you are a very large company with an in-house webmaster, this is probably the most crucial aspect of developing a site in terms of getting good search engine results.

3. Writing new pages can be extremely time consuming and unless you have a suitable S.M.S. package installed, enabling you to become your own webmaster, it’s highly likely you will commence the slow but inexorable slide to oblivion, other wise known as Zero traffic.

4. Build your site by all means but make sure that you become your own webmaster, having taken a crash course in the do’s and don’ts. You absolutely must have the facility to control what goes on within your site. If you miss out on this vital aspect of developing a site, the chances are that you will lose interest and stop creating ideas and content.

5. Learning to write your content, even if this seems a bit beyond your reach to begin with is another essential skill to be fine tuned and believe me, once you have got under way it will become easier with each passing day. Looking at how other web sites operate and the standard of their content will help you along the path.

6. Articles on your area of expertise, submitted to a number of reputable Directories, will almost immediately get you noticed and start to build credibility. These can be modified for use as web pages and will provide ideas for new content on a never ending basis. It has been my experience in the recent past that articles can have a very advantageous effect on search engine results. Credibility is something you can never have too much of.

7. Search engine optimization, a very fancy term, with nearly as many, so called, experts as there are sites on the Web and similar in number to the droves of Web site designers! This is a thorny topic and one best left to the experts, for the behind the scenes work. However, it is my belief that the best results come from fresh and original content put up on your site on a regular basis. Results from my blog of only two months existence, in terms of link popularity, are outstripping my web site that has been on-line for five years. This is all down to regular articles on my chosen topic.

8. A newsletter or ezine, is a very good way of encouraging traffic to your site and building your subscriber list that you can eventually turn into clients, customers and sales. Offering an incentive for your visitors to part with their e-mail address can be by way of a free mini course or e book.. In the case of your newly published E-Book, offering a free download of one complete chapter is something worth considering and is a very popular technique. This is all part of the credibility building process. Once you get used to making regular posts to your newly set up Blog, a newsletter should be relatively easy to produce, without too much stress.

9. A Business Blog is I think, the way forward, for many web site owners who would like to see an increase in traffic of a targeted nature. They are easy to set up and have the advantage of being virtually instant. One of the great things that can help you in becoming more adept as a webmaster, utilising your own blog, is that learning the rudiments of html is not the nightmare that it may appear to be. You can practise away to your heart’s content adding and subtracting code from a blog post and see immediately the result in the preview pane. You don’t even need to publish this post. Again, getting used to viewing the source code of other web sites and seeing how they do things will give you no end of inspiration.

10. Control is the key to success in developing your skill as a webmaster. In a follow–up article on the experiences of a complete Blog novice we will have a look at some of the more interesting facts, figures, and activities that will take you where you want to go, and contribute to the success of your web site, providing you are prepared to allocate sufficient computer timeand are not expecting to retire a millionaire in six months!

It is, however, an achievable goal to go from Meek to Geek in just a couple of weeks, with a little effort! (well maybe  a couple of months on second   thoughts!)

This Article was originally published on 27.01.06 as I attempted to crank up a gear with yet another Blogger.com blog. I was having difficulties getting my previous Webmaster to accept what I was trying to achieve with a blog that was to be attached to our main Driving School Site.It’s probably only been read by a handful of readers so am now unleashing on a new and hopefully receptive Audience.

Blog Post for NetNewbieprofits.blogspot.com 27.01.06

I am sure what I am about to tell you is common knowledge amongst seasoned Internet Marketers and Business Web Site Owners but it takes a lot of hard graft and several years of trial and error to get any business running profitably. During this start – up phase there will be many sleepless nights and not much in the way of free time. However the exponential growth of the Internet has turned traditional Marketing on its head and provided unheard of opportunities for those who have little start up capital.

Article Marketing And Blogging

One of the ways in which your message can reach a wide audience with breakneck speed is the ability to craft informative Articles covering your particular subject and areas of expertise and get them circulating.

A lot has been written about the importance of getting your articles published and circulating widely, in building confidence amongst your readers and subscribers and web site visitors. Establishing your reputation as a trusted expert in your particular field can be built over time with a constant stream of articles and dramatically enhanced when your work is published elsewhere on the Internet, beyond the boundaries of your own web site. Let’s have a brief look at how you would go about this and what sort of results you could reasonably expect.

With the flavour of the Month now firmly resting with the mighty army of Bloggers, it is worth a quick look at how this could impact on your Article writing career. Blogs have taken the Internet by storm because of the ease with which the every day aspiring writer and marketer can now, without any cost whatsoever, set up a Web-Log in half an hour or less!

I suppose the most popular Blogging Host is Blogger.com and provides a reasonable platform to get started. Many Web Hosting companies are providing alternative blogging software with the more traditionally named Word Press.

It is well worth trying out both these blogging platforms and seeing which suits you better. My own preference is for WordPress but I am using both for several blogs.

Instant Recognition with a Blog Post or an Article

In a nutshell, a blog enables the average person to be published instantly. If you are prepared to take the time to learn the tips and tricks you will soon be posting regularly and will then have the impetus to go a couple of clicks up the ladder to composing fully fledged Articles which will stand along side the best out there.

This was my chosen route during the last year and the transition from wondering would it work, to actually getting going, was the most difficult. Having heard about blogs and articles for quite a while during web research it still took the compelling words of a master marketer to light the fire.

It is not too difficult to keep that fire burning once you see some results, however small they may be initially. In my own case the first and very amateurish blog far outperformed the Web site with links in just two months. The Web site had been going for five years, admittedly with not a huge sum spent on its development, but nevertheless it showed what can be achieved with regular posts or mini articles in a very short time.

Around this time (June 2005) the first articles were published at www.ezinearticles.com including one that had sat on my hard drive for a year and it is the combination of these two separate strategies(Blog Posts &Articles) that works so well.

The key, I was told in the beginning, was to post every day if possible and at least three times a week for the first six months, before expecting any results! The results far outweighed the meagre expectations and continued to grow daily.

I am not going to tell tales of unimaginable riches at this point since it is very early days but I do believe that the combination of Blogging and Article circulation can make a huge difference to any ones’ web presence given plenty of action and hard work with the pen. Of course this is only one of the many avenues of making a viable business online or offline for that matter.

As a post script to this article… in June 2005 as I joined Ezine Articles .com there were under 8000 Authors . Today in December 2008 there are well over 100,000;  some with as many as 10,000 articles to their credit!

Does that give you a clue? I hope so!

There are probably as many secrets to effective writing as there are Days in the Year or Blogs on the Blogosphere. But a few key elements stand out and I would like to share a couple with you in this post.

First and foremost, since it’s difficult for most of us to even start to write anything at all then it’s essential that when you are in second gear and accelerating that you don’t pull into the nearest lay by for a coffee and a sandwich. Basically what you should do once underway is to keep going and forget the spell check, the punctuation, the grammar and paragraphs.

If you are going to be stopping and checking email every few minutes which some of us do when at the computer (coz it’s fun and you never know who will be writing to you) you sure ain’t going to get anything worthwhile completed.

Completion that is the key to any success in life; a half finished project is pretty much worthless, in fact it can give you nightmares for months. So no matter what the distractions you must finish your project and this type of laser focus will bear fruit.

Ok so you have kept writing and ideas keep flowing and flowing and flowing. The page looks a mess but you have the outline. Going for a spell check or even a visit to the bathroom can interrupt the flow and then when the phone or doorbell rings you will be sinking without a trace. How do I know this to be true? Well I wrote the book on the subject but never got round to publishing it! so there!

If like me your typing skills are a little last century, then the ideas will be coming faster than you can type so it’s vital to keep going at the keyboard. An alternative would be to record you r thoughts and then transcribe but for me the thought of having to clear the desk and get those microphone thingies all set up just creeps me out. Yes I wrote the book on being Technically Challenged but couldn’t fathom out either PDF or FTP (this is being looked at as I write!)

The first hurdle is achieved if you have 500 -750 words and garbled paragraphs on the page because now you have something to work with. As you format and spell check you will inevitably come up with new ideas which will be useful in the same or other articles so that writer’s block will never be a problem… I like to read out loud as I type and also when doing my sentence and grammatical structure

When you have done your first draft you’ll then have a much better idea of what is working and what needs modifying for your reader .You do have readers don’t you? After all this is the whole point of the exercise!

So that’s a quick how do you get started and how you prepare to finish what you have started. We’ll talk more about dealing with the second draft in the next post sometime somewhere but don’t wait up you’ll be disappointed!