“Thinking of Creating an eBook? Here’s a System to Guide You Through it – 33% off Today” plus 2 more

Thinking of Creating an eBook? Here’s a System to Guide You Through it – 33% off Today
Trent Hamm’s 5 Strategies for Building The Simple Dollar
The Team Behind My Blogs: From Solo Blogger to Business

Thinking of Creating an eBook? Here’s a System to Guide You Through it – 33% off Today

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 09:42 PM PDT

If there’s one question that I get asked more than any other at the moment it is about eBooks. In fact there are three main questions that I’m asked on the topic of eBooks more than any other:

How do I create content for eBooks?
How do I design beautiful eBooks (covers and internal design)?
How do I market and launch eBooks to maximise their potential?

Over the last few years selling eBooks has become a larger and larger part of my business (in fact its now the #1 way I earn a living) and these three questions have been the same three big issues that I’ve had to grapple with time and time again.

To be honest I’m still refining my systems even now after years at it but in the early days the process was very very messy and quite hit and miss.

The learning was slow – nobody had written a comprehensive guide to walk me through the process, so I had to really develop my own way forward.

This week Kelly Kingman and Pamela Wilson have released a fantastic guide to walk eBook publishers through a great system of creating, designing and launching eBooks.

It’s called the eBook Evolution and for the next day it’s 33% off.

Having just reviewed it today I can safely say it is what I needed a few years back when I was starting out – it would have paid for itself many times over by now.

Pamela and Kelly bring some great skills and experiences to this eBook. Pamela is a graphic designer with many years of experience and Kelly is a published author and experienced eBook creator. I’ve been so impressed by Kelly’s previous eBooks that we’re actually working together on a photography eBook to be released in the next weeks – she knows what she is doing!

Together they’ve created eBook Evolution which is divided into 3 areas corresponding with those 3 common questions about eBooks:

Write it – from choosing your topic through to writing your manuscript
Create it – eBook Evolution gives you some great templates to use to help you create a beautiful eBook. You also get a Cover Recipe book to make attractive covers. This section has some great screencasts as well as templates you can use to do your own eBook design.
Launch it – some fantastic tips on how to get word about your eBook out there to the right people to help you promote it.

On top of that you get some great bonuses including a Quick Start Guide, a brainstorming guide to help you come up with ideas and some useful interviews.

The eBook Evolution is available for $97 until tomorrow (Thursday night at midnight Eastern US time) when it’ll go up to $147. It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

If eBooks are on the horizon for you (or even if you’re already publishing them) but you’re unsure how to develop a system to write, create and launch the – this is a guide that you’ll seriously want to consider.

As I said above – if this had been around 2-3 years ago I could see that it would have returned the $97 investment many times over (all I’d have had to do is sell an extra five $19.99 ebooks from what I learned to make the money back).

Learn more about what the eBook Evolution includes and secure your own copy here

Disclaimer: While I am an affiliate for this product I am also a big fan of Kelly, Pamela and the wonderful resource that they’ve created.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Thinking of Creating an eBook? Here’s a System to Guide You Through it – 33% off Today

Trent Hamm’s 5 Strategies for Building The Simple Dollar

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 01:06 PM PDT

This guest post is by Michael Alexis, producer of WriterViews.com.

Trent Hamm's personal finance blog, The Simple Dollar attracts over 1.2 million page views every month. When I interviewed Trent earlier this year, he shared the top strategies he used to build his audience. This post includes five of the strategies Trent used to take his blog from zero to one million, and his best practices now that he is achieving his dreams. How does that feel? Trent describes when it first started happening: "it was a little scary, to know that I was reaching so many people," he says, but adds that now it feels good since he has become comfortable with it.

1. Get lucky by thinking strategically

Trent

Within a month or two of launch, The Simple Dollar had a few hundred thousand views every month. Trent says, "I was very lucky to get a few popular sites to link to me early on, and I didn't expect that." However, when pressed, Trent admits there was strategy involved. Trent started by looking "at a few very popular blogs at the time— Lifehacker and a few others" and then "tried to think a little bit about what kind of posts would be useful to their readers." Trent then intentionally wrote a few early posts with that in mind.

Action Points: 1) Find a popular blog in your niche, 2) Study their style, 3) Write for their audience.

2. Quit your job and commit to your dreams

Trent's impetus for starting his blog was a major financial meltdown. Married and with a newborn, Trent realized, "I was digging a debt hole and following a career path that would get me nowhere near writing." So, he committed to change. Trent started by sitting down for two to three hours a day to focus on writing. A few years later The Simple Dollar generated enough income that he could quit his job.

Trent remembers "it was very scary" to quit, but needed to be done because it was a "gigantic time sink."

How can you do what Trent did? He says it will not be instant, but it isn't impossible either – the reality is somewhere in between. First, he says, "I didn't leave my job until I knew that the day I walked out the door my income would be enough to cover expenses." Once that is the case, Trent says you gain time freedom, and you can work on projects of your liking. In order to reach that point, Trent says, "I devoted a lot of my free time to getting a platform ready, so that I could jump." He spent over two years writing every day, and putting his goals before doing things like watching TV.

Action Points: 1) Build your platform, 2) Earn enough to cover expenses, 3) Take the leap.

3. Set the rules

Some bloggers use a "start here" widget to welcome new readers to their blog. With The Simple Dollar, Trent gives an overview of content with his 14 Money Rules. "These," says Trent, "are an essential set of things that people visiting the site can read and get the basics of." Trent thinks hard about his rules, and says, "they've evolved over time." Even though some of these rules had been highlighted in earlier posts, Trent says, "I kind of sat down and solidified the things I had written about over the years."

You need to believe in your rules, and it is okay to rank them. Trent's favorite is rule #6—Stop Trying to Impress Other People, which developed after he realized that his after work "social events" weren't really important to him, and were a major expense as well. By making sure your rules reflect your values, you give people an honest introduction to your writing.

Action Points: 1. Think about what matters to you, 2. Write about it, 3. Solidify your rules in a list.

4. Be your own ethical filter

Trent believes "when I read other peoples sites, it's a relationship of trust; I'm letting their advice come in the door of my life." So, if that writer is advertising something Trent doesn't feel right about, he doesn't trust that person as much anymore. When writing for The Simple Dollar, Trent will "look at decisions" by viewing them "from the perspective of the reader." That means Trent doesn't sell information to his readers, and isn't serving up posts that are paid for by someone else. "Basically," says Trent, "if it's something I don't want to see from someone I read, I'm not going to do it to my readers."

By applying a strict ethical filter you will build a stronger relationship with your readers, and keep them coming back. "People may not agree with everything I say," says Trent, "but at least they know I'm coming from a genuine background."

Action Points: 1. Consider your writing from a reader's perspective, 2. Be true to yourself, 3. Build trust with your readers.

5. Collect ideas

Trent's blogging started off by chronicling tips from the changes he was making in his financial life. Trent remembers that these were just "two, three, four paragraphs" and that he would "write several a day, jotting those out in 15 minutes, then boom—they were ready to go." Now, Trent posts twice a day with longer, more thoughtful posts, and he attributes this, in part, to his philosophy background.

Throughout his journey, Trent has kept track of his thoughts in an Idea Book. He says that by doing this, once you have all your ideas in once place, you can go ahead and start acting on them.

Action Points: 1. Generate ideas, 2. Track them in your own version of an Idea Book, 3. Use them.

Those are just five of the many strategies Trent used to launch his writing career. Do you use any of these strategies in your writing?

Michael Alexis is the co-founder and producer of WriterViews, a daily video series where accomplished writers share their tips, strategies and stories. Learn more about him here and follow him on Twitter at @writerviews.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Trent Hamm's 5 Strategies for Building The Simple Dollar

The Team Behind My Blogs: From Solo Blogger to Business

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 07:01 AM PDT

One of the requests that I’ve received a fair bit lately from readers here at ProBlogger is for me to write a little more on the team I’ve put together to help me run and grow my blogs. So today I thought I’d tell a bit of that back story.

But first, let’s go back in time… (this full story can be found in ProBlogger the book).

Blogging: from hobby to job

November 2002: I started my first personal blog almost nine years ago, without even the faintest suspicion that it’d be anything more than a hobby. In fact, I half suspected I wouldn’t still be blogging by the end of 2002—I don’t really have a good history of sticking with most of my hobbies for more than a month or two (hence the collection of sporting equipment and gadgets in my attic).
December 2003: By this point, I’d started to experiment with making money from my blogs (I had a couple by this point). By no means was it a “job” (not even a part-time one), but I was earning $6 a day and was starting to get an inkling that there could just be some potential if I could only keep the earnings from my AdSense ads trending up each month.
April 2004: I was now earning $20 per day from my blogs, having put extra effort into them over the last few months, and at this rate I started to consider my blogs as a part-time job. As a result my wife (V) and I decided I would dedicate a little more time to blogging to see what impact that would have.
June 2004: May and June continued to see the income grow and it passed $1000 in a month for the first time. The goal of being a full time blogger grew. We decided to give it a six-month deadline to get to a full-time level, or I’d have to “get a real job.” I began to slowly give up other work as the blogging income grew.
December 2004: We made a decision that things were at a level I could go full-time as a blogger. Income went up and down over the next year or so. but I was able to give up all other work and just focus upon blogging.
September 2005: I published a post here on ProBlogger talking about how I’d reached the “six-figure” level of income from blogging.

To this point, things had really just evolved. There were not too many months where there’d been spectacular growth or spikes in income. Rather, it was a very steady growth and I while I was working a lot of hours, the idea of hiring someone to help on an ongoing basis never really entered my mind.

I did hire blog designers once or twice in these early years, but that’s about as far as it went.

I look at this first phase of my blogging for income as blogging moving from a hobby to a part-time job, then to a full-time job.

Blogging: from job to business

The next phase involved moving to more of a “business” mindset.

I guess the transition of moving to more of a business model began with the starting of b5media—a blog network that I began with a small group of other bloggers in 2005. While I’m still a minor shareholder of the company, I am no longer actively involved. But the idea was that each of us founders realized we could probably achieve a lot more if we pooled out efforts and worked with an expanded team.

That business grew rapidly, and while we made mistakes, we also learned a lot about business, blogging, and working with teams. b5media took on a number of rounds of venture capital, which enabled us to grow, and I began to see the beauty of having a team working on the same projects rather than just doing everything myself.

While I didn’t focus all of my energies on b5media, I learned a lot in that period.

It was also at this time that I began to explore other partnerships and also began to toy with the idea of hiring staff and/or contractors to help me. I realized that in my own blogs, I was approaching a ceiling in terms of how much I could do each day. As a result, in this time I took a number of steps:

There was a period where I outsourced the writing of one of my old blogs (no longer active) to another blogger on a contract/revenue share basis.
I took on Lara Kulpa to help with the administrative load (Lara still contracts with me today to help with comment moderation and community management on ProBlogger.com).
I worked with others on a revenue share basis for a while on the ProBlogger Job Boards (I now maintain this myself).

Today: the team

dps problogger team.jpg

My blogs have grown beyond what I can really manage alone. Lara still is involved but the last year or so has seen a number of additions to the team. What follows is an attempt to give some insight into the different levels of involvement that others have on my sites—both voluntarily and in a paid capactity (I’m sure I’ll forget someone):

Guest writers: Gradually over the last few years I’ve involved others in the writing of content on my blogs. I did this first on my photography blog, where today almost all of our posts are either from guests or a small team of regular paid contributors.
Paid writers: Toda,y this is solely limited to the photography site (I did have a couple of paid contributors here on ProBlogger, but that never really panned out). These paid writers on dPS write between one and eight posts per month and are paid on a per-post basis. At times there were up to 10 paid writers on the team, but this has decreased a little as we’ve developed more of a guest writer team—as dPS has a considerable audience writers are mainly involved to help grow their profiles.
Editors: I’m currently working with a number of editors on different levels. The main editor that regulars of ProBlogger will know is Georgina Laidlaw, who edits ProBlogger and FeelGooder. Georgina works with guest writers on both blogs as well as creating content of her own. She is also involved in the creation of ebooks, writing sales copy, and other editorial tasks. We also have a couple of other editors who have helped with editing and proofreading ebooks.
Ebook authors: Over the last few years, I’ve expanded my focus to create more products to sell. These have largely been ebooks to this point. At this stage we’ve created six ebooks on Digital Photography School, three here on ProBlogger, and one on FeelGooder. I’ve written some of these myself, but have also partnered with other authors on some. Authors work with us on a revenue share arrangement where my company acts as a publisher and brings audience, marketing, customer service, and so on, and the author brings expertise. At this point, we have published ebooks with four other authors, but will release another four or five collaborative projects by the end of the year.
Product production: To help with this increased production I recently contracted with Jasmin Tragas, who heads up the production of new products. Jasmin works with authors, editors, designers, and marketing to get products to publication. It’s enabled us to increase product creation incredibly, and has allowed me to focus my attention on other activities.
Community management: As I mentioned above, Lara helps with community management at ProBlogger.com, but I’ve also got the involvement of Simon Pollock (my brother-in-law) to manage the community at dPS (among other roles).
Customer service: Simon is also involved in giving customer support on dPS. We’ve recently installed ZenDesk to funnel all incoming emails on that site into the one place, and Simon handles all of that.
Designers: Designers were perhaps the first people that I hired in the early days of my blogging, and I continue to work with a number of them (all on a contract basis). These come in on short-term basis to design/redesign our blogs but we also work with two designers on our ebook designs.
Social media: I do the bulk of my own social media marketing, but in the last month or so Simon has also become more involved in this for dPS.
Technology: Last year, I contracted someone to manage the servers and back end of my blogs. This had previously been handled by b5media for numerous years, but last year, we moved everything over to Amazon (and a variety of other technology partners).
Ad Sales: Gabrielle Green heads up ad sales on both ProBlogger and dPS. While we do use some more automated ad solutions (like AdSense) on dPS, we’re also growing the number of ads we are selling directly to advertisers—both banner ads and newsletter ads. It’s been great to have someone dedicated to this task.
Marketing: Lastly I’m fortunate to have the involvement of the Web Marketing Ninja (who has been a regular guest poster here on ProBlogger). The Ninja has helped sharpen sales pages and emails, and formulate strategy for product launches and promotions.

None of the above people work full-time just on my blogs, and none are “staff”—they all work on a contract basis. Interestingly, in the last 12 months the main additions to the team have all been local to me here in Melbourne, which has enabled more face-to-face interactions among my team (including the recent team lunch, where we took the above photo).

So … what do I do?

Having brought others in to take on different roles, one might wonder what it is that I do these days. Having an expanding team has certainly taken pressure off on some levels, but there is still plenty to do.

My main focus these days is on:

editing dPS (coordinating guest and paid writers, scheduling posts, writing email newsletters, etc.)
social media (mainly on ProBlogger)
team management—with more team members come more management tasks
writing and developing content, both for the blogs as well as products that we’re developing
strategy and partnership development—at present there are at least four other products/projects that I’m working on
administration—I’m amazed just how much admin there is, and while some of my email is now flowing through ZenDesk to Simon there’s still a tonne that needs to be done each day
speaking—this tends to come in fits and starts but it’s been nice to be able to allocate a bit more time to local speaking opportunities lately.

I realize that this post has been quite long, but I hope it answers some of those questions that I’ve been getting more and more of lately.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Team Behind My Blogs: From Solo Blogger to Business