Desperate measures - a plea from a man on the brink

[Caro]

Hi Michael,

Gosh it has been so long since I had an ebook written - in 2005 my ebook cost $1K to be written and was 15,000 words (130 pages with spacing and diagrams) and I had to do the re-write.

I'd recommend you go to Elance and see what sort of word count people are bidding on for around $1000-$1500 which is the going rate as I understand it.

I think $25 for a 30page ebook does not sound great value to me. Again it depends on how well you can market the value of the content.

My ebook is at $37.77 and discounts at $25 - and this is for a small niche.

Having said all of that - as far as content etc - how we do it in the 30DC is actually we ask our prospects what they want to know first - and that is the basis of the questions the writer forms the book around - answering those questions.

I don't know enough about what you're doing - it does sound like it is going against what we teach in the 30DC - where it's keyword driven - make sure there is traffic there.

And then you survey the market (and there's many ways to do this) to find out what they still want to know on that topic.

Caro

[Essence]

I've got some strong keywords that I'm centering around. I know that it's standard to prove the market first and make the product second -- I just don't really have time to do it right.

My wife pointed out that the 30-page estimate was in Times New Roman, 12 pt, with no illustrations, formatting, or anything. She's a damn fine editor, and she expects to nearly double that, so I'm feeling much more confident in the percieved value of my product.

I know, of course, that the actual value is way above the price point that I have in mind. It's just my confidence in my ability to market it without getting a bunch of refunds based strictly on the length of my ebook was kinda shaky.

Thank you for your advice, by the way. I'll check out elance and see what it looks like.

[starshooter]

Originally Posted by Caro

Look at Ed & Dan - they have both decided to be successful - and so it became.

Ed has a great story he's shared before of his facing bankruptcy etc - but that he decided he would be a millionaire before he was 30 - and he had absolute conviction in achieving that goal - and he did.

For him the book - Awaken the Giant by Tony Robbins was instrumental for him at that time.

Wishing you all the very best in your endeavours - you WILL succeed when you decide you will

Caro

Hi Caro
when and where did Ed mention his journey? I'd like to know a bit more about that.

Thanks a lot
Starshooter

[Christie327]

Hi Essence,
Looks like you have had some amazing advice and found great resources! That makes my heart smile! My advice is if you need to make some money asap, I recommend you finding some quick work on eLance, especially if you can write. At least you will be guaranteed to get it in the next two weeks. That's what I do when there is more month at the end of the money.

Christie

[Essence]

OK, so I'm getting blogs set up to funnel to my sale site, and I have a really stupid question that I can't find the answer to on Blogger at all. I think it's probably an HTML issue that I'm too ignorant to address.

If you want to see what I'm talking about, it's right here.

I've put a picture on my blog, but I don't know how to get the picture to fit in the column width (or just display right over the edge of the column, if that's what's necessary.) How do I tell how wide my column is, and what's the best way to downsize the picture to match?


Thank you!!

Michael Danielson

[ariedel]

Hi Essence

First of don't know the answer to your image question.

Some other comments:

1)
The post "The Corrected Healthy Eating Pyramid" doesn't lead anywhere.
You must fix that

2) Google will scan the first 300 chars of you blog to understand what it is about, so ... move the left side image and links to the right NOW!

3) Do you eat a diet (sorry English isn't my first language)
Do you have a diet, take a diet, are on a diet

4) Don't know if you really want adwords in your blog, but if you do make them the same background color (your blog is yellowish, the adwords are white), and make the links the same color as your blog links.
People will think the adwords links are part of your blog. They must blend in.

5) AND MOST IMPORTANT ...
Where is the 'hole' in the funnel. I am a visitor. I have NO time to loose
(do you have any spare time?)
I came to your site because it seemed interesting (at the time)
You have 7 seconds (max) to 'tell' me what to do next. I am only looking at what I see without scrolling down (scrolling is hard!)
You MUST tell me in this space what I should do and in a way so I will do it.

(Sidenote: Just discovered the link in the middle of the page to 'This Ebook'
The link doesn't work!)


Right ... Michael, it seems that there are a few challenges with the blog.
However, just looking at this thread it also seems that there are a lot of resources available to you.

richardjes
chap1
IMstrong
(and myself)

What you need to do now (and with 6 days left it's going to be interesting)
is to get your team of 4 together. Formulate what you want 'us' to do and MANAGE it.

While honestly I do not know what the other guys will do, I can say that I will NOT solve your problem, but I will help you get your book project of the ground. But YOU have to coordinate, plan, do (as you are already doing anyway)

mail me and get hold of the others

Hell, all we need to do is sell 15 books at $27 (and we could have some plr bonuses)

richardjes, chap1, IMstrong are you in?

Asbjorn

[scole]

I may not be as successful as Caro, Ed, or Dan... but if there's anything you need help with let me know!

I know the situation that you're in. We have two young children, I'm the only one working, and we've had our power company knocking on our door to shut our service off in the middle of winter, our phone has been disconnected, and tv.

It's a hard situation to be in and I wish you all the best in collecting the necessary funds.

Shannon

[richardjes]

Hi Asbjorn,

I am definately on for helping out. I have already given Michael some PLR material he can use.

I suggest that Asbjorn be the PROJECT MANAGER.

Hi Michael,

Just so you know, Asbjorn was my mentor for my first 30 DC and is a great guy to have on your side. He even took time to meet with me personally in London and gave me some tips which helped me start selling a few copies of my first e book.

Wow!!! a challenge before the actual challenge. what a case study this could be for all 30 DCers

[scole]

I just noticed you said that you're doing the 2007 TDC material.. I still have most of the material available if you need it.. I was responsible for sorting, organizing, and uploading the torrents last year, so they're still on my computer.

If you need anything, or missing anything, let me know.

Shannon

[Essence]

Wow. Thanks, Asbjorn. In response to your questions: the blog wasn't ready for public consumption when I accidentally hit "publish" last night. I'm working on getting it corrected as we speak.

I'll absolutely take your advice and make those modifications ASAP.



OK, not really knowing what specifically needs to be done, here's my plan:

The Ebook is being edited as we speak, so it's not ready yet. (Emergency hospital visit yesterday threw my schedule off. Don't worry -- the baby is fine, it was a false alarm. )

I'm dedicating the next 48 hours to geting all of my funneling-blogs up and running, and then I'll finish up the Ebook while Google crawls the blogs. If any of you who are willing to help could set up blogs around the keywords below, preferably all on blogspot with "Arananthi" as an author, that would be really helpful.

Originally Posted by my PM to onthermarkfb

Healthy eating pyramid" has wikipedia and ezine articles, but no really big hitters. It would be pretty easy to include this in my Ebook and on some splat pages. 19,500 pages, 143 visitors/day on lead page. This is the only one that I've gotten set up

"Eating for your Blood Type" is apparently a pretty popular book, but again, only ezinearticles for major competition. It would be possible to set up a funnel site that took advantage of people looking for reviews or something. I've already got the book on hold at the library. 6,380 pages, 171 visitors per day. This one is up and running (only one post at the moment though)

"Eating Disorder Help" has no big names on the first page of Google at all, but also is going to be kind of tough to relate. I can do it, but it'll be somewhat tangential. 18,400 pages, 93 visitors/day.

"Nausea after eating" has Yahoo Answers and a bunch of medical sites, none of which has huge PageRank. This would be even tougher to leverage into my topic, though my mother-in-law (the nutritionist) has some ideas on how to get it linked in well. 14,400 pages, 141 visitors/day.

I've got some posts from other places that I can copy onto each and edit to fit, so the first couple of posts on each blog won't be an issue. I'm figuring on going round and adding a new post per week to each, all geared toward spreading great info first, but absolutely I'll put more emphasis on the "go here, buy this" early on in each, as per your advice.

Currently, the domain I've got to my name isn't relevant at all (Majik.be), but I'm thinking of adding a relevant pagename like www.majesstix.com/how-to-eat-food.html or something like it, at least until I can get enough to use godaddy or something to purchase a domain name to redirect.

If someone could HTML up a sales letter page (I know nothing, so anything like a background/color scheme and some text boxes would be great; I've got Dreamweaver to edit with), I've got some testimonials of my mother-in-law's skills and a success story or two of my own to put up, as well as some strong ideas based on a marketing campaign that I started to write up, but just didn't have the sexy keywords I hoped it would. Basically the "anti-cancer, anti-heart attack, anti-diabetes, anti-infertility, anti-Alzheimer's diet", but not written all in a row like that. ;p

Please ask any and all questions that would be helpful in further setting things up. I'm awed at your collective offer, and I want to do anything I can to make it valuable.

***

On the positive side, I was able to give the electric company a large payment from all of the donations that people have provided me (You guys are mind-bogglingly charitable people), so my cut-off date has been moved back to August 1st. (Hooray!!) That will give me an extra couple of weeks to make the leftovers plus July's bill (a total of somewhere around $180), which, with all the expertise building behind me, I don't see myself failing at.

If I could relieve the church of some of the burden of paying my rent, too, I will fall down on my knees and try to send each and every one of you a batch of my wife's superbrownies.


Thank you again, everyone. The more I feel your support building behind me, the more I am determined to be a success story that all of you can be proud of. Let's light it up!


Michael Danielson


P.S.: Yes, Asbjorn, I am on a diet: basically the one that I describe on the blog you saw.