How to Publish 76 Books In a Year

...And Earn a 6-Figure Passive Income for Life

So much for that hiatus. Since you're one of the brilliant, charismatic followers of this blog and podcast, you know I just gave you a complete brain dump of a marketing sequence just last week. Half an hour of content, all in one huge checklist.

And then I said I was simply going to get busy implementing it and so you wouldn't hear from me for awhile.

That old phrase I like comes to mind: “Man plans and God laughs.”

What I did was start double-checking my research – which then simplified the process.

That is why I'm back with you today – to help make your life simpler.

Scott Sutton showed me a better way to Amazon my books.

I mentioned in my last post that I'd found out that Kindle books weren't normal books which would run 300 pages in text. They should be short, compiled versions of blog posts. Well, I did some study on Scott Sutton – actually paid for his collection of three books (“3 for the price of 2” was the marketing hook.) [link]

Then I digested this last night, which was true to its word – short, bullet-heavy, and full of action steps. Not a lot of fluff.

While this is how he has made as much as $50K per month – he's leaving money on the table and isn't organizing this for real production by re-purposing.

The other point to ignore his ideas about KDP Select. This simply doesn't work anymore. Hasn't since 2012. He covers this with his “.99 is the New Free” report – but doesn't revise his earlier books to take that into account.

Overall, it's a nice read to get started earning some real income from just books.

76 books in a year, really?!?

Well, it could actually be more than that. And it doesn't cover all the peripheral products you'll also be creating as you go along.

Theory

1. You essentially blog once a week.
2. Turn that into an Amazon single, plus peripheral marketing pieces.
3. Combine 5 of those singles into a title.
4. Combine 3 of those titles into a collection.
5. Bundle at every combining step.

Counting this up gives you:

• 50 singles
• 10 titles
• 3 collections
• 10 title bundles
• 3 collection bundles
  
  

And then equals:

76 properties on Amazon, your own site, and BitTorrent. (Plus the rest of the major distributors and anywhere else you want to port these.)

Note: the word “book” applies at every step, since a book is an idea-container. But to be specific, we will be talking about

• singles (a 2K blog post converted into a short ebook.)
• titles (a 10K collection of 5 singles)
• collections (3 titles together)
• bundles (ebooks plus audio, visual, and any other digital offering you have that adds value.

Basic Plan

You research for a profitable niche that you can blog about for the next year.

(Note: The starred items aren't covered by Sutton.)

*You blog every week.

*You podcast that blog.

*You create a LinkedIn article with 8 images from that blog post (and link to it.)

*You create a presentation on Slideshare from that LinkedIn article (which links to and is embedded in the blog post.)

*You use that podcast and images to create a YouTube video (which links back to that blog post, and is embedded in it.)

You edit that blog post into a standalone single for Amazon with front and back matter – and post it. (Lots of work here with cover and description.)

*You then port that Amazon single through Lulu and Google Play to the other distributors with updated links (front and back).

*When you have five which are on the same topic and complement each other, you edit these into a title and port to Amazon.

*Then port that title through Lulu and Google Play to everywhere else.

* That title can be published as a hardcopy through Lulu to Ingram provided it's longer than 32 pages.

*Next, create a bundle for sale on your site and through BitTorrent Bundles with the extra A/V items you have, plus anything else – like related PDF's. Go back and update links on all singles and titles about that bundle.

*When you have 3 books that complement each other, you compile these into a collection and port to Amazon, Lulu, and Google Play.

*Then port that collection everywhere else.

*Next, create a mega-bundle with all the A/V and other extras, and post to your site and BitTorrent Bundles.

That's a year's worth of work, all nicely organized to create 76 products in a single year's time.

What Sutton had was a way to get a book out every 3 weeks.

My improvement on this is to get a property out every single week, and another 8 properties as well.

Schedules

This is the rub. It doesn't count for “everything else” that can happen in a life. But roughly, here's how it could go:

Daily –

• Writing in am, and nothing else. 2K words as a target.
• Editing in the afternoon.
• Email and business in the evening.

Weekly -

Mon – Fri

• New blog post.
• Edit into shape and post to blog.
• Create the Linked In article from it and publish there. (Remember this has 8 images.)
• Create the podcast from the LinkedIn post. Embed player on blog post and as as enclosure.
• Create the video from the podcast and images. Post to YouTube. Embed on blog post at top.
• Create PDF, post to Slideshare. Embed video in presentation there.
• Edit this into an Amazon book with front and back matter, as well as cover. Consult your research for title.
• As time and content available - build your titles, collections, and bundles.
• Post to your list (preferably on Monday or Friday – best email open days) with what you got published the week before, as well as anything coming up. This becomes your newsletter. It links into your blog, your podcast, and your video channel – and to Amazon for exact properties and also to your author page there.
• Do daily analytics on each of your properties sales – at end of day.

Sat – Sun

• Do market research on upcoming content.
• Do longer analytics on trends, at least monthly.
• Do daily analytics to see weekend sales.
• Study up on other authors and their strategies.
• Layout your M-F posts.

Monthly

Analytics of sales and trends.

Update your publishing schedule.

Discussion

How this fits into public domain and PLR publishing is fairly simple. Once you have your niche area worked out, then you find your existing books already published and write a review about them, or excerpt them to be a good single for Amazon.

As you have your 5 book reviews, then these can be combined into titles, and so on.

This brings more links into the books you discussed.

PLR can't be published on Amazon, but can be re-written as your blog posts. Sutton brings up some very good points in his collection above about how to write for Amazon buyers. Most PLR doesn't come up to that quality or precise targeting.

Again this has to be tested. And so I've just laid out a year's worth of work.

Why? It took Sutton 4 years to create a stable of 58 properties which was pulling in $30-50K per month. I think we can do it faster, by creating singles for .99, titles for 2.99, and collections for 4.99. It's possible to have 76 properties by the end of a single year – my next goal.

This is also starting without a list in general, and implementing the various strategies Sutton has for list building as you go.

The real key is to not do as I have done. Keep your research and writing separate. Keep to a schedule as much as possible. Play catch up with the priority of posting a single every week at least.

The other key point is that Sutton left money on the table all over the place. I've covered multiple times how the other distributors will bring you income while you wait for Amazon to take off. As well, he uses CreateSpace, which doesn't get you into Ingram's catalog, so your hardcopy only sells on Amazon. He also doesn't mention creating “spoken word albums”, although elsewhere he does say he's publishing audio books on each one. (More than likely, he's publishing them exclusively on Audible, which is even worse financially than publishing to KDP Select.)

Why all the videos, podcasts, and such?

Marketing – which gives you additional discovery points. People who listen to podcasts are not necessarily heavy readers. Same for video viewers. So giving them a way to find it all out without having to go outside their own preferences makes it possible for them to get the version they want.

That's the point of the “spoken word album” and even creating DVD's from the videos – but probably more realistic to use them as part of your bundle and give a handful away for an email on BitTorrent Bundles, or your own embedded Ganxy script. People have preferences – and if they'd rather buy the audio or video to get through the same content, fine – you're ready with it.

This post is to lay out how to organize taking a single blog post and creating multiple discovery and sales points from each one.

The Breakthrough

A few actually:

1. Working backwards from the buyers – researching Amazon as the starting point for greater passive income.

My approach so far was to build on any (residual) brand awareness for that PD author and/or their book title. What's popular as downloads doesn't necessarily translate to sales. Researching Amazon then shifts the mind set and allows you to leverage Amazon for all its worth.

2. Pushing singles gives you instant properties. Combining these gives you more properties with little more work.

While Sutton opened my eyes to the idea while Amazon wants original content, Kindle readers want short and low-cost books they can read quickly on their favorite device (like a smartphone – which is what I mostly used to read his.) What Sutton didn't do is to take this back to the basic business plan of generating a ton of singles and the building them up into books – but instead set up for books and then would shift gears to write singles.

(In looking this over, it's obvious that if you took your most popular singles, they'd make your best title – or a lead article for that title.)

3. Adding the extra oomph of publishing everywhere possible builds on publishing to Amazon first.

The PD problems built into Amazon have kept me away from this platform in How to Publish 76 Books In a Year and earn 6-figure passive income for lifegeneral. The world-view shift of writing short works not only opened up PD publishing by giving the annotated extra Amazon wants, but also then created new books by combining those short singles.

(This was the inspiration for last week's long post. But it's simple to post an “annotated” version of a PD book if it's not already up there – since you now have the annotation-article to add.)

4. Multiple eyeballs wins out over being Amazon-centric.

As I mentioned, Sutton is leaving tons of income on the table by publishing mostly inside Amazon's kingdom. His use of CreateSpace underscores this, since they only publish to Amazon, really. If he's using Audible, that is a reason right there why his audiobooks aren't bringing him income.

You will most always make more money from paperback sales as royalties than you will from ebooks – even though they sell far less. Again: “both” is the best solution.

By also publishing everywhere else, this gives you additional passive income sources – as well as bringing you buyers directly to your site for the added value. And passive income is that which will sell from here on out.

By publishing “spoken word albums” through CD Baby, you're now selling through music stores – as well as through Amazon, on a back-channel.

This solves the social network problem Sutton fudged on.

He only really uses Twitter. And in his books doesn't really nail this down – practically giving advice that would mire down your week in just communicating on social media.

One approach I appreciate – he says his approach doesn't market, but lets Amazon do his marketing for him. Smart. Right down my alley.

As I've mentioned before, the two content-friendly social networks are LinkedIn and Google+ – and it just makes sense to point a writer to places where their skills can be best put to use.

By researching Google, Amazon and then LinkedIn, you'll wind up with the keywords and approaches which will bring you well-heeled clients. Search engine optimization on all three platforms can (and should) be built into each article so that they'll all bring you all possible interested viewers.

Then IFTTT takes care of all the updates everywhere else.

Your primary job is building a backbench of properties which routinely sell well. Your metrics are income vs. overhead. You want to get one-and-done approaches ongoing so that you can concentrate on the next book.

That said, you may want to spend six months building properties and take a month to just tweak everything to see how that affects sales. If that gets too boring, then maybe expand your analytics review to three days, and expect to get out new properties every other week.

My own opinion would be to simply get all this done now, and then at the end of the year do a complete review where you sort out what isn't selling well and why. Once you get them all selling well, then start your next year with a new niche.

The Perfect Graduation or Retirement Gift

What this current plan does is to give you a graduation present for your young high-school grad. Get them to follow this, and you're giving them a business they can grow forever, one year at a time. Infinite income – and financial freedom. (Yes, you could give this to your college grad – but practically, they should be writing their books long before that – and making 6-figures before they graduate. Anyone with a writing talent (or wanting to develop their own) can do this.

Give this plan to someone with experience (who's retiring, for instance) and you have a built-in retirement plan they can will to their heirs after they have no more use for it.

The Self-Funding Opportunity

This pays for itself as it goes, and so will leverage into even higher quality.

Even without a lick of writing talent, it's possible to create these books by hiring it out. You just have to know what you like when you read, and do precise research on Amazon. Hire out the writing. Hire out the cover. Hire out the editing. Hire out the conversion. You can even hire someone to post the book for you. Pay off your bills from the income.

Once you get done creating the original content, you can then pay someone to port all these books over to the other minor distributors and leverage your income even higher. Oh, and of course, the bundles make great Affiliate sales products. (Pay that person a percentage of sales to take care of the Affiliates for you.)

Sure, it would take an investment. But the only books that don't sell are those which a) have a bad cover, b) are poorly written, c) aren't edited into good shape, d) are not researched to begin with, and/or e) have poor CTA's in their descriptions.

The solutions to these are to study bestsellers, and study the basics of copywriting – so you know. (Eugene Schwartz' Breakthrough Advertising [link] is the key to this.)

Combine this with your membership enrollment activities and you have a real winner.

Do a few years of this and a 7 or 8-figure income should be attainable.

OK?

Testing this now follows...

Luck to us all.  

Related articles

• Getting Booksales on Amazon - and Everywhere Else
• How to Edit a Book Into Shape and Stay Sane
• The Numbers Racket and Amazon's Public Domain Problems.
• How to Best Profit from your KDP Select investment...
• The Author as Producer - it's not just about ebooks anymore. Case Study 03
• Is there any Real Money in public domain (self-)publishing?

Self Publishing: Employing Emissaries and Spies for More Profit

Spying is probably the oldest profession (well, excepting maybe one other). The most widely reprinted book on warfare (Sun Tzu's Art of War) has a whole chapter on spies and spying.

Spying is really just gathering intelligence. That's why embassies are constantly found out and "embarrassed" when it's "discovered" they've been doing this - over and over and over. For governments, it's just part of doing business.

For corporations, it's big business, and a big part of their budget. For marketers, it's called "market research" and "demographics".

If you are a self-published author (and don't have a huge marketing budget) you can still have spies working for you.

Like embassies, you can have emissaries - in every book you publish. The problem for so long has been that books were considered the end product. Once you sold them, you were done. Or so conventional wisdom said.

Your books are actually emissaries because they spread the word about you. They can also gather intelligence for you.

Any brick-and-mortar shop owner knows that their local repeat traffic comes from word-of-mouth - and this is gotten by providing incredible service to everyone who comes into their store, regardless of whether they buy anything or not. Local shop owners learn all sorts of things from their customers.

That fact is lost on the traditional publishers. They have been so long in the business of having books as a final product that they miss the fact which our modern "native commerce" model exposed.

Your book is no longer a finite printed work. It's in many formats, delivered through multiple platforms. It can be updated at any time (although print versions are harder).

You book is no longer an end point of your production - factually, it's just the beginning.

Books now are your emissaries. They tell everyone about what you think, how you act, what you think of them, how you can help them - even how much you respect them (or don't.)

Intelligence your distributors don't want you to know

Books-as-emissaries are also spies. The best ones have embedded links which bring potential buyers back to your site. And those embedded links can tell you more about that customer than they want to tell you. Well, mostly, anyway.

Right now, there are no really good tools to find out what your readers want - except what they actually buy. And that is limited, unless they are buying directly from you.

When you publish your books via distributors, they pay you royalties - but they don't tell you all the intelligence they are gathering from getting people to buy through them. All of them have various algorithms which give you "also bought" and "related books" to get you to spend more money with them. As you spend, they keep records of everything you bought - just business.

Your books are probably on at least a half-dozen distributors now, and each of these have different audiences. Google seems to sell more nerdy books, not surprisingly. Amazon sales are filtered through their algorithms, so they are basically bargain hunters and fans. iTunes has artistic types, but also business people and early adopters. Nook could be described as hard-core anti-Amazon. Kobo is international in scope, so purchases here range across a wide field of cultural differences.

From the little data the distributors reveal, the author up to this point could only say - hey, I got more/less book sales this month! Because that's all the data you're given (other than maybe what continent they came from, which is hardly better data. "10 from the U.S., 2 from Italy, and 1 from France - cheers.")

If your business was a local book shop, one of your spies would whisper when that person came into your shop: ((Psst - this guy is basically a nerd. He came from Google.)) or: ((Psst - this is a gal looking for a deal, she came from Amazon.))

And you, being a good spy-master, can arrange your shop to offer that new potential customer just what they are looking for. You take them over to that particular case of books that has what they probably want... And get the sale, and get a loyal client from there on out - since they think you can read their mind.

How Do You Get Such Great Intelligence?

It's that link you have front and back in your ebook, your PDF, your print book, your audiobook, your videos, your podcasts. (You do have links back to your site, don't you? Good, I thought so - we have such brilliant people who listen to this podcast and read this blog...)

The secret is to have a specific link for that buyer everywhere you distribute your book.

The link they use to find your site also says where they came from. No, this isn't magic or even black hat. This has been known since people started selling stuff online. (The earliest I was able to find was about 1995.)

These links are called "Redirects".

Affiliate marketers have been using this as least that long, while mail-order marketers such as Claude Hopkins used "coupons" in his Scientific Advertising since the 1920's.

That link in your ebook can tell you where their copy came from, whether it was an ebook, a print book, an audiobook, or video. That link will answer: did they come from Amazon, Googke Play/Books, iTunes, Nook, Kobo?

The cheap way to do this is to create these links on your server - so when a person clicked on http://[yourdomain.com]/[your-redirect] they would show up on a page they were probably interested in. And that is why affiliate marketers used them - to take them to a specific page just for that type of people who were looking for a specific product.

As an author, you do this to find out what type of buyer is coming to your site from what version of book.

And - being the brilliant person you are - you then give them a page which is closer to what they are looking for.

In Rainmaker, this is made simple. You create the redirect, and the landing page, and then link one to the other.

But you say - hey, I've got over a dozen books. There are nearly that many distributors. And just where am I supposed to get the time to spend in creating all these links and pages?!?

Relax. The Rainmaker folks have you taken care of. They keep track of the clicks while you can make simple variations of links, and landing pages can be simply copied and tweaked as a new version. Of course you could be satisfied with just knowing which distributors are best at sending you what type of traffic - even if you send them all to the same page. Later on, you can invest in specific pages for viewers coming in from specific areas.

With Intelligence, You Can Offer Specific Viewers What They Already Want

What if you followed a link in a book you got from Amazon, only to find a page which said, "Thanks for getting [Book Title] from Amazon. Here's some related books and material readers of [genre/niche] have found valuable." And then you show them other books you have on in that area - not just the ones you have on Google. The buy links go to your site, though - and the viewer is able to get not only .mobi or .azw versions, but also PDF's and links to the audio and video versions.

Meanwhile, you are pocketing 100% royalties from every sale. Or you can also send them to a Print-On-Demand outlet like Lulu, or an indie bookstore where they have your hardcopy book in stock. More book sales, more royalty income, happier customers.

Yes, you can also offer them a free membership which gives them an automatic 25% non-expiring discount coupon on everything they buy from you. And an additional 50% discount if they tweet or like that copy their interested in to their friends.

Now you have a devoted client - who's wondering how you read their mind.

All you did - was put a specific re-direct link in your book that was only in your Amazon versions.

A buyer who types in your print book link would be met with a page that gives them print versions, but also helps them buy ebook versions for their smartphone or tablet. Or that audiobook version so they can listen to the book on commutes when reading a print book would be difficult.

Improving Sales, Improving Royalties

Do you see how this could improve your sales markedly? (Thought I saw a few light bulbs go on over there...)

Since you're selling on your own site, you're improving your royalties - and now

I've talked about this before. And I've put bit.ly links in my books to take care of this function. The problem with bit.ly links is that they are only one web address per link. You can't have several links going to a single page.

Being able to set up your own re-directs is how you get intelligence. Send all your buyers to a single page to see if its worth creating a specific landing page for them. When you do start getting a flood of viewers coming in from a certain distributor's book, then create a variation of that page - maybe with a special discount for buyers of that book from (certain distributor goes here).

On Amazon, you can use redirects on their individual author pages you're supposed to set up on every continent. You can also do this with every bio page you set up anywhere. They can redirect to a specific page for that nationality or region.

You don't have to change the ebook and revise all the time after you've done this once. Redirects can be changed to point anywhere you want, any time you want to improve your sales from a decent flow of viewers. You can even run A/B tests through Rainmaker, so you tweak the page to convert best.

Quite simple. Quite powerful. 

And while this was another "secret hidden in plain sight", it's a good one. If you've subscribed to Rainmaker, you already have these tools available.

Otherwise, just access your own domain server and cobble your own scene together. With your server-redirects, you can even do this on a Blogger blog. Just takes more time.

I say that, as I say always - that you start from scratch or less, and make your site pay for itself as it goes. Costs you more time, but not money you don't have. If you're already getting great income from your book sales and want to take it to the next level, I'd suggest Rainmaker.

But then, I'm right in the middle of my transition over to this - so you can expect me to be a bit enthusiastic.

However, as far as I know - no one is telling authors to do this.

So I've just given you secrets even the top corporate spies won't disclose.

- - - -

Show notes:

...picking up where we left off in the podcast.

How to Implement Redirects

1. Take your bestsellers, probably in order of actual sales - not what you wish were happening.

2. Pick your landing page, even if they all go to the same one for now. What we are looking for is which books from which distributors actually show up.

3. Create redirects for the 5 main distributors:

• Amazon (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/amzn)
• iTunes (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/itun)
• Google Play/Books (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/goog)
• Nook (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/nook)
• Kobo (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/kobo)
• (and Sellfy, Ganxy, Leanpub, Overdrive, e-Sentral, BitTorrent, Rainmaker itself, and anywhere else you are actively uploading your book for distribution or sales.)

Note: these redirect links all go to the same landing page, and only give counts of traffic by distributors.

4. Split out Lulu (or your hardcopy POD distributor) by book type - again, only if you've gone there:

• tradepaperback - (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/lulu-tpb)
• pocket paperback - (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/lulu-ppb)
• casewrap hardback - (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/lulu-cwhb)
• dustjacket hardback - (such as: http://livesensical.com/books/lulu-djpb)

5. Now, replace the links in your ebook (and other versions) with these new links.

A blurb like:

Visit Midwest Journal Press for more materials and related books.

Sign up today for a free membership and instant access to an expanding library of books and materials ready for immediate download – all to help you improve your quality of living.

Visit http://livesensical.com/go/aow-lulu-djhb/ ‎

now uses that link both front and back of every book (just mouse-over to see the link).

6. Rinse, repeat from 1-5 for all distributors where this book is getting sold.
7. Rinse, repeat from 1-6 all books which are actually selling, by order of personal sales rank.

Simplest is to do this as you update the marketing for any book.

a. Grab the .odt (or .doc) file and update for Lulu with appropriate link.
b. Have Lulu create the epub.
c. Edit the hard links as appropriate (Calibre has an internal epub editor) and save as [title]-[distributor]-version.epub
 - ie. "SunTzuArtOfWar-amzn.epub"
d. Upload that epub where it's needed.
e. Generate the PDF from the original .odt/.doc file (embed fonts) for each version and rename similarly, according to anywhere you are selling the book. Lulu hardcopy versions would also get individual versions. (It is possible to edit PDF links, just not as easily.)
 - ie. "SunTzuArtOfWar-lulu-tpb.pdf"

You can and should definitely do this for every PDF preview you create, regardless of sales - as this is part of book promotion. TIP: you can also include a coupon in that PDF for a discounted purchase.

Note: if Lulu is distributing your ebook, you're stuck with one redirected link for the single epub they post everywhere. That's a trade-off - like the royalties you lose in that process. As you can, get accounts with these other distributors and start uploading your ebooks directly, turning them "off" in Lulu's distribution.

Work from the ones which are your bestsellers, so your increase in royalties would pay for the time you have to invest to make the switch. If you're losing 50 cents per book, but only sell 3 in 6 months, well... You probably have other issues with that book and would be better putting it on your "ready to be re-marketed list" (meaning start from scratch with market research.)

You'll also probably have some books which never sell on certain distributors - so you tailor your links appropriately. Saves you time, which is worth more than money.

Discussion:

1. A point to be clear on - when you make a redirect link once, you never have to update that ebook again (for the link, anyway.) You can change the page it directs to anyway you want, any time you want.
2. Theoretically, Google Analytics could help with this - but it's way beyond my pay grade. Adding editable redirect links to the ebook as you submit it to the distributor would be a simple, elegant solution.
3. I've done a fairly thorough check to see if Amazon has any particular policies on links within ebooks. The safest route is that the ebook links to your own site. Some have links that go elsewhere and haven't been penalized (with the exception of one spammer who had hundreds of links in a "book")
4. And boy, does this give me a lot of work to do - but again, it will pay for itself by working in order of current bestsellers down. All this is a way to build audience, which is the exact point.
   

Bonus Lightbulb Concept: 

I mentioned Rainmaker's ability to create digital coupons above. You can also set links up so that they show in the Kindle Preview - such that a person could send people to their site without that person even needing to buy that book. I've checked a preview of one of my earlier books and this is indeed the case. Look up any of my books with a link in the front, click on it - and you'll wind up on one of my sites. You don't even have to buy the book.

This means you could use the Look Inside feature to get people directly to your site. A redirect link would tell you which preview they had clicked on to get there.

Imagine a boxed text which said something like: "Up to 50% discounts on this and related books in all formats - Click Here Now." Or maybe something like: "Limited bonus for book readers - Click Here Now." As long as any price on that link wasn't lower than Amazon (with the discount) then you'd be fine. Of course, if that book-discount was only available behind a free membership paywall, then Amazon's bots wouldn't be able to find it...

Digital coupons come into play, much as in Scientific Advertising, to tell you more about the client, and as well, what text gets them to buy. While A/B tests aren't really possible with ebooks, they are with landing pages. Those landing pages could also enable people to tell their friends about that offer, to make it go viral - giving them a different redirect link, which itself was shortened with bit.ly or similar.

Isn't bit.ly an overkill? Considering the analytics they have, it's a nice backup. You can customize it as well, for any mouseover. None of the bit.ly links I've used have ever caused a flag - as they simply go to one of my sites, in any case. Bit.ly has better analytics than the next closest contender in this, Goo.gl. But if you don't want that extra complexity, your redirect link itself can be plenty short.

Examples:

• original redirect link: http://livesensical.com/go/aow-lulu-djhb/ ‎
• rainmaker's shortlink: http://livesensical.com/?p=7325
• bit.ly's custom link: http://j.mp/AOW-lulu-djhb

If word got out that people could get a free membership with multiple downloads - just by clicking on Amazon preview links - perhaps that would drive business to your site. Of course, such people might only be lookie-loo's - but a little work would then show you whether this was working, since signups from a special landing page would tell you if you were only getting freebie-seekers who opted out after downloading everything they could. (The joke is on them, though - since all your PDF's also have links in them which are redirects. If they post them elsewhere, they'll still be able to bring you buyers even years later.)

This prompts another post (on my list of to-do's) which tells of a new strategy for beating Amazon by employing their own tactics against them - commodity pricing and instant delivery. So do stay tuned - make sure you're subscribed by email or RSS feed. 

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• A Comparison of Distributors - Who's on First?
• How I Got My Financioal Freedom from Publishing Books
• Getting Booksales on Amazon - and Everywhere Else
• How to Market Test Your eBook - Before You Port to Amazon
• How to Publish a Dozen Books in an Afternoon.

I'm Sorry - Updates Galore Coming Soon!

I've been quiet too long. And I apologize.

It's not that I don't have stuff for you - I do. About 5 podcasts which have to be recorded and posted so you can be alerted by email or RSS feed/podcatcher/iTunes, etc. (You are subscribed, aren't you? Good.)

Because I do this all for you.

What's happened that I don't want you to fall into.

I went back to my hard-drives and pulled every backup I had. Of course, because I didn't always have this habit, they only went back to 2005. I look around old files and found that I'd been blogging since at least 2003, but they were on platforms which have since gone extinct.

Anyway, this gave me nearly 5,000 (yes, five thousand) blog posts to sort through. Taking out obvious duplicates narrowed it down to under 4,000. When I simply trashed or turned to draft anything you wouldn't be interested in (like the details of getting a refund from a scammer company that finally went under last year) - this pulled it down below 3,000.

Finally, I had to go through everything which wasn't assigned a category and put these where they belonged.

Moving back to Wordpress off Blogger

I've always liked Wordpress, but had a love/hate relationship with the free blog-hosting sites that used it. All free blog hosting sites have trouble with spammers. Some have taken fairly draconian (harsh) measures to protect their servers and financial backend.

Wordpress.com was one of these. I've had more blogs and profiles turned off on that site than I can easily count. They simply won't tolerate obvioius affiliate links. And will ban you at the drop of a hat. (While meanwhile labeling you a spammer - hope you're not using your real name...)

Since I need to make an online living by offering products (my books) - I had to get onto a platform that would not just tolerate this, but encourage it. So I went to Blogger.

And I was happy, overall. I knew it was more limited than Wordpress, but the minimalist simplicity of it didn't keep you from feeding your muse and working to get paid for it.

Blogger has one major drawback - it doesn't have categories, so exporting and then re-importing to a Wordpress platform leaves you with a huge stack of stuff which is "uncategorized."

Then the fun begins.

(I did see, after a couple of days at this, that it's possible to turn tags ["labels" on Blogger] into categories. And then within Wordpress, to move from one category to another, or combine them.)

Since "uncategorized" is a default on Wordpress, I had to move all these over into a new temp category, sort them, to where they needed to go, and then delete that temp one.

It took days, close to a week of my part-time schedule working at this (the farm chores and other duties still take their fair share.)

And Just When I Thought I Was Done...

...I found out how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Rainmaker is an amazing platform. Amazing. As I don't use that word often, it means a lot.

I was down to about 1200 posts (with at least that many as draft or trash to revive as needed.)

Unfortunately, it isn't really like Blogger or Wordpress, where you can pick out a nice template and just start in. It's way more powerful with built-in memberships, podcasting networks, online courses, and of course - the ability to directly sell digital products.

I'm getting this podcast out to you on the old system to let you know what's coming up. Because I've got a lot of work to do - still - just to help you get the data you want the way you want it.

The problem is that it's going to take some time before I can get a nice base set up and turn on stuff bit-by-bit.

There's no reason to have to have everything ready at once, but let me lay out what looks to be possible at this point.

The Grand Design Revealed

...drumroll, please.

You should really go over to livesensical.com to sign up. That's my new site. Nice video there that starts to explain it.

This site will really be in four parts, which is how I've organized my 50+ years of research and all the workable resources I've collected so share with you.

There are going to be both free and paid memberships, which allow me to fine-tune this material. To begin with, it will all be a free membership - but I'll have a lot of blog posts which live free out there to get people to sign up at all.

These four areas will each have their own podcast, probably bi-weekly, as that's a lot of work.

Just in the self-help area, I already have 4 or 5 ecourses which can be revived. In the online marketing area, there's another 3-4 or more.  This is just what I've found when I was moving stuff around. Other courses exist on video and PDF which can be brought in and connected. Then there are PLR video and audio courses which I've got stashed away and are still fairly useful.

I've mentioned before that I have a couple dozen-dozen books out there already. Some are very applicable to your studies, some were just tests (aka: cannon fodder). There are a great number of these I want to make available for free, and then offer the other version of them (epub, mobi, audiobook/podcasts, videos) for small fees - well, at least higher than they are sold on Amazon.

Eventually, I'll get onto some major projects I've been laying out and putting off - such as

• a set of classic evergreen fiction bestsellers made available to authors to improve their craft. 
• There's also an online marketing training course to enable people to really think with what they find online and be able to spot real winners and the scams. This has particular use to people who have been into Network Marketing. 
• My series on Masters of Marketing needs quite a bit more work - and porting to LinkedIn for their use.
• There's a final book on selling books online, which takes all the data I've set out here and packages it up in various formats. This also needs to be a course, plus bundled with audio.
• Eventually, I'll be caught up and will start in on Children's Books, both writing and illustrating them, but they'll have a companion set of books so anyone can train themselves on this genre. (It will probably be it's own site, although that's a future scene I haven't fully figured out as yet.)

The Rainmaker platform has built-in SEO scripting, so all the surviving posts need to be gone through and updated. That alone would take weeks if I didn't also have some forward progress to make (and bills to pay, and promises to keep.)

The backend bells-and-whistles to set this up take a bit of study - but there is an excellent set of tutorials and walk-throughs which tell anyone how to build their own stuff.

The great part of Rainmaker platform is that this is the same tools that Clark & Co. have used to build Copyblogger into a multi-million dollar annual income. Same tools - just like they use. In short: it's truly powerful.

What happens to these old blogs?

Well, they stay right there. One datum you must know is that you never, ever delete a blog once you set it up. Fill it with usable content, put an opt-in form on it, update it if you can here and there. But like vintage wine, it gets more valuable with time, not less. Google gives them more authority (meaning: higher rankings) the longer they are out there. Even free blogs. Put them on a spreadsheet and drop some content in on them from time to time. (If you can set up IFTTT to syndicate your content, that fine.)

You see, each of these free blog hosts have their own community. So they recommend your stuff to their followers differently. That means more people can find your stuff that you'd not necessarily connect with otherwise.

Meanwhile, the search engines can link all these in on very long-tail basis to help other people find your stuff. 

I don't really have a system in place to deal with all these. Like I said, I've got a spreadsheet which hs most of them on it - some will stay forever lost to my access, but will never be deleted.

In some cases, like that scammer content, this can be posted back to specialty blogs just on that subject - the history of a particular Utah scammer company. Might even become a book if I can ever get around to it. But having this content on a Blogger blog is a fitting bookend to this chapter of my own history.

You also never throw away old content - you just re-purpose it when you can.

Well, thanks - Gotta run.

I really, really appreciate the time you spend listening to these rambles. It's all designed to help you learn from my mistakes and earn your own extra online income faster. 

I've got a long post (just written last night) on free blogs all by themselves. Another on how to effectively promote on social media without having your time sucked away with no income. And some others I wrote last week about what I'd been inspired on through this journey. 

These are all waiting for me to find them, record them, and get them out to you.

Today, though, I though you deserved an update.

Let me know what you need covered in more detail. I'll get to it when I can - you can see above that my schedule is a bit packed now...

Luck to us all.

Related articles

• Is the old-fashioned blog being killed by other publishing platforms?
• Have LinkedIn and Medium Killed the Old-Fashioned Blog?
• Soaring The Blogosphere With Blogger
• The Grand "Google Empire" Experiment Begins
• Getting Your Book Discovered, Finding More Sales, Having More Fun
• How I Fouled up Self-Publishing My New Book Series (...and what you can do to avoid this mistake) - Case Study 10

When Your Case Study Becomes the Next Case Study (11)

This could have happened to you - or maybe not.

The scene was this: I was listening to some podcasts while working (as radio these days is nearly as bad as the TV news) and got inspired to use this fancy mic I had gotten a few months back.

It would be a nice test (I told myself) as you've got all these programs and it would be a good thing to do what you've been telling others all along - you know, publish to multiple eyeballs in as many formats as possible...

So I "ate my own dogfood" - I did what I thought was a good blog post about what I'd just done the night before in publishing.

Then I read this over, just the way I'd tell someone the same data - well, maybe a bit more interesting than that. Recorded it, and edited in Audacity on a MAC. (Could have done that on my Linux box as well - or Windows, if I was into self-torture.)

I uploaded that to Archive.org, then took that file location and set it into Blogger as an enclosure link. Voila! I was podcasting.

Went back to the blog post and embedded the audio on the page.

Then, I worked up a presentation, based on the outline of what I was saying. Did this in LibreOffice Impress. Exported each frame as a jpeg file.

These images and the audio were combined in a video editor (OpenShot - on Linux) and created a video file for YouTube.

But it was a bit dry, so I looked up some PLR bumper music on my hard drives and added this to the sound-track.

Produced the video again, and uploaded it to YouTube. Then embedded it onto the original page - below the podcast file.

Finally, I added the presentation to the bottom of the page, where it could be downloaded.

Where this could be improved

It took most of the day, with interruptions. Most of the time spent was in finding everything the first time. Knowing how to use Audacity and a video editor made it faster.

Still, it took at least as long to edit the audio into shape as it took to record it. (Peacock in the background - see if you can hear it...)

The presentation took some time, although I didn't even try to create the whole transcript (original blog post) as a presentation. This would have been way too many images to set up - so building one based on a simple outline makes the video possible.  I'll probably keep doing this on future videos as a time saver.

What I still need to do is to scrape that original blog post and make a simple PDF of it (with links - through LibreOffice) and post that as well to Slideshare.net.

I'll use the same bumper music - to brand these - so that will be faster on the podcast.

If I podcast all the blog posts from here on out, then I'll be able to burn an RSS feed via Feedburner and post this to Itunes.

This, of course, makes your book discovery more possible. (A future blog post will happen on this.)

The assembly-line sequence for your multi-media production

1. Blog it like you'd talk to someone you know and respect.
2. Podcast this. (Edit goofs, add bumper theme intro and outro.)
3. Scrape and create the PDF of this blog post.
4. Create a presentation of the outline.
5. Turn the presentation into images (jpeg's.)
6. Combine the audio and images into a video.
7. Post the podcast to your hosting service. Add the link as an enclosure.
8. Embed the podcast.
9. Post the video. Embed the video.
10. Post the PDF's. Embed the PDF's.
11. Review and make your blog post live.
12. Rinse, repeat.

This should just takes an hour or so, once you have all the tools in place.

Why do all this work?

As I've covered before - it's a point of Search Engine Marketing. Now I have backlinks from YouTube, Slideshare, and Archive.org coming directly to that blog post. As well, I've got peripheral links out to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Some got hit a couple of times.

This means I have some rudimentary social linking happening. And I have some of the biggest sites now saying that my little blog is important to them. All good.

While I can cut out the video to save some time (still posting the podcast and PDF's) - that wouldn't be the smartest move, as videos tend to convert more than just blog posts or audio only.

The point is to set up a Gary Vaynerchuk scene, as there's a lot to say on this subject. All that would enable people discovering my books that much easier.

Believe me, I see that there is still a lot to learn in this area. For a first try, that wasn't bad (IMHO.)

It's all downhill from here.

PDF download:

When Your Book Case Study Becomes Your Podcast and Video Case Study from Robert Worstell

- - - -

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Related articles

• How to Publish an Ebook, Audiobook, Video Ecourse at the Same Time
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• How to Market Your Book Online - In Spite of Amazon

How I Fouled up Self-Publishing My New Book Series - Case Study 10

(...and what you can do to avoid this mistake)

(Yes, I know - Fouled up isn't the same as Fowl, which isn't a cute chickie...)

Video edition:

OK, I got busy getting some hard-cover books done up - mainly because Lulu had a 25% discount which ended last night. (And that mostly paid for shipping...)

I had these books which I thought were ready, but actually were only half-way there. Out of the 13 books in that series (yes it grew from the first 6), I was able to get 8 of them coming to me as proofs. (I have one more actually ready, but was too close to the midnight deadline to order, and the others are either too short to print, or have a lot of work yet to make them ready.)

The problem was, I screwed up with the self-serving links in them.

I told you years ago - or was it just last year sometime - that you need to start tracking your links from these books.

It's true that Google is able to read these books, and so can follow links. If you put a link-shortener in there, you get no SEO. So my foul-up isn't that bad.

OK, let's backtrack a bit - this is getting us both confused.

The error you shouldn't make

I had these books ready, or so I thought.

Instead of putting a single link back to the site, I thought to add a "Bibliography" to each book which would give links to all the books in that series. (This is instead of a single link front and back.)

What I did then was to quickly set up landing page addresses for each book (set up the page on the site, copy the link, then turn the post back to draft.)

The step I omitted (which isn't a big deal, since the print versions don't have links anyway) is to convert all these books into bit.ly-shortened links.

The two reasons for using bit.ly are, first - they are the only shortener left standing which actually tracks your links and can give some analytics on it. The second reason is that they have become a form of social media in themselves.

The whole point of this is to have trackable links from your ebooks to show you whether they are coming from your books or somewhere else. I don't know that Google Analytics can't track these, but the point is that you want to be able to - and bit.ly is the only way I know of right now to do so.

Why the trade paperback isn't a bad start

It's true that they don't have links, but why paying for the expense of getting these books printed instead of the easy route of ebooks?

Well, for a start - Amazon can't/won't reject them. Second, you are only paying a few bucks for each book and will have a nice copy for your effort, with the satisfying touch and feel - being able to dog-ear and use a real bookmark, etc.

True, I've said to get them out into the ebook distributors first and then only spend the time and money on proven sellers.

And that is still very valid advice. When you are broadshooting with a few dozen books available to publish, that would be the way to go. Particularly with PLR to show you which book markets are hottest - of course you've already done your market research to pick out PLR ebooks based on what you've found. Publishing ebooks just tends to verify and narrow your field (providing your covers and descriptions are enticing and fascinating.)

And maybe this was a mistake. I kinda think not - since I can sit down and rattle off a 5-10 minute book trailer with a hardcopy in my hand, doing a half-dozen or more books in a single sitting. This then gets the book trailer out of the way.

It also takes time to get those books to me, while I then build out the landing pages for each one (yes, you can imagine having to build 13 landing pages will take some time.) With snail-mail (cheapest) figure about 10 days to 2 weeks before they arrive. I should be able to get all those pages back up and running.

The other error I'm correcting 

It has to do with IFTTT (If This Then That - ifttt.com). This we've covered - it's a way to get your message out to all sorts of social media. I have to post the original video, cover, blog post, audio, and PDF to basically five sites. Then IFTTT sends these out to:

Tumblr
Wordpress
Blogger
Facebook Page
Instagram
500px
Twitter
LinkedIn
bitly
delicious
diigo
digg
Box
and Facebook

And some get multiple posts. That saves me a lot of work promoting these - the problem is: I don't have these set up via IFTTT, either. Or all verified, anyway.

So I pulled down (reverted to draft) all the landing pages I had put up. So when I put these live, they'll be covered. (You can see my CYA post here.)

All that work is headed in a certain direction - which is how to market these books, any books, effectively. And as I said before, what starts right tends to go right, but you can always start over...

What about this Membership stuff?

Funny you should ask. That's probably the fourth error I have to fix.

When I started looking ahead to all the work I had to do, I considered that I wouldn't want to do anything twice - and that why should I invest my Synnd coins on a Blogger blog, when I can spend them promoting the same post on my membership site which I can then syndicate over to that Blogger site (which IFTTT then syndicates to Wordpress and Tumblr, etc. for me.)

About the time I get all done, I'll need to change it again. Not funny.

So my next real step is to figure if I can CNAME deep inside my membership, or simply redirect my Blogger blog over to a category inside my wordpress-based Rainmaker platform.

The original Blogger site will still get set up as planned, it's just that the main promotion is going to be spent on my Rainmaker-hosted site, with the freebie site carried as a version of the first. Is it worth it? Well, you never throw away a blog which has been around for awhile. And this standalone blog will be devoted entirely and only to assembling and promoting the know-how of creating children's books. (I've got plans after this as well - when I start cranking out children's books by the gross, literally...)

Lots of work ahead, one step back for every two forward, and so on.

But you're worth it, aren't you?

You are why I'm doing this after all - so you don't have to go through this pain on your own.

- - - -

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Presentation version:

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