Why I deleted my Hot Resale Rights JV Giveaway account

June 23rd, 2008

I sent out this e-mail to my subscriber list telling why I had
unsubscribed from a JV Giveaway I had previously recommended. It
turned out to be one of the most controversial that I have sent
to date. One guy who has a JV Giveaway read it and called me a
freeloader. Others agreed and disagreed in various fashions.
Obviously he hasn’t been reading my other emails or he would know
that I am a heavy promoter of JVGiveaways. Here is the message I
sent out:

Hi NAME,

Here’s why I deleted my Hot Resale Rights JV Giveaway account. I
didn’t read the terms and conditions close enough. They said you
must give out resale rights or more to your product. No thanks…
I don’t want to do that.

I’ve noticed a trend happening lately where the JV managers are
starting to have greater and greater demands on the contributors.
In the past week, I’ve seen two that will drop you if you don’t
get a certain number of points within about 3 weeks. And… to
make it worse, they give a low number of points for sign-ups.
Effectively, they are forcing you to promote more often than may
be practical or it may even be detrimental to your business plan.
The reality is you can find other JV Giveaways to promote your
list with. (Yes, I know, its a dangling preposition.)

Anyway, now you know my philosophy about Giveaways. I can and may
change my opinion in the future.

Have a great day!

Dan

I’d like to hear your ideas on this and it would be good for the
community to get a dialogue going so that we can all try to
understand each others reasons, needs, and positions.

7 Author Tips for Writing an E-book Fast

June 6th, 2008

When you are writing an e-book how long does it take you?  Would you
like to be able to write faster without losing quality in your
writing?  I’m going to give you seven ideas you can use to write high
quality articles and save time doing it.

1. (Be comfortable — really comfortable). If you are most
comfortable in your office with a quiet symphony playing in the
background or are most comfortable sitting in the swimming pool on a
bright sunny day then that is what you should do.  Writers do their
best when they are in an environment that makes them feel good.  This
happens both in the quantity of work and the quality of work that
gets done.

2. (Get rid of your distractions).  All of your distractions need to
be eliminated. This may seem impossible but it needn’t be.  For
instance, if you work at home and have kids, try sending them to
daycare even if for only one day a week.  Alternately, you could try
working during their nap times or at night when they are in bed. It’s
important to be able to continue a train of thought and eliminating
distractions is one of the best ways do this.  I’ll are is said that
for some people this takes care of writers block problems.

3. (Speed up your typing).  If you can’t type 45 wpm, consider
taking a typing class or get a speech recognition program such as
Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  Since most people think much faster than
they type, their fingers slow them down.  By speeding up your typing,
you will be able to continue your thought process and make your
writing much more enjoyable.

4. (Use a mind map). By using a mind map such as PersonalBrain, you
can speed the process of writing an e-book. A mind map lets you
visually see and organize your thoughts ahead of time and as you go
along.  It also lets you see where your connectors should be — at a
glance.

 It’s also a great tool for future projects where you might
incorporate some of the same ideas. I found this to be one of the
most important tools I have.

5. (Spellcheck it later).  Spellcheckers are important for any e-
book.  You want to lend credibility and professionalism to your e-
book.  The problem with spellchecking is it can slow you down and can
break your train of thought.  Performing tasks like this while you’re
writing adds a lot of speed bumps to your writing process.  The best
thing to do is do you’re spellchecking after your work is done.

6. (Proof read later). Many writers want to proofread after they are
done with each page or chapter.  Don’t make a habit of this.  If it
becomes a habit, you can totally interrupt and stop your writing. You
might get on a roll and feel like writing more which is good. But, if
you stop and proofread at the end of a paragraph or a chapter, you
have just missed everything up.  After you are no longer in the mood
to write, then proofread.  You might even want to wait until the e-
book is done before you proof it.

7. (Set a time limit). Yesterday I read a Warrior Forum thread from
a guy who couldn’t get things done. Nathan Faulkner had a spot on
answer:

“Having “all the time in the world” is problematic, because it’s
easy to push things off for “later” or to get caught up doing things
on forums or elsewhere and not actually get anything done.

Try this… set aside just ONE HOUR wherein you’ll focus on your
work. I’ve been a fan of using this little online “timer” that I can
program to sound an alarm at the end of a predefined amount of time:

http://www.vickiblackwell.com/timer.html

(Note: The above url may not be active by the time you read this. In
that case do a search for web timers.)

Maybe try starting with 30 minute increments and say to yourself
that you’ll create an entire review page or whatever it is that
you’re doing that works. Force yourself to rush and to get it done
before the alarm goes off, etc. I hope this helps!”

When you can speed up your writing, you will enjoy it more and you
will write more e-books and better e-books. Use the above tips and
become better at what you do.

 

How to Make RSS Feeds Show Up in Internet Explorer 7

May 24th, 2008

With Internet Explorer 7, many times when I use the Favorites Center
(Alt+C) for the RSS Feeds I subscribe to, the blog pages won’t show
up. If I click on the Refresh Arrows, the page still doesn’t show up.
A trick I learned to make it work is to align my cursor right behind
the URL and hit enter.

I might have to do that a couple of times but the page will show up.
It might be a little clunky but it works.

I saved $450 on Photoshop legally

May 22nd, 2008

Every Internet marketer eventually comes to the conclusion that he or she is going to need Adobe Photoshop to make headers and footers, change graphics, add scribbles and a bunch of other things that I can’t think of right now. The exception of course is if everything is outsourced.

For most Internet marketers Adobe Photoshop is a very expensive product buy. It sells for $649 from Adobe. That was out of the range that I want to spend. Thanks to a course that I bought from Marlon Sanders, I came across Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Photoshop Elements sells for $99 (at Amazon.com it sells for $75 or less). I bought my copy from Adobe. That way I was able to download it right away.

When you open Photoshop Elements, you get choices of what you wanted to do. The choice you should make is “edit and enhance photos”. When you open and select it, you have virtually the same toolbar as Photoshop CS. This is the area where you can begin creating your graphics. At this point there are few differences between Photoshop Elements and Photoshop CS with the exception of the ability to use action scripts.

Here’s how I overcame the action scripts problem. I found a product called Graffi_add-o-matic. For convenience I’m going to call it Graffi.

With Graffi, you can take an action script you found somewhere, drag it into Graffi, and the next time you open Photoshop Elements, it will compile the action script into Photoshop Elements. This will save you hours and hours of work.

To get to the action scripts, left click Window at the top of the Photosop window and in the drop down click Artwork and Effects, then click on the center icon Special Effects – Added Effects. There you will be able to see your action scripts such as e-book covers, DVD covers, etc.

You can get Graffi at http://www.graficalicus.com/graffishop/ [Not an affiliate link]. The price is $9.99.

So, considering that I got Photoshop Elements plus Graffi for a total cost of $108.99, I saved $540. That comes out to an 83% savings. I now have 90% or more of the functionality of Photoshop CS and probably everything I will need.

I found Marlon Sanders Design Dashboard to be very helpful. Its an excellent tutorial about how to make a nice looking header, add patterns, add gradients, make scribbles and a whole bunch of other things. Many of the tutorials have easy to follow videos. For $59.95 its well worth it. You can get it at http://www.designdashboard.com/ . [Not an affiliate link].

Max Rylski has some awesome action scripts he is giving away at – http://www.graphicsclubmonthly.com/blog/ [Not an affiliate link] for a limited time. You can’t beat action scripts for ebook covers, video covers, box covers – a veritable treasure. Anything Max does is Top Gun.

If you do eveything I recommend above you will be on your way to making just about anything and everything.

Where did my blog go?

May 12th, 2008

You may have come to my blog recently and found nothing there. There is a reason for this. I screwed up and with a disaster of circumstances, I lost everything.

Here’s my story:

I received an automated message from my hosting site that their software detected that I might have an insecure version of Wordpress and to please upgrade it. Wanting to be a good netizen, I decided to upgrade it right away.

My first mistake: I didn’t do a backup. I know better than that but I took a flyer.

My second mistake: I didn’t do a proper upgrade. I didn’t deactivate my plug-ins.

My third mistake: I used Fantastico to do my upgrade. If you have ever made ANY changes to your blog, it doesn’t work.

My fourth mistake: When I started getting error messages and no blog, I went to my hosting service help desk for help. After two responses from them that were wrong I went to a Wordpress blog that said I should delete a certain plug-in. That didn’t work.

Within just a few hours I got a message from my hosting service they had moved my main site to a temporary server because I was using too many cpu resources and that it had to do with a PHP application but they couldn’t tell me which one. They also told me if I didn’t fix it in seven days they would shut down my account.

Geez Louise… I knew that the only thing I had changed was my blog. Frustrated, I deleted my blog. Several months of blogging was gone.

Then I went searching and found out on forums that Wordpress version 2.5.1 had caused the same problem as me. Too high cpu resources usage. Some sites had been shut down completely by their hosting sites.

There are several lessons to be learned here but the biggest one is before I think about a change to Wordpress, I will backup everything including the database.