eBook Publishing: Upsells and Back End Sales

Monetization is a great way to add a few dollars here and there when you sell books online.

Affiliate Products, Upsells and Back End Sales

In order to make the most of your ebook publishing business, you will want to include special offers. How will you do that?


Many online marketers monetize their ebooks and if you really want to monetize yours, then here are a few tips on how to do this the right way.

Ebook monetization can be done through affiliate programs: when you sell a book, you want your customer to come back to your site, right? Then, when you customer buys your newly published product, you will provide them with some kind of "upsell". This upsell could consist in an offer for another book that matches the subject of the one they just bought.

Another way to easily and efficiently monetize your publication is using a back end product recommendation: when your customer buys let's say "twelve ways to bake pumpkin cupcakes", they're taken to a thank you page where they can download the item. 

On this page, you will add an affiliate product recommendation that matches those cupcakes; for example, a cupcake pan or a cupcake decorating set.

The principle works the same way for crafts: instead of baking stuff you can offer a craft organizer that will allow them to store all their craft materials in one place. 

This works for all kinds of niche:

Golf --> golf clubs, gloves, knickers, etc.
Guitar lessons --> guitar picks, chords, etc.
Gardening --> gardening tools, gloves, etc.

So as you can see, there are many different ways to make the most of your new online business. See you soon for the next installment of your short course on ebook publishing.


Posted by Holly Day

eBook Publishing: Earn More Money from your Books

Make the most out of your ebook empire: in addition to the money the books are supposed to generate, ensure to add some additional bucks in your pocket.

How to earn money with your recipe / craft / niche ebooks

To make money selling recipe ebooks, and because there's huge number of websites that work towards making money out of books on the Internet, there are a few steps to take. Here are some of the best traffic driving tips.

Giveaway an excerpt of your book

People love nothing as much as getting gifts and things for free. This is why you're going to give an excerpt of your very first ebook for free to any new visitor.

I'd recommend adding a subscription form on your site asking visitors their email address in exchange of a short ebook including a link to your website and 5 recipes / craft tutorials / guitar courses along with pictures. You won't need to provide more, if they like the content you gave away, they will come back and will certainly buy from you.

Although I'm not subscription lists' fan number one, I have to admit that, having a list with potential costumers' email addresses is extremely interesting for anyone who's about to start an online business. This way you can contact your list when you release your new ebook or when you plan special events on your site.

In any way, never use this list for spam purpose. A list that you care for is a happy list and a happy list is a list that will more likely buy than click on the unsubscribe button.

Set up an affiliate program

Another idea to promote your new ebook business is to provide your customers with an affiliate program so as to award those who refer your products to referrals with a commission. Depending on the percentage of the commission, they'll put more efforts in their promotional campaigns. The big advantage is that this type of marketing approach is free as you only pay your affiliates when they make sales.

Naturally, when it comes to niches that are popular, you are not limited to books. As a matter of fact, there are other ways to make money with them!

Build a niche blog

Niche blogging is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your new online based business. All you need to do so is to get a domain name, set up a blog in which you create different specific categories. 

I recommend setting up a Wordpress blog as WP provides a wide range of modules and plugins that allow you to make a professional blog. A very interesting way to make your blog stand out from the crowd would be by using a script which allows you to post a fresh article each day and spotlight it as "Recipe / Craft / Lesson of the Day".

Send out a weekly/monthly newsletter and/or ezine

If you set up a subscription form on your site and started getting people to provide you with their email address, you can exploit them with a weekly or monthly newlsetter or ezine. Just add a recipe / tutorial / lesson to your newsletter and spotlight the area to make it stand out from the rest of the content.

Where to find content for the newsletter

The process is the same as for your book articles, tutorials and recipes. You can write with your own words and use your own creativeness to come up with new ideas. 

Or you can get ideas from offline or online classes you would take. The other option is using PLR articles that are related to your niche.


Posted by Holly Day

eBook Publishing: How To Compile your First One

Now that you are ready to publish your very first recipe or craft tutorial ebook, let's take an eye to its overall layout. How are you going to present the articles/recipes/tutorials? 

Layout overview

In order to publish a perfect ebook, you must make sure that your pages are attractive to the eyes of your potential customers. Also make sure that each recipe or craft tutorial (or golf lesson, gardening tip, guitar course, etc.) has their own individual page.

Here is an example of how an appealing page should look.  

• Recipe / craft / instrument / sport title
• Ingredients / materials / instrument along with a picture of the finished product (or an attractive picture of a golfer or sportman-woman) aligned to the right (you can, if you wish, add center big picture between the title and the beginning of your writings or a picture gallery)
• Directions / instructions
• Extras (recommended side dish and beverage, shortcuts or tips, etc.)
• Some more info about the product (where you found the recipe, how you ended up making this craft, which was your best performance)
• A link to your website at the bottom of the page.

When it comes to the external appearance of your book, make sure to carefully select the graphics that will become your store window. 

There are many sites on the Internet that will create bespoke ebook covers for you to choose from. 

As for the first ebook pages, make sure to add a table of contents as well as any disclaimer (more particularly if you wish to protect your writings from being posted all over the Internet, etc.)

Posted by Holly Day

eBook Publishing - Where to Find Content

Finding Recipe or Craft Content

When publishing books, ebooks or books for ereaders, you need to first find content. And it's not always easy to come up with ideas for new content. There are different sources that you can get content from. In todays article I'm going to cover the four potential content sources that will help you fill your ebook (or Kindle book).

Publish your everyday meal recipes or the crafts you make yourself

You're probably a great cook and have a huge number of personal recipes that you try and make all year long. Each time you prepare a meal, take pictures of the different steps, list the ingredients, write instructions and bingo! You have a new recipe to share each and every day. Collect all pics, recipes and instructions and publish them in your next ebook. 

The ebook can be filled with every day meals or you can create specific collections (one ebook that would present your best cakes, one with your favorite cupcakes, another with your most favorite avocado recipes, one ebook that lists chicken recipes, and so on). 

Craft related ebooks would work the same way. If you create jewelry at home, have one ebook filled with your best bracelet designs, one with birthstone rings you created, etc. Now if you knit, why don't you just make a short ebook on a specific model for a dress that can be declined in different designs - with sleeves, sleeveless, one top different skirts, etc. 

Now you can take craft classes and publish your very own creations that you were taught during the courses. For example, Craftsy.com provides you with a wide range of craft classes to learn from. From learning how to take pictures of flowers to drawing, from knitting to crocheting, from quilting to scrapbooking, from cooking to making and decorating cookie blooms, you will find the class that will help you start that new business you've always dreamed of.

And you can even take a test drive using their free online craft classes.

The types of recipes or crafts can be different from one month to another. As long as you capture your audience's attention, you're sure to sell your books - and probably, in case of crafts, your creations themselves.



Recipe For A Cookbook: How To Write, Publish, And Promote Your Cookbook
by Gloria Chadwick

So you wish to start making money selling recipe ebooks online... I strongly recommend to get a step by step guide on how to do so. Although oriented towards selling physical cookbooks, this guide will guide you through the process of writing your new recipe book, how to publish and market it. In reality, selling online recipe books is easier than selling physical selling a recipe book. But the main principles are more or less the same as it all starts with writing recipes, choosing a story line and attract your audience.

Publish your Family or Friend's Recipes and Crafts

If you don't want to run out of ideas on what to publish you can ask your friends and family to share their own recipes and crafts. It's a great way to keep providing ebooks filled with unique and original content. 

As a matter of fact a specific recipe may always vary when prepared by someone else: one will like it hot, another will like it creamy, another will prepare it with pasta, another will rather use potatoes, etc. This will also make your customers come back over and over again as they'll really get one of a kind information.

Crafts work the same way. For example, while you can create heart-shaped cookie blooms, you can decline the very same heart-shaped cookie blooms in a variety of designs and colors.  An A-line dress can be declined in a variety of models. A cute crocheted beret can be adorned with pompoms, crocheted flowers, hearts, toys, etc.

Buy recipes and craft tutorials from ghost writers

A third option for you to get more fresh content is from a ghost writer. While the ghost writer will focus on writing the recipes and instructions or the craft tutorials, you will have plenty of time to manage your website and market your products. 

When hiring online writers, make sure they will not sell you plagiarized content, therefore, you will always double check the writings they send. Copyscape.com is ideal for such a purpose. Create an account, you pay $5 for 1,000 articles to check and this will save you a lot of problems.

Buy PLR recipes and craft tutorials

PLR articles are the fourth source of content for your publications to be packed with. PLR recipes and articles can be found on the Internet, they're generally sold for a very affordable price and are one of the quickest ways to publish your ebooks online. 

As a matter of fact, they will help you avoid writing the recipes or tutorials from scratch as you'll just have to edit and personalize them (at least the directions) and they'll allow you to come up with more ideas. A great benefit that you can get from PLR cooking sources is that they also often provide you with great kitchen product related reviews - this can greatly help you earn commissions from online stores.

Although you can even publish the content as it is, I recommend to always edit and personalize titles and directions, this will really make your ebook original. Another great way to customize PLR writings is to change the quantities.

Naturally and in any case, always add pictures to your tutorials. Photos are greatly appreciated by individuals and will send more customers your way.


How To Write and Publish a Best Selling Craft Book
by Mark Montano


When publishing craft books or ebooks (or even Kindle books), you need to make yourself stand out from the crowd that also publishes craft related tutorials.
The author will show you how to set your own style and, therefore, set you apart from the others, how to write your craft books, how to find a publisher for your writings and how to promote your guide on how to create these or those crafts.


Posted by Holly Day

eBook Publishing - Find your Target Market

Hi and welcome to this new article on how to start selling ebooks or Kindle books online. Today we are going to cover the market you will want to target.

Pause for a second and think: who is going to buy your ebooks (or Kindle books)?

Find your target market

If you have made a decision on selling ebooks - therefore books that can be downloaded from the Internet - you will want to own a website. And because you are becoming a website owner, you want to generate traffic to your new webpages. When it comes to driving traffic to your website you have to keep some things in mind.

The first thing you will want to do is to have visitors stuck like glue on your website and not leave it because of any kind of frustration. Therefore, if you want to reach your aim; which is to sell ebooks (or Kindle books), you have to know who you are targeting with your tutorials/recipes. The sites must be addressed to a specific audience.

Potential recipe market

Here is a list of potential target markets that would look for and buy food recipe ebooks on the World Wide Web:

• Single, married, working or stay at home mommies or dads,
• Grand parents who keep their grand children at home,
• Retired people who enjoy trying new recipes,
• Cook amateurs,
• Students looking for quick and easy recipes,
• Families who are on a thight budget,
• Event planners who are looking for recipes to serve at parties or special events,
• And many more...

As a quick example, look at students who are studying and working. They don't have time and money to spend in cooking and will most likely look for recipes that are fast and easy to make and don't require a too large budget. These can, therefore, become your target market.

Potential craft market

The same principle applies to the craft market. What kind of audience are you going to target? 

• Families who want to create their own holiday decorations,
• Grand parents who keep their grand children at home,
• Party planners who need activity ideas for kids and grownups, 
• People who are on a tight budget and need ideas on how to recycle old furniture, used things for the home or the garden,
• Baking and cooking amateurs who need guidance and ideas,
• Photo amateurs,
• Scrapbooking amateurs,
• People who enjoy trying new activities,
• And many more...

Once again, here's the example of a freshly retired lady who needs a new activity. She might be looking for an art to make with her hands but she does not want to go out on a regular basis for this. She can become your target market if you're in one of the niches she's looking into. 

The information you are going to provide your target market won't be the same from one to another. As a matter of fact you are not going to show the same drawings to a 40 years old man than to a family with young children. A 70 years old lady won't probably be looking for a neon pink lime green dotted Easter egg; instead she may be searching for instructions on how to decorate a Victorian style egg.

That's it for today. See you on Thursday for a new short course on ebook publishing.


Posted by Holly Day

Difference Between Locked Lens and Unpublished Hub

Last week while updating and republishing a Squidoo lens of mine (Strawberry Love), I got the prompt message that the lens in question was considered "low content quality" lens (not sure this is grammatically correct, although I'm not an English speaker, it is nevertheless the way Squidoo spells it) and that I could whether keep editing it, delete it or send a greenlight request.

Although the update I was doing was dead links, deleted lenses and keyword density, I didn't see any other reason for the lens to get flagged this way. Therefore I asked for a greenlight.

Surprise! The lens was locked right away! The email I've received included only this message:

"Text for message is unavailable."

With such a message no doubt I'd be going to understand why my lens was locked.


Therefore my reaction was deleting the lens.

I must say this lens was a lensography. Indispensable tool for a niche of mine - the Strawberry lens collection. I was known for adding actual content on my lensographies, one of the rare lensmasters to do that from the very beginning. I just was always unable to create link collections only, that is why I always added a bunch of content before providing links to the related lenses.

So this lensography was not a "low quality content" one, nor did it lack of content. In addition it didn't feature a single product for sale. It was just a lensography. 

Anyways. Given the poor number of traffic my lenses get these days, I don't think anyone will notice the disappearance of this lensography. 

I presume the lens got locked righ away because I'm not a giant any more. Since my lost status, most of my lenses dropped from higher tiers and I won't say that I dare updating them often.

I've read on other places that filters tend to lock content lenses these days. I don't really understand the goal behind this but it's their decision, it's their site and they do whatever they want to.

How HubPages Deals with Duplicate Content Hubs

Yesterday at 7 PM (GMT +1), I received an email from the HubPages team. I learned that a brand new Hub I published on Sunday afternoon was unpublished because it was found as being a duplicate content page. The email wasn't the most agreeable one I've ever received and it didn't provide real information (where I could find this content, etc.) 

So I searched for a potential duplicated page and found it in one second.

My Hub's content was scraped and posted on another blog yesterday, this is how HubPages discovered similar content on the Web. 

I thus left a message to the culprit demanding the content removal, I filed to Blogger (the webhost), Name Cheap (the domain registrar), Google Adsense (monetization), and so on. 

I ended up in HubPages forums asking if I should leave the Hub as it was, even unpublished and hope for a reinstatement or just delete it and move it to my own site.

My very first time in 6 years in HubPages' forums... The support was great: I've gotten a bunch of replies very quickly, suggestions, recommendations, etc. Other members found out that their Hubs were stolen and posted on the very same blog as well. Then someone suggested me to contact the Hub team and ask for a reinstatement along with proof that MY content was stolen.

I didn't think of keeping in touch with HubPages' HQ. Well, I didn't want to wait for weeks before getting a reply nor did I want to hear that they didn't mind and that if I didn't like it, I was free to pack and leave. But I eventually contacted them and at 10 PM (GMT + 1), therefore 3 hours after the Hub was unpublished, it was reinstated! 

I've received a very short email from their HQ but it made me feel good. My email was received, read and replied in less than 1 hour. Someone listened to me. I've never gotten a reply that fast and I'm still stunned with the way this case was handled.

It was also the very first time I've ever got a problem on HubPages... And when I've received the unpublishing mail, I was questioning the three next History Hubs I'm about to publish. Now I don't question them any more, they'll go on HubPages, nowhere else. Time also to complete my Tarot cards collection on this site. 

I digressed a bit from the ebook publishing guide but through this post I also wanted to let you know the link where the thief does post stolen content, just in case you'd have Hubs or other pages' content scraped and posted on there.

Here's the link to the culprit (replace the [dot] with actual dots):

www[dot]travelcloud[dot]me

Here are the actions I took yesterday:

• Posted on the site itself a comment demanding content removal right away.
• Reported to HubPages staff with link to the original work and the culprit,
• Reported to NameCheap : its domain provider (feedback@namecheap.com),
• Reported to Adsense: https://support.google.com/adsense/contact/violation_report?rd=1
• Reported to Google using this new form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Pw1KVOVRyr4a7ezj_6SHghnX1Y6bp1SOVmy60QjkF0Y/viewform

always link to the cached page of your stolen work as, since HubPages unpublishes your Hubs in this case, it is proof that the work does exist.

That's it for today. See you soon for a new ebook publishing installment :)



 
Posted by Holly Day

eBook Publishing - Traffic Matters

keyword search for the term "recipes"

Welcome to this new short course on how to start selling ebooks online.

In the last post we covered the two niches that are popular these days and out of them you can find materials for you to write about.

Today we're going to see how you can find out if a niche is popular and how much. 

One of the questions you would surely ask is: is your niche going to get traffic? Well it all depends on the popularity of your topic and also on the quality of your content, your ability to promote it where it should be promoted... 

The two niche markets I listed in a previous post are big traffic drivers. Both recipes and crafts generate traffic to a website. Mostly because all of us on Earth eat each and every day and because there always will be people looking for things to make by hand, for whatever reason (they enjoy homemade things, they are short on budget and want to make things themselves, etc.) 

All in all food and crafts are definitely good in terms of traffic.

So now you're going to have to choose the kind of recipes or crafts that are going to send potential buyers to your soon-to-be published ebook (or Kindle book). 

Let's take the recipes as an example. They are a huge traffic driver term as you can see in the picture on the right. The search volume for the term "recipes" itself is 244,875. As a matter of fact, owning a recipe website is profitable and there is no reason to not plan to make money selling online recipe ebooks!

Recipes are really huge traffic drivers.

And as you can see in the chart above, average recipes are not the only ones to be searched for. Dieting recipes are also extremely popular (see Weight Watchers Recipes). As you can see there is a huge amount of recipe amateurs searching for ideas for what to cook or bake online. 

Don't these numbers make room for some recipes to be published and seen? I do think so. Naturally you will want to find a narrower topic to create your ebook (or Kindle book) about.

Think about this: if you build a website related to recipes and create a recipe ebook about, let's say, "chicken recipes", you might end up selling a bunch of such ebooks since the term "chicken recipes" is searched 27,954 times.

There's no need to say more than, if you wish to start making money selling recipe ebooks, then, do so.

Let's take an eye on the craft opportunities now:

As you can see the niche is profitable. There is a good search volume for the keywords listed on the graphic, the competition isn't too ard for the four first keywords and as you can see the highest potential keywords for this market is "art crafts for kids". This won't let your audience know what exactly you're about to sell to them, therefore you will want to refine the keyword phrase a bit.

The Easter crafts keyword (I chose this one because the holiday's quickly approaching) above shows that for a good search volume, "Easter kids crafts" doesn't have a huge competition and, therefore has some potential. There are some keywords with low competition rate, you thus will want to choose these unless you wish to refine the other ones.

Obviously, if you want to focus on the "knitting" niche that is part of the craft market, you will search for "knitting" related keywords to exploit and not "crafts".

See you on Tuesday for a new episode of our short course on how to sell ebooks online.

Posted by Holly Day

eBook Publishing - Find your Niche Market

When starting an ebook (or Kindle book) business, the very first thing you want to do is choosing your niche. When selecting a niche to exploit, also ensure that there is room for several different ebooks that you'll deliver to your audience. Don't exploit a too small niche for which you'll struggle finding materials. 

Are there any wide and profitable niches?

Heart sausages for lovely breakfast
© Elena Moiseeva @ Dreamstime.com

There are niches that are bigger than others. The food niche is quite wide and provides you with a very large audience for different categories. 

For example, recipes books are probably the most popular books in the world. Everyone needs recipe ideas to prepare family meals, to feed guests on special days and celebrations, serve appetizers and finger food at holiday parties, and more. This craze for recipes has also taken the Web by the storm and recipe books are one of the hottest topics on the Internet.

The reason behind this is that everyone needs inspiration to prepare meals and desserts as we're supposed to eat three times each and every day of our life and we might quickly run out of ideas to prepare meals. So, as a stay at home mom, you might be interested in sharing your personal or traditional family recipes with the world and, by the way, make some money out of them.

The ways people search for recipes on the Internet are all different and more often than not, depend on the individual's personality, cooking skills and tastes. Some may search for recipes because they want to try something different from their daily routine, some may search for recipes because they don't know what to do with the left overs they have in the fridge, others may search for recipes because they need to add a side dish to their dinner.

In reality there's wide range for reasons to look for recipe ideas on the Internet, and people might be looking for recipes to prepare for:

• Breakfast,
• Quick and easy lunch,
• Traditional holiday meals,
• International meals,
• Barbecue parties with friends,
• Birthday cakes and cupcakes for children, adolescents or grownups,
• Decorating cakes, cupcakes, cookies,...
• Bread making,
• The thousand ways to cook chicken,
• How to make French toasts without any of the required ingredients,
• And many more.

If you keep the different people living on Earth and the different types of meals prepared in the world, you'll soon get a wide range of recipes to base your new recipe ebook business on. And that source of recipes is almost endless.

Another very profitable niche that you can think of is the craft one. Everybody looks for crafts no matter the season.

Crafts are an excellent way to have fun while creating something useful. In addition, these can be made whether by kids, teens or adults, depending on the level of difficulty of the object to create.

This niche includes many different categories that you can take advantage of:

• Sewing,
• Crochetting,
• Knitting,
• Quilting,
• Embroidering,
• Jewelry,
• Greeting cards,
• Holiday ornaments,
• Scrapbooking,
• Drawing,
• Decorating,
• And more.

How can crafts be profitable in terms of ebook sales?

People will always be looking for holiday ornaments to make themselves as although they enjoy buying such items from stores, they also love having some made by hand displayed in their decor.

There are many other reasons for them to search for craft related how to tutorials, for instance, they want to keep the kids occupied during their time off of school. They might also just love doing things themselves.

I only listed the most popular niches I know out there, however there are many others that can be exploited. As long as there is an audience for your ebooks (or Kindle books), you're on the right track.

See you on Saturday for another installment of this short course on how to start publishing and making money selling ebooks (or Kindle books). 



Posted by Holly Day

How to Start an eBook Business

Selling ebooks or Kindle books is trendy these days. It seems that everybody is discovering the writer in himself and decided to write for a wider audience than just for blog or site readership. 

As a writer, when one has some talent, there is no reason for not giving a try to publishing a book. However, all authors aren't that good or successful. Everybody is not born with the skill to tell, through words on a sheet of paper, a story that will have people stick to it and not close the book before the end.

Still you want to publish something. Whatever the reason: 

• You enjoy nothing but writing; 
• You want to share your knowledge; 
• You want to showcase your talents;
• You want to make money from the thing you do the best: writing;
• Etc.

How about making money selling online ebooks of your own?

For instance, recipe books are probably the most popular books in the world. Everyone needs recipe ideas to prepare family meals, to feed guests on special days and celebrations, serve appetizers and finger food at holiday parties, etc. This craze for recipes has also taken the Web by the storm and recipe books are among the hottest topics on the Internet!

The reason behind this is that everyone needs inspiration to prepare meals and desserts as we're supposed to eat three times each and every day of our life and we might quickly run out of ideas to prepare meals. 

Another niche that is extremely popular is the craft niche. This niche is highly demanded because, once again, families do look for them. How many times are you looking for crafts to make with your kids or grandchildren or little ones in school? Holidays are the best times of the year for you to create things of your own. And then, once they're done, nobody but your family does see them. 

If you're online oriented, you can share them on your site, but what about the people who don't browse websites and just shop online? They would miss these clever homemade holiday decorations you're able to create.

The list of popular topics is quite long but among them one finds:

• Gardening - the gardening niche is extremely wide;
• Sports - also wide niche;
• Home improvement - another very large market;
• Animals - certainly one of the biggest.

I couldn't write all of them here but be assured that if you have materials for different series of books in the niche of your choice you can make money selling them.

If you really want to start such a business, stay tuned, in the coming days, I'm going to share a short guide on how to start making money selling ebooks or Kindle books on the Web.
 

Posted by Holly Day

Repurposing Former Lenses

I have not been active online these past weeks, apart from cleaning up my Squidoo account, deleting useless lenses.

Useless lenses are a reality. How many of them were outdated although kept updated from time to time? I built some lenses in the toys niche in the past. Some were very focused like the Strawberry Dolls one, for example. Believe it or not, these dolls are extremely hard to find nowadays. Even the most recent versions of this cute strawberry scented stuffed or plastic doll are rare items.

Needless to say that after the deletion I did, I browsed online stores with affiliate programs in order to make sure these lenses could be repurposed. Hm... Not all of them - for some I'll have to entirely refocus the subject (for example from one specific Lego toy that can't be found in stores any more, I'll have to find the most similar one and detail it instead. However, all in all I could follow the original pattern). 

Thus this cleaning task was indispensable as many of these lenses have to be reworked entirely and I was right to delete a great part of them. 

Long ago I deleted the History of my favorite doll and planned on adding it to my own gift blog. This was done last week. I changed the title, the toys I couldn't find any more were replaced with others but I must say that I'm quite happy with the way the page turned into.

Everyone Loves Strawberry Shortcake Dolls (title has changed as well) has found a new home.  

Because of the work I did last week with these former lenses, I'd say that the narrower the niche is, the worst the ways to repurpose the lenses are. As said earlier, many products disappeared from the market, some are available in so small quantities that it isn't worth the time and effort trying to promote them any more. So, some lenses will be moved, others will just disappear or become general articles about the topic and not promote anything. 

I will still keep my current lenses updated when they need to. Though I will still log into my account as often as before. 

As for my personal online things, I'm still considering the selling of my sites so that I can restart from scratch with a brand new domain name that would be broader and allow me to not have to update different sites. I'm the procrastination queen and always have been. Even more since the beginning of 2013 and the online disaster that hit the writing platform I focused on instead of working on my own sites. I have written almost nothing since the first week of January 2014 and don't even feel the need of writing anything. 

I also have a new project to launch with a friend of mine - takes longer than we thought. This will still deal with the Internet but I won't have to write any more. Another project that's about to see the light in April with my partner; this one is an offline project and it will have nothing to do with the Internet - and I must say that I really love being offline... Many things to take care of because of them right now also keep me away from writing or wanting to write for my sites.

But I still want to share my tips to create ebooks online so I'm going to start writing about that right now.

See you soon for the first installment of that new series (shorter than the one related to creating a money making site, though).



Posted by Holly Day

Deleting Low Performance Lenses These Days

I'm sorry for having been absent these past days. I don't plan on leaving this blog aside, instead I want it to keep being updated as much as I can. However I don't like to post when I don't have anything to say. And since I didn't have anything new to write about, I rather kept silent.

This being said, I noticed that this blog has become a heaven for spammers. I'd like them to know that I marked their comments as spam and that they're soon to be unable to comment on it any more. Good luck in spamming someone else's blog, though.

I've been quite busy this week: I started deleting Squidoo lenses that weren't performing any more. Anything under tier 2 is going to be removed from my account.  This will provide me with a clear account, less lenses to update, less stress in the event some get locked and need some work so as to unlock them - just in case, you know...

I thought it would be a smooth task - you know, I'm tired, a bit upset, not willing to work, not willing to move too much, just needing my bed and fall alseep as much as I can. No way! I must work and so started with my Squidoo account clean up. 

I started with my Christmas lenses - should have begun with Halloween ones but got mistaken. Anyways. I deleted 11 Christmas lenses when suddenly the system didn't want to let me delete the 12th. The message I received was that I logged into my account too many times for the day. Strange... I just deleted lenses and didn't log into the account more than once?!?

Whatever thing I tried, I couldn't delete the 12th lens I wanted to delete, not to mention that I couldn't touch to the Halloween ones either. I thus waited until the very next day and proceeded to the last deletion. Then took care of the next niche I wanted to delete lenses but found out that I couldn't remove as many as I planned to since most of them were tier 2 during the dedicated season.

I'm now left with 113 lenses and plan on jumping on the next niches to be taken care of soon. These will be Valentine and Mardi Gras. Then Easter - two month after the holiday, though.

My account will then only feature tier 1 and 2 lenses - the last season - and I'll see how they perform the next season. If some fall from tier 2 to tier 3 or in the rank abysses, I'll delete them as well. I just want to keep popular lenses in my account.

From the Valentine and the Mardi Gras disasters - these were beyond my expectations - I still can't see a brighter future for Squidoo and, therefore, for my portfolio. I've never had so few tier 1 and 2 lenses on Valentine's Day or Mardi Gras. Traffic just keeps dropping, no sign of a potential recovery. 

The boat is still sinking, Mayday, Mayday, need rescue team...!!! Noone hears us, nobody does seem to want to rescue the site.

For the third time in three months, I'm invited to become a contributor - just got the last invite yesterday - also invited to join Squidoo on Google+ - which I won't do, of course - and even invited to share Squidoo with my friends. Yeah, I'm surely going to ask my friends to join a site that won't help them earn money but will make them jump through hoops all the time and upset them more then actual life already does.

So, HQ, I'm really sorry but I will pass on to these offers for the moment. Until I see an improvement in traffic, sales and, more particularly, the way you treat the members, especially those that were here from the beginning and always supported the site, promoted it, made it what it had become, I won't play any new game nor will I ask anyone to join me.

That's it for today. I'll post later, probably my short course on how to create and sell ebooks - works also for Kindle books, though.

See you soon :)


Posted by Holly Day