How to Make Fistfuls of Money Online. Louis Shalako.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Louis Shalako

 

Blogger. A blog is a free website, simple and easy to use. Your blog has content, stories and pictures of your products. It has the imprint of your personality. Your blog can be found by simple search, it can be shared and reposted by you and others. It has an email contact form, your phone number, a Google Map showing your location. You can have a picture of the store-front if you wish. With the ‘widgets’ in the side-bar, you can have outbound links, perhaps to a Youtube video, or an affiliate link to a supplier or company website. You can have ads to other featured products. An affiliate link is where if a customer clicks, and buys something from that company within thirty or sixty days, you get a percentage of that sale. (Look up affiliate marketing). I am seeing fifteen to twenty percent offers in such programs. That’s your commission.

Okay, some sales sites have thousands of pages. Why duplicate all that expense and effort when you can just leverage their site to your own advantage.

This is basically what we do when Smashwords, iTunes, Kobo, Amazon, host our books on their websites. I don’t need a site or a shopping cart of my own.

I would suggest one introductory blog post, and then write about a single product, with one good picture, one at a time, as time or schedule permits. I would keep them short, with good pictures. Links to testimonials, magazine articles, or other blogs and related websites elsewhere could be included if you find them. For the basic product description, copy and paste them from the company website until you learn to do it on your own. You could sign the post at the bottom, (like a letter) or put the name up top and first where the search engines can find it faster. Always use clear and simple titles with the product name or word in it. I would go up to the font size on your word program and manually set the size at 13, not 12, which is too small, or 14, which is too big. Use Times New Roman, keep the page white, and fancy fonts and colours to a minimum. Save your product descriptions in separate document files.

Kijiji. You have a Kijiji account. Use the same short descriptions of single products to put up, at first, strictly free ads. Use a minimal number of the best pictures you can get. Bear in mind, you have to fill out the field for a price. Lower in your ad text, you can talk about ‘a complete line of wellness products.’ If you want to list a few prices, that is fine. Now, if you list single products in unique ads, you can put up more than one, although I would be a bit shy of going too crazy. You don’t want to get kicked off. Kijiji already has a system of communication with you and prospective buyers, and this is in the local area. For something like $3.99/week, you can have a link out to your Youtube video, a blog or website, a Facebook page. You might think, for roughly fifteen dollars a month, you might want to keep that up as a permanent ad, pitched for the most part to the local market. Oh, if you’re paying for a link on multiple ads, Kijiji is much less likely to object. In local terms, you’re in and out and about, you have a good vehicle and delivery shouldn’t be much of a problem. There is also the option of customer pick-up.

Youtube. You can post videos, long or short, to Youtube. If they are popular enough, you can build an audience of subscribers, which has its own value in terms of monetization. However, what you basically want to do is to link back and forth from your blog to Youtube. On the profile section of each site, use the same head shot photo, a nice one. If there is anywhere to set up links, say from Youtube back to your blog, this is a good thing. You could put up a pic on the Kijiji account, use the exact same bio that you use on other sites. Youtube has share buttons. 

When you’re signed into Facebook, but not actually on the site, you can share your Youtube video on Facebook and a number of platforms. You already have Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. 

This is where building up the numbers of friends and followers is important. Don’t be shy about accepting new friend requests or even making them. You post the video, share it on all platforms, using the little buttons provided. Your blog should have share buttons, either on the bottom or sometimes the top or in a sidebar.

Everything has a learning curve. Affiliate marketing sounds good, but it takes time to learn. Now you’re selling other people’s products, so their line has to mesh with your target market. When they do click, that should always open up in a new window—keeping your own window open until they’ve had their look and hopefully decided to come back. This is due to your interesting content. You can set this in Blogger settings.

Facebook. You can use a webcam or probably a phone to go live on Facebook. For this you want good light, good sound and a good background. I would suggest keeping it short, unless you begin to see good comments, or possibly a larger audience. I’ve never done it, but apparently you can see when you have a watcher or watchers. I would suggest a written script, and stick to it as best as possible. Not too many distractions in the background but a bit of staging might be good.

You can buy an ad on Facebook for as little as $25.00. They’ve offered me a $20.00 credit more than once. If you want the credit, look up ‘advertise on Facebook’. Sooner or later their algorithms will present you the offer. You could try it once on an experimental basis just to see what return on the dollar you get. If it works, you could set a small budget—two months at Christmastime for example. Google also offers ads—you see them on the side of web searches. For the time being I would suggest relying on your own network and your own resources, including time. I post links to my books and art all the time on Facebook. It’s free. The thing is to strike a balance where you’re not too much of a spammer. This is why you set up your own Facebook page for the new business. You want people to click like on that page, follow it and then keep them interested by regular product or service updates.

Podcasting. What exactly is a podcast. (Look it up.) It doesn’t have to be a live performance. It doesn’t have to have video or even be a video, although many people are doing that too. 

Podcasting is hosted by sites like Spotify. Subscribers on a monthly payment plan get unlimited access to literally thousands of resources including music files. Ah, but a music file also has an album cover, hence the photographic or video aspect of it. At its simplest, it is ‘digital content’, some of which is pure entertainment, and some of which is documentary or promotional, such as sales of products. 

Podcasts have sound but only a slide or background to look at onscreen, someone listening on a phone would see that slide when they selected the item. Posting a video to Youtube, (vlogging), accomplishes the same thing, admittedly, the greater the number of platforms you appear on, the more likely people are to discover your work.

Tagging. On Youtube, on your blog, you should always use ‘tags’. Tags are used by search engines to categorize, filter and ultimately present content in terms of searches. People look for essential oils, your blog post on essential oils will be indexed not only on its content, in other words a search of key words through the post, but also by the tags. On Twitter and other platforms, hashtags like #Louis (for example) provide the same function. Kijiji has provision for tags, this is for their own site and customer searches. Someone wants a product, their search should find a properly tagged item.

LinkedIn. Let’s say you’re on LinkedIn. What good is it. You have to click around and make ‘connections’ with people, most of whom are there for professional purposes. With a certain set of skills you could probably get a job on the site in a matter of minutes. Selling things is another story. But let’s say you have a thousand contacts. This is useless if you never share your content on the site. If you never share it, no one on the site can repost or share it. If you never make any friends or connections, no one is going to read your bio or look at your links. This is true on all social platforms. You can get on Instagram or Snapchat easily enough, why are you there? Getting friends and followers on any platform takes time and it only does so much good unless you’re good at finding your target audience. You can’t really search on any platform for ‘people that want to buy this or people that want to buy that’. It’s just not that easy, although Facebook groups might be a place to begin.

Print Ads. Pick up the phone, call First Monday or Daytripping or the Sarnia Journal. How much does it cost to put up a simple ad in their paper or on their website.

Bulletin Boards. I really don’t see bulletin boards in grocery stores these days, but somewhere like the Strangway Centre might still have them. There may be a community, online bulletin board. If you were going to do that, make up a good quality black and white image with some text. Print out a dozen or so and drive around to all the coin-op laundry places in town. They might have bulletin boards. People doing laundry are bored sick, they’ll read anything.

Why are people reading your material in the first place.

How did they find your blog? Can you read the analytics and see how many people a day read the blog, or what story, etc.

What category are you listed in when you post a Kijiji ad. Are there other ads in that category. Can you post outside of your geographical area. What other viable free online ad sites are there.

How long or short should your product videos on Youtube be.

Where do you get the quality photos of your products.

Do you have a folder set aside on the desktop for this particular business. What email address are you going to use. What password. What phone number.

Okay. So, you have all those products, you spent so much money. Yet some of those products you will never use. If you haven’t opened them. Why not use a free Kijiji ad, give it away for free. You believe in this product so much, you will deliver it to anyone in the city or county. Only thing there is, now would be the time to have 500 business cards for $9.99 from Vista Print or some other print on demand (POD) service online. You give them the free product and the card at the same time.

 

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Disclaimer: I am not currently involved in affiliate sales, neither do I receive a bounty for sign-ups through a link. It is true that if I sign up someone on Audible.com, I would receive a $60.00 bounty. Here’s my new audiobook, incidentally. You can listen free with trial membership. 

(Okay, maybe he’s doing it after all. – ed.)

Here is a link to the Amazon Affiliate Program.

Here is a link to the Smashwords Affiliate Program.

Here is a link to ShareASale, where, once approved, you could sign up for affiliate programs dealing in literally thousands of products and services.

 

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

 

 

 

My Story Anna Published in German. Louis Shalako.

Anna. The perfect woman.

Louis Shalako

My science fiction story Anna has been published in German translation. The print edition of Nova 29 can be found on Amazon.

In addition to English, I have been published in seven other languages, including Estonian, Dutch, Greek, Catalan and Galician, (two mainstream Spanish dialects), and in Portuguese.

For the most part, the only pay is a couple of copies, (and sometimes not even that), but the Greek version of the same story paid one hundred and forty euros. With a twenty percent tax withholding, not really worth filing a Greek tax return in order to get that back, but I am the only guy I know who has paid taxes in Greece…I’ve paid some in the U.S. as well, which is why you want to get an ITIN with the revenue folks. U.S. tax withholding is thirty percent. If you’re selling any books or stories at all, and you don’t actually live there, why pay tax when you don't have to?

When I first started submitting to foreign markets, it involved breaking one or two unwritten rules. I was just some guy, trying to write the craziest possible stories, and submitting them to the greatest number of markets. Essentially, a newcomer in a field that is already crowded enough, and if you really want to succeed, you’re going up against long-term professionals. 

Their basic rule is to sell the story in English first. Their concern is to hang onto 'first-rights' in English, but I couldn't sell a story in English to save my life. To go straight to the foreign markets was unconventional, to say the least. And those guys, the foreign editors know the rules too. In that sense, I kind of got lucky. They might have thought I was more successful in English than I really was.

At that point, you don’t want to worry too much about what the real pros think of you.

(It’s probably not so good, so why torment yourself.)

In the fiction market, I had never been published in a professional or even semi-professional magazine. I had six manuscripts for full-length books, and I had submitted them around. Yes, I had worked for a newspaper and written for some small industrial magazines. A few months, less than one year, of actual employment did not seem to account for much. It didn’t buy any respect, I can assure the reader of that. If nothing else, I figured I could write on some level of basic proficiency.

Back then, this involved printing out chapters, writing letters and sticking an inordinate number of stamps on large buff envelopes. Even then, I probably had a few rejection slips. 

Okay, so Aurora Award winning writer Douglas Smith was at Genrecon, in 2009, along with some other successful authors.

He talked about earning money from writing short fiction. I wanted to write books, and so I had never really considered short fiction. I cornered him—literally, in the men’s room, and he was kind enough to tell me a little bit more about it before we went back into the authors panel discussion.

Okay, so how do I do it?

There are market lists. The first time I tried to market my book projects, I went to the library, and the book in question could not be loaned out—it had to stay in the building, (under the watchful eye of resource librarian Jeffery Alan Beeler, who recently retired), and so, I laboriously copied out publishers and addresses and whatever was available in terms of submission guidelines.

Nowadays we can get all of that online. We submit via email, using a simple .doc file.

Douglas has a website, the website has a page ‘for writers’, and if you click on that, you will find his Foreign Market List.

Once you’ve gotten over the first few rejections in the general sense, the ones from foreign markets are no different. It’s just one more rejection slip. I currently have eleven hundred plus rejections, and the success rate is what? One or two percent. Three percent at the most.

I have been offered at least four contracts. On examination, they didn’t look all that professional and there were some elements of vanity publishing. A lot of department store mom-and-pop pics and one title per author sort of thing. The more professional authors tend to leave the spouse and the dog and the grand-kids out of their profile pics...

A much more reputable publisher of science fiction and fantasy once asked for a ‘partial’, in other words chapters four to seven of a book. They already had the first three chapters on their desk. That book, The Shape-Shifters, was ultimately rejected. They were also interested in Time Storm for an ebook, and I didn’t even know what an ebook was at that point. That deal never happened for various reasons which aren’t that important some years later.

And that’s about it—not that I haven’t had some fun along the way, and made some money by publishing it all myself, in the end.

So, if it’s not so much about the money, what is the point? For one thing, an editor liked the story well enough to put the work into the translation. For another, when some troll reviewer on Amazon makes a point of mentioning that they didn’t even read the story but it’s full of typos, missing words and plot holes, it’s pretty obviously just bullshit—

And not everyone can say they’ve been published in their own language, let alone a foreign market.

What’s interesting about the story Anna, is that Michael Iwoleit had accepted the story, and then the magazine discontinued accepting foreign submissions. Mike had some health problems and the whole thing seemed dead. Three or four years later, and all of sudden it has come to life again.

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Here’s one market list, Ralan.com.

Readers can get a free English copy of Anna in ebook form from Smashwords and other fine retailers. Here is the blurb, which I wrote myself. I also do all of my own covers:

Anna changed my life. Anna was the perfect woman for an emotional cripple, and really brought me out of my shell. I'd been on the inside for a long time. Now I'm retired, just some scholarly old gentleman with his young wife. I even ditched the .45 Colt for Anna. So what if she's electronic and I ordered her out of a catalogue. And if you have to ask the price, you can't afford one. A short story.

Here is the link to a recent story about the release of my first audiobook, Speak Softly My Love. An Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery.

Check out my drawings on Fine Art America.

Illustration by Louis.

Thank you for reading.

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A Covid-19 Success Story: Speak Softly My Love, an Audiobook. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako


 

To fall in love is to be young again. To count the cost is to die a little bit inside. In Speak Softly My Love, Inspector Gilles Maintenon goes out for a litre of milk and stumbles across a dead man. The trouble is, when the dead get up and walk away. They have one too many missing-person reports, too many wives, girlfriends and other mysterious blondes.

Louis Shalako has released his first audiobook, Speak Softly My Love, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon murder mystery. Read by Mike Manz, it’s available through Audible, Amazon and iTunes.

“Mike was looking to build his portfolio as a voice actor. I had published it five or six years ago. There’s nothing to lose. Audiobooks are big right now. You have to get that first one out, to do the work and to learn the lessons.” It’s all uphill from there.

Choosing his first audiobook was a no-brainer.

“I liked the cover with the sultry blonde. With a series, building readership is easier. If they like one, they like them all. The Maintenon stories are set in Paris, in the twenties and thirties. The world is in ferment. Recent history hasn’t been written yet. The writer, and the readers, get to play in that world.” There is a certain dark humour.

“Inspector Maintenon, a WW I veteran and a middle-aged widower, just wants to get the right guy. The price of a mistake is to send an innocent person to the guillotine.” He’s very French, but not a parody.

Louis hopes to produce further titles in the series. He studied Radio, Television and Journalism Arts at Lambton College.

 “I wanted someone to teach me how to write. That was my dream. I’ve put over thirty years into it. You get out of it what you put into it.”

“When I really started, on the internet for the first time, a famous and successful author said, a professional writer can write anything.” The real challenge is our expectations.

“I can write and edit a sixty-thousand word novel in a hundred and fifty to two hundred hours. You just put your head down and do the work. It’s not hard—it just takes some patience.”

“I’ve gotten three-quarters into writing a book, and I still didn’t know how it ended.” It’s actually better to have the gag first, to go back in time, and then write towards that end point.

To take it from text both adds something, and possibly takes something away.

“It is to create a completely different work of art. In terms of the experience, there was a book that I wrote six years ago. I hadn’t read it since, and then it was being read back to me by a talented voice actor.” All you can is to sit there and just listen.

“When it’s published, you sit there and wait to see if anyone will buy it.”

Louis has given away 150,000 ebooks in ten years just by setting the price at zero. All ebook titles are currently free for the duration, on Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iTunes and other platforms.

“It’s not really about money. It’s not about me. It’s about love. I know it sounds mad. But. You want people to enjoy your book.”

With Mike Manz living in Hangzhou, China, under lockdown and having lost a teaching job, there were some obvious challenges. Paying jobs had to come first, ahead of the more chancy royalty-sharing agreement.

“The point is, Mike got it done, which shows character. I am very happy with the results.”

The audiobook is available from Audible, Amazon and on iTunes.

It's also free to listen to with an Audible trial membership.



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Check out Louis' drawings on Fine Art America.

Thank you for reading, and listening.