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.

 

END

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Not your usual rant.

(A page from Time-Storm. Nothing here to fix.)



This is not your usual rant.

No, this is a far more lucid and sophisticated sort of a rant.

Troubleshooting Messed-Up Table of Contents.


The other day I uploaded my latest novel, ‘Time-Storm,’ to Smashwords. According to my practice, as soon at it was converted, I downloaded Kindle and Epub versions of the book. I flip through them page by page.

Chapter Sixteen was listed twice in the table of contents, and Chapter Twenty-Two was not listed at all. This has happened before, and it’s no big thing. I went back to Smashwords, clicked on ‘un-publish’ for this title, and then went through my file. I fixed the chapter numbering. I also noticed indents in the front matter, as I had decided to try left justification. I could have just taken it out. For whatever reason, I use a 0.25 indent, although it seems to make no difference on certain platforms and certain operating systems. I centred that up the way I usually do it. Then I re-uploaded the file. Same thing—I checked the Kindle version first, and the chapter numbers were screwed up.

What the heck was going on? I only have one version on the desktop—it’s not the wrong file. Short story long, first I had to delete the very first download from Kindle for PC, that’s a free reading app. It was in my Kindle Library. But the Smashwords download appears on the desktop as a blue-coloured, book-shaped icon. When I clicked on that, it opened up the Kindle app and Kindle presented me with the first file. It took two and a half hours to upload a book, and an image, to write and post the blurb, etc.

File Permission Revoked.


It gets better. When I went to check my blurb, maybe make it a little longer, it wouldn’t open. Apparently I don’t have ‘permission’ to open the file! Honestly, it looks like a computer glitch, possibly due to the age and decrepitude of the machine. I lost three images and a couple of files there—one of them the latest and most up to date version of my newly-published novel, ‘Time-Storm.’ That is the file, modified slightly, that I would have used to make an .html file for upload to Amazon. I lost the marketing image. I lost images for another two books as well.

A file dragged and dropped into the same folder became un-openable. I just grabbed some old thing from anther file. Hopefully it wasn’t too important. It’s gone. The good news is that I managed to get everything still in good condition out of that folder and into others. When I try to delete that folder, it won’t even go into the recycle bin. It sits there on the desktop, defying my best efforts. Without that image, putting an ad at the top of this page is problematical. I’ll probably just make a new one.

Back Everything Up.


So, the thing to do is to back everything up as soon as we write it. Put it on a disc, print it out, or e-mail a copy to yourself. Do the same with important photos.

I really only have one unpublished novel left, and it is safe enough. All of my short stories, (hopefully,) are backed up in various ways. That’s not to say that losing a file permanently would not be an inconvenience, because it is. I spent six weeks or a month re-writing and editing ‘Time-Storm.’ I do have an older version somewhere.

But, luckily for me, I got a fresh file from my Smashwords account, and I’m getting pretty handy with the tools.

***

Active blogging.


Now, in terms of active blogging, one thing I see from my stats page, is that if you stop producing original content, and stop posting, the page hits drop off pretty dramatically. The odds of creating a viral piece of literature would appear to be slim. It takes persistence and constant attention. It also takes thoughtful targeting as to audience.

However, there is an exception in terms of content-type. My short little piece, ‘Kobo Not Recognized by PC,’ keeps showing up in the analytics. There’s a simple reason for that. People buy new Kobos every day. They take them home, plug them into the PC, and try to get it going. If that story generates five or ten hits a week for an extended time, it stays on the first page of the relevant links longer, and ultimately more and more people will hit on it. Another one, ‘Formatting a 5 x 8” POD on Createspace’ is a good example of fairly short, specific, how-to articles that are helpful to a specific audience, that are not just all positive attitude and having little or no substance.

These are all white-hat techniques for SEO.

The discoveries are sort of accidental, but we know better now and we will put some thought into discovering a tight little audience somewhere, and then writing something that serves their needs. Let’s face it: on the right hand side of my blog are product images and links to my books and stories…right?

Photos are important to a blog or website. Pinterest looks for photos, and we see a fair bit of traffic from there. In the above photo, spell-check and grammar-check are turned on. This is a good feeling for a writer, to see that nothing there needs fixing. This blog post was written in Word, and copied and pasted into the Blogger interface. This is all part of active blogging.

And, I promise not to drag and drop it into that contaminated folder, and neither do I plan on sticking the contaminated folder in any other folder...

Next Novel in Mystery Series.


‘Cause that would just be stupid. Since Friday, I’ve written about 2,000 words on the second of the Inspector Maintenon mystery series. I will be following SOP, Standard Operating Procedure until that is published. The character was originally created in the short story, ‘The Handbag’s Tale,’ and the first book in the series is ‘Redemption: an Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery.’ They’re available from Amazon and other fine online booksellers.

Active versus passive blogging.

Clearly we have been doing something right. Photo by Louis.








Like many writers, I have a blog on Google’s Blogger. Others use WordPress or another service provider. I actually have four blogs, as well as being on blogging sites. Some of these include Hubpages, Squidoo, (where I have nothing posted,) then there’s Tumblr, Pinterest, and some other places. You can blog on Goodreads, Book Blogs, and probably others.

Passive Blogging.

The trouble with a blog is that it tends to be passive. We put share buttons on them so that anyone that enjoys the content or finds it useful can share it with friends or followers.

That’s fine as far as it goes. How did the readers get there in the first place?

By signing up for Networked Blogs on Facebook, when I post a story or article on Shalako Publishing’s blog, it automatically pops up on Facebook on my Shalako Publishing author page.

That’s all well and good. This resulted in a few page hits a day from people using search engines, and a small spike here and there when I posted something. A very small number of people are actually signed up to follow the blogs—maybe a dozen on Shalako Publishing and exactly three follow the ‘badpoetsclub.’ When I post something new, a few of them probably do check it out.

Getting blog followers is quite difficult. It takes a moment to sign up, but readers don’t necessarily want to be bombarded through their inboxes with post after post. It doesn't take long before people turn off notifications altogether, which is why I blog twice a week, and try to keep it relevant.

How then, was I to get more page-views? This is important, as the material posted on the blog says a lot about us, and of course I have all the ads down the right side where people can click and take a look at my books in various places. While it is hard to estimate just how many people click through and look at a book, or how many of those actually click on the ‘buy button’ on Amazon, Smashwords or iTunes, we can say this much: some will. I also believe that ‘interest,’ the very fact that someone looked at your book, has some weight in the ‘product presentation algorithms.’ If someone buys your book, and then another one, the next guy that comes along may see the proverbial, ‘people who bought this book also bought this one,’ or ‘people who looked at this book also looked at this one.’ You want your book to be in there.

Active Blogging.

So all we have to do is drive up those numbers, right? Bearing in mind this is all part of a larger strategy.

What I have been doing is to look at older posts. Some of them can be rewritten, enhanced, perhaps relevant links added to them. If I have an old story on the hard-drive, I can take a look at it, stick it up on one of my four blogs, and see what happens, for surely posting new content regularly is one way to build an audience, (or drive up hits.) I routinely do this with all new content now. But the older materials can be recycled to some extent. I have the poetry blog, a French-language blog, and a blog which I never promote. That one has had 150 page hits, mostly indexing hits by search engine bots, and it serves as a control blog—that’s how many hits you get in a given time period with a static, totally passive blog which is not updated too often.

Technique.

So what we do is to click on the title of the story. Then we copy that URL with our mouse. Then we close down our blog for a while and fire up Tweetdeck. On Tweetdeck, I manage three Twitter channels, and I can post to Myspace, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I’m putting out on six channels, and this is to a total of several thousand people, not all of whom are viewing at any given time.

What this means is that you can repost later, at a different time. Make your writing work for you.

Then I go and post on Reddit, Digg, and any other place where I can get away with it. I say that because Squidoo for one is looking for all-original content. The basic technique is to blog twice a week on Shalako Publishing, but by reposting and recycling, we can make it do the work of ten passive blogs. If it takes an hour to write a good post, and another ten minutes to ‘spread it around,’ that ten minutes of time is a good investment because it multiplies effectiveness by a factor of about ten times.

Watching your stats.

Watching stats might sound boring, but you can learn a lot. I saw that an old post, ‘Kobo not recognized by PC,’ was getting the odd page hit. It was just a short little story. Clearly, people were having trouble figuring out their Kobo…they were Googling it to find out what to do.

After some thought, I searched through my e-mail and found Kobo’s response to my question. I stuck it in the story. After more thought, I engine-searched and found Kobo’s help page on their website. So I added another line to the story and put that link in there as a service to people who were obviously having the same problem as I was. Also, having links in a story, and traffic generated by them, drives up our ranking with the search engines, for those people who randomly search or have just heard our name somewhere.

There is no single solution to generating traffic.

Getting results and data from experiments.

What we are doing is getting results and data from our experiments.

Incidentally, our ‘Kobo not recognized by PC’ story pops up on page one of the the Google results, and we did that without even half trying. If I had more tips and information to put in that story, I would do it in a heartbeat.

The Shalako Publishing blog had about 5,900 hits in two or three years of blogging. Not too impressive, right? The badpoetsclub had 100 hits last month in total.

This month I’ve gotten about1,400 hits on Shalako Publishing. Just to replicate the experiment and the results, I posted a couple of poems and got 39 page hits so far today on badpoetsclub, including one comment, which happened within minutes and was completely unexpected.

Comments add weight to your blog.

Encourage people to comment on your blog.

Comments also add weight in search engines, as well as activity of any sort. With a scientific application of some pretty basic principles, we are well on our way to somewhere between 15,000 and 35,000 page hits this year on our blogs. That’s a lot better than a couple thousand a year.

If one in a hundred clicks through and if another one in ten buys a book, this will have a significant result on sales, and of course name recognition and blog followers are good things too.

Comments are always welcome, and if you have some simple tips you would like to share, please feel free to do so. I don’t have a donate button, but you’re always welcome to share, re-post, or link to this post within your own blog. Please have a look at my books, I'm a professional writer with 29 years of experience and there might be something there for you.

P.S. Here’s one criticism of this blog: not enough pictures.

For more on this subject, go to ProBlogger.