It is time for an update on my writing challenge.

This past weekend I traveled cross country for a conference (New York to Los Angeles.) I decided to devote a portion of my westbound flight to writing articles for this challenge.

I planned to write on subjects I was familiar with which would limit the amount of research required. I also chose topics that would not require quoting lots of facts and figures. The topics were writing and home improvement.

There was one home improvement topic I needed to do a little research on, so I had about 25 pages of printouts from a quick Google search on Thursday night. I relied on personal experience for the rest of the articles. When I got started writing, I fell into an interesting pattern.

As I started to write, I found myself outlining the articles with just enough detail to capture the idea and provide an outline of the complete article. Because I wasn’t laboring over details, I got on a roll and moved through the articles quickly.

In less than 2 hours, I outlined 11 separate articles – 9 on my original topics and 2 that just popped into my mind when I got in the groove. (That works out to 11 minutes per article.)

This process reminded me of when I worked on an automotive assembly line building cars (this is just one of the many interesting jobs I’ve held!) When you break a project down into the primary steps of production, and then complete one step for multiple products at the same time, you move much faster than if you complete every step for one product before starting the next product. You get into a rhythm and you stop thinking about the process and just do the work.

The outlines still need to be expanded into full articles, but I think that can be done quickly since they are already clearly outlined – I’m just expanding the thoughts into complete statements.

I should have the first batch ready to submit for payment within a few days.

The Go-To Guy!

“Just a quick thank you for illuminating the basics of Photoshop to me so that I could complete my project. I can say without hesitation that every conversation with you is an education! (and a delight!) You’re the best! Thanks!”

Suzanne Toro

“…a big thank you to Andrew Seltz: The Go-To Guy!, who gave me some simple but brilliant advice, and I took it by the horns and ran with it. Now, well, I feel I have a purpose once again.”

Jezee – Member of the BarbaraSher.com forum

Read Jezee’s Full Forum Post at BarbaraSher.com

“Andrew Seltz you are simply AMAZING! There has been nothing that I have come to you for that you weren’t the perfect answer for the job. Well versed in any task creative or technical, once again you’ve given me an education just by explaining how you’ve answered problems along the way. Though you are often beyond my capacity technologically you are able to help me understand in your thorough explanations. From one artist to another you’ve done it again – shear creative GENIUS.”

Alicia M. DeFrange – Artist

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Website Traffic: You can either pay for it or cast a wide net to pull it in.

Paying is pretty simple (well, technically it’s an art unto itself) but you join up with a PPC program, select your keyword groups, write some ads and start paying.

You can also find websites where your potential visitors hang out and buy some links or ads on those sites.

To cast a net you will invest time rather than money. I have two basic strategies.

The first strategy is to write a batch of 300-500 word marketing articles with links back to my target site in the author’s resource box and post them to directories like www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com. (I wrote an article about how to write effective marketing articles on my blog.)

It will take some time before the articles start getting picked up by other publishers and reprinted, but once they are out there, you’ll keep getting traffic. I have articles that were published over a year ago that still bring me regular hits to my sites.

The second strategy takes advantage of the work done in the first. I will pull apart the articles I wrote and format them as blog entries laced with links back to my target site. Then, I’ll take advantage of the many free blogging sites out there like www.blogger.com, www.wordpress.com, www.myspace.com, www.livejournal.com, www.friendster.com, and www.squidoo.com and make a bunch of new blogs and post the revised article content.

Almost instantly you will find sites like Technorati linking back to your main site. Within a few days you should start seeing visitors and find yourself geting indexed in the search engines – just don’t use the exact some content on every blog. It will count against you in the search engine rankings.

The last time I did this, I got my first visitor and earned my first dollar in under 48 hours.

Keep adding new content to the blogs and article directories for a few months (once ore twice a week after the first week.) If you’ve targeted a good niche, chosen good keyword targets, and written good articles, you will see a steady flow of traffic drawn into your site through this network of pages linking in.

One warning: Don’t forget to actively promote a newsletter or some other device on your main site to capture visitor’s email address. The next time you want to talk to them you don’t have to wait for them to wander by, you can send something straight to them!

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Using an approach like Jonathan Leger’s $7 Secrets to promote a simple report you’ve written can quickly build a mailing list without all of the blogs and article writing. That’s my next project!

Article marketing is a low cost strategy to direct traffic to a website and begin to develop one-way backlinks to its pages. For new online ventures it offers a great way to build traffic to a site and to establish its authority in a particular niche.

Article Marketing is also an excellent strategy to quickly get a new site listed in search engines like Google and Yahoo!

The basic process for article marketing is this:

• Write a series of short 350-700 word articles related to the content of your website
• Add an author’s resource box to each article that contains links back to one or more pages on your website
• Upload the articles to various article directories like www.EZineArticles.com or www.GoArticles.com
• Wait for other publishers to reprint your articles and resource links
• Wait for search engines to index your articles (and the links back to your site) from the article directories and also from the websites that reprint them giving you relevant inbound links and new visitor traffic

The process works. I wrote my first small batch of articles over a year ago and continue to see traffic from them today. I even make a dollar or two every now and then from ads on the pages that the resource links are pointing to. If I had more articles out there, the overall traffic would rise. But those first articles were a test to see if the process worked and were not well written for the task of making me money (or even getting me good search engine ranking.)

Once I proved to myself that the basic system worked, I next had to learn how to write articles that compel people to click on the resource links and how to optimize those links to improve my search engine rankings. The best SEO in the world won’t help if your content isn’t compelling and the most compelling articles are pointless if they don’t improve your business.

Optimizing the links was easy. I just had to include the primary keywords for the page I was directing traffic to in the anchor text in the link. Like this: Energy Efficient Home Construction information. Every article gets unique words based on the page that is being linked to. When multiple articles link to the same page I make subtle alterations to the link on each article so that the search engines don’t always see the exact same text and devalue it as duplicate content.

Making the articles compelling so that readers want to follow the links and come to my site is more challenging. The most effective articles for this marketing method give readers a taste of the topic and lead them to deeper subjects they need to explore to really be satisfied. The resource box should promise them this next level of information and the links will lead them to the new information.

I realize that this explanation might not be clear enough, so I’ll give a quick illustration:

Say you are selling camera equipment for product photography – cameras, lights, display stands, backdrops, etc.

You write an article about how adding a photo to your eBay auctions can radically improve your profits. Your readers will be eBay sellers who want to make more money and your article leads them to realize that good product photos will improve their income.

In the article you make a special point of the importance of professional quality images to set yourself apart from the crowd. You further explain that with a modest investment in the right tools and some basic training anyone can learn to take the kinds of images that will make big money. If you write this well, the reader will now want to know how to take a good product photo and what equipment is needed to get professional results.

In your resource box you promise them free tutorials for taking product photos they can use in their auctions. These links will land them on pages where they will learn techniques and discover the basic tools they need to take good photos (with ads for the gear highlighted in the tutorials, a newsletter sign-up form, and maybe an offer for an e-book guide to taking professional product photos.) The link text might be something like “Learn 5 Simple Steps to Professional Quality Product Photos.”

Another article pointing to the exact same set of tutorials could focus on showing aspiring catalog photographers how to build their portfolios. Still another would entice model building hobbyists into taking professional quality photos of the models they build to show off their skills, etc. You can find dozens of different ways to approach potential audiences for your products.

The article introduces a need and builds the desire for a solution, then the resource box promises to satisfy this new desire.

Model building websites, photography websites, and auction business websites will all begin to reprint your articles and steer their visitors toward your site. The search engines will also start to recognize your site’s pages as authoritative because of the growing number of inbound links. Over time your search engine placement will also improve.

Creating articles that work at this level takes effort. If your main goal is to simply to gain backlinks to improve search engine rankings, this is overkill. But if you are trying to warm up a new customer for a sale, you have to make the effort.

If you would like to see some of the marketing articles I have published visit my EZineArticles profile. (While you are there, please rate my articles – every little bit of promotion helps.) Hopefully you will be able to see the improvement in my articles over the past year.

Now, get out there and start writing.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Don’t let me have the last word. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

How would you like to uncover all the best deals available on Amazon.com?

I have uncovered a secret method of searching through the Amazon.com product database and showing only items that are on sale. You can pick the product category and exact discount range you want to search and Amazon will do the rest.

The information I found involved a fairly messy process of copying and pasting codes together to create a special search string and then pasting that into your browser. I decided to make the process easier so that anyone could find these great deals.

Here is the result of my labor:

Give it a try and see what you find! You can download a Windows version of this tool here:

AmazonDealFinder.exe

Make sure and bookmark this page and tell your friends.

Happy Bargain Hunting,

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Do you use bookmarking sites like Delicious or Digg? Or, how about StumbleUpon.com? Recommend this page and give it a good review. Thanks!

I was looking through the stats for this site today and saw that someone had followed a Google search for “The Go To Guy” and arrived at my homepage.

Being the curious type, I clicked on the referring link to see what came up on a Google search for that phrase and where www.AndrewSeltz.com placed in the search results.

This site is number 11 (top of the second page) for the phrase “The Go To Guy.” Not bad considering that I have made no specific effort to rank well for that phrase and there were 295,000 results.

The results that placed higher than this site were mostly big news sites and/or referring to well know people, so I’m in good company.

Maybe someday this whole Go-To Guy! thing will stick in a big way?

Andrew Seltz, The Go-To Guy!

“People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post — for support rather than illumination” — Mark Twain

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” — Mark Twain

“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.” — Mark Twain

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” — Mark Twain

“The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.” — Mark Twain

Are you trying to print out the contents of a PDF document in booklet format?

A colleague of mine just told me about a very long and drawn out process he went through to create a booklet for his work. The original file he was given for the project had been created with Microsoft Publisher. He, being a Mac Guy, was using Quark for page design. Overall, it just did not go well.

He copied and pasted elements from the original file into his new Quark file, but ran into trouble trying to impose the pages for printing (this is the re-ordering of the individual booklet pages so that the printed pages, when stacked together and stapled down the middle, will be in the correct reading order.)

To print a typical booklet, 4 pages are combined and printed onto a single sheet of paper – 2 pages on the front and 2 on the back. When all of the printed pages are stacked together and folded, the individual booklet pages should be in the correct reading order.

My colleague went ‘old school.’ He printed out all of the individual pages and taped them together in the right order for printing. Then, he photocopied the results and sent them to the printer to print the finished copies. Technology to the rescue.

Watch The Complete Process Demonstrated

Simple Method To Print Booklets From PDF Files

A much less labor intensive, and higher quality, method is available. This is what I recommended to him:

1. Print a copy of the booklet in normal reading order to a PDF file (this is easy to do and can be accomplished with free software)
2. Using a program like CutePDF Pro ($50), or the PDF Snake plugin ($340) for Adobe Acrobat, open the file and use the booklet function to reorder the pages
3. Print a test copy by printing all of the odd pages first, flipping the paper stack, and then printing all of the even pages (each page in the file will contain 2 booklet pages side-by-side and alternate between the front and back pages)
4. Send the new PDF file to the printer

The computer can do all of the hard work and the results are great. Whenever I want to print out an e-book, I do this step first. I have stacks of books created in this fashion.

If you are creating the book in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, you can set up booklet printing inside the software for each new document. The pages will automatically be reordered when you print. There is also a product called Clickbook* that intercepts the file when you hit the print button and reorders the pages before sending them on to the printer. It will work with any program that is capable of printing. The price is comparable to CutePDF Pro.

CutePDF Pro and PDF Snake both offer a free trial version. Hardcore users will appreciate the features of PDF Snake, but most folks will do fine with the cheaper CutePDF Pro.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. If you have questions about this process or want a more detailed tutorial, leave a comment and let me know.

Click To Play Flash version Get Your Copy Now!* Read My Review of this Book

My Do-It-Yourself Bookbinding article has turned out to be one of the most popular articles on this site. It came from my desire to have printed copies of some of the many e-books I have collected over the years. Very often I don’t worry about putting a cover on the book and just bind the pages or I cover the book with plain heavy cardstock and hand-write the title. But what if you really want to put together a polished book that looks store-bought?

Take a look at the 3 books in the photo. I won’t make you guess which one I made – it’s the one in the middle! This was my first attempt at creating a cover that would pass for bookstore quality. An author I like gave electronic files of some of his books as bonuses for his newsletter subscribers (www.FredGleek.com.) This isn’t a tiny 30 page e-book, but the electronic version of a book he wrote for print. It is several hundred pages and I wanted to print it out to keep on the shelf next to 2 other books of his that I purchased. I think it turned out pretty well and I will tell you the simple steps I used to create the cover.

Here are the supplies you will need to create a professional quality book cover for your self published book:

• Card Stock Paper that is larger that your bound book block (I print to 1/2 of a standard page so 8.5″x14″ legal is big enough for most projects)
• Inkjet Printer that can print on your Cover Stock (for larger books you may need a large format printer)
• Photoshop CS or similar image processing software (I like creating graphics in Photoshop, but you could layout your cover in your wordprocessor)
• .3 mil Adhesive Plastic Laminate (thick laminate will work, but I prefer thinner plastic)
• Bone Folder – a handy tool that can be found at most craft stores or art supply stores (usually near the scrapbooking section)
• Exact-O Knife
• Metal Straight Edge

When I studied the book covers in my library I noticed that the main feature that differentiated them from plain card stock was the laminated coating that covers on the outside. I don’t know exactly how they coat the pages in professional print shops, but I figured that a simple thin coating of adhesive laminate would give a very similar result. My main goal was to protect the printing and make the cover water resistant and give it the glossy sheen of a trade paperback.

I laid out my cover in Photoshop, setting the page dimensions to match my paper. This time around I didn’t try to print on the spine or back cover – just the front. This choice saved me a lot of measuring and tweaking. If you want to wrap all the way around, measure the thickness of your book block and make your page size equal to twice the page width plus the spine width. Then, lay out your cover text and art.

When printing, make sure your printer is set to print the whole page edge to edge (most new photo quality printers are capable of this.) If you can’t print edge to edge, make sure that Photoshop does not scale your image to fit the page – this will throw off all of your measurements. If your cover has full-page artwork, set the page dimensions to have an extra 1/4″ on the outside edges of the cover. You can trim off the extra when you are done and there will never be a white edge where your graphic stops.

When the cover is printed, cut a length of laminate off of the roll that is a little larger than the cover. Peel off the backing paper on one end. Next, stick that edge to your working surface and then peel back the rest. This will help you to hold the laminate straight and tight as you press it onto the cover. Position the cover underneath and then slowly press the laminate onto the page and smooth out any air bubbles. Work from the center out. Press the laminate down firmly over the whole cover to ensure solid contact.

Next you will need to crease the cover where it will bend around the spine. Line your straight edge up in the spine of the book and use your bone folder to score the spine. Fold the cover along the score and you are ready to glue it to the book block.

Apply a layer of glue to the inside spine of the cover and then set the bookblock in place. I tap the spine on the table a few times to force the book block firmly into the glue and then leave the book on on its spine until the glue dries.

When everything is dry, take your Exact-O knife and straight edge and trim the excess paper from the cover. You should have a pretty professional looking book at this point.

I went an extra step and had my local copy shop trim the 3 open edges with their heavy duty trimmer. This was a little expensive, but I wanted to see how good it could look.

This technique works equally well for saddlebound book covers. Just buy cover stock that is exactly the same size as your pages, ignore the spine in your design, and fold down the middle when you staple the booklets together.

If you have any tips or techniques that you use to make trade paperback style covers, leave a comment and share your wisdom. Also, let me know why you are interested in binding your own books. The more I know about what you are trying to do the more helpful I can be with my tutorials and suggestions.

The Go-To Guy!

Click To Play Flash version Get Your Copy Now!* Read My Review of This Book

P.S. Easy Bookbinding* – Learn a simple 6 step process for creating professional looking trade paperback and hardcover books! This e-book course will walk you through the entire process in detail. You will be binding your own books in no time!

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