* As you can see, I’ve completely given up on the philosophy of not swearing in header text.

This is a very, very important post. If you don’t have time to read it right now, save it in your reader or whatever because it’s a big deal.

I got an email with the title of this post as the subject line. Want to get my attention? That’s the way to do it, baby. Here it is, in its entirety:

“Naomi, thanks for doing the series about writing and selling ebooks. It’s very useful and timely for me, as I’m currently writing my first paid ebook, as well as looking for a way to work from home.

Right before you started that series, I was thinking about emailing you to suggest that you write an ebook called “How To Work From Home When You Have No Fucking Talent.” I don’t mean that the readers are useless, just that they don’t have any particularly extraordinary rockstar talent. People who are fabulous copywriters can be you or Brian Clark or James Chartrand, people who are superb graphic and blog designers can be Harrison McLeod, people who are fantastic internet marketers can be Yaro, people who know how to do everything can be Tim Ferriss, etc. But what about more normal people, how can they quit the 9-5?

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 29, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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I was on the phone with a client today. He wanted some help with some internet marketing and information product stuff. Pretty typical questions — paid search, landing pages, conversion rates — nothing too exciting. I helped him, all was well. (It was well enough that he decided to send me more money to do more stuff, which is always a good sign.)

Now, right now, since he’s paying me, I’m his consultant. But if he weren’t paying me, a lot of people would say that in this particular facet of life, I’m his mentor. And I guess they’d be right.

Except this particular client attended Stanford Business School.

I have a feeling, just maybe, there’s something he can teach me, too. Now at the moment we’ve only just met and we might end up hating each other, so it’s not exactly the time to start proposing this sort of mutually beneficial relationship. Besides, right now all he needs is to start making some fucking money already. But later? I’d be kind of a dumbass if I didn’t pick his brain, don’t you think?

This leads me to the topic du jour.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 27, 2008 in Home Based Business
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This is a guest post from the ever ass-kicking Dave Navarro of time management and productivity fame. Did you ever notice how all the guest posts on this blog are so much better formatted than mine? Yeah, I did too, and I don’t want to talk about it.

Quick quiz: What do you absolutely need to have if you want your business to pay that mortgage of yours?

• A) A kick-ass website
• B) Clever business cards
• C) A catchy mission statement
• D) Arrogance

If you answered anything but D), you’ve got a hard road ahead of you.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 26, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 55 Comments
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There’s an ancient Scottish saying that I love:

“Build a thousand bridges and they’ll never call you a bridge builder. Fuck one sheep and you’re a sheep fucker for life.”

(Prove it’s not an ancient Scottish saying. Go on, prove it.)

It seems like a large portion of the world has taken it upon themselves to email me and tell me they hate me. I’m used to hate mail, but this has been a special time. I’ve been fortunate enough to receive a whole year’s worth of fuck-you, all in the matter of less than a month.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 25, 2008 in Personal - 102 Comments
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Well, it’s been quite a week. We’ve covered figuring out if you have a market for your ebook, we’ve covered how to write an ebook, and we’ve covered how to sell the damn thing. So why are we still here? Because you’d be really surprised by all the extra stuff that comes along with it.

You read about people who get book deals talking about how their whole life falls apart in the process of trying to get the whole thing to come together. You wouldn’t think that would transition over to a document of fewer than 100 pages that you’re publishing yourself. Well, maybe you would. I sure as hell didn’t.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 22, 2008 in Small Business Marketing
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Hi again!

OK, so you’ve decided you’ve got a market and you’ve written an ebook. This is normally where the writer of the post would be all “good for you, what a tremendous accomplishment, pat yourself on the back”, but that’s not how I roll. There may be some esoteric benefit to writing an a novel and not selling it, but the same doesn’t apply to ebooks.

The only thing more lame than a book languishing in your drawer is an ebook languishing on your hard drive. Let’s face it, you could write the next Gatsby but if you can’t sell it, you stay poor.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 21, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 21 Comments
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OK, so you’ve decided that there’s a market for your ebook, that the idea is not crap, and that there is an outside chance people will pay perfectly good vodka money for it. Rock on. This post is really, really long so I’m just going to start with no smooth transition. All choppy like.

When I started writing this lesson, I realized that the result will end up being about 4000 words long. Since nobody needs 4000 words in their inbox or feed reader, I’m deliberately being as brief as possible. This means you’ll probably have questions. If so, you can ask them in the comments or you can email me. It’s probably better if you ask in the comments because if you have the question, odds are so does someone else.

I’ve split this lesson up into three parts. First is preparation. Second is a bunch of tips. Third is what to do when you’re done. Let’s rock.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 20, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 24 Comments
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The next installment in the how to write an ebook series is coming, but I gotta beg for stuff before I forget. First, what you see on the right is my feet with fan socks on them. Fan socks are very similar to fan mail, except instead of letters, they send you footwear. Please take a moment to appreciate the awesomeness of the fan socks. They’re from Sock Dreams. Jesus Lord, I could spend thousands there. Want to know why you should blog? Blog for the socks. (And yes, I chose THESE socks of the many fan socks so I didn’t have to shave my legs. We also had to crop my underwear out of the shot.)

***

Next, I have a plea. It is impassioned. Some might call it an impassioned plea. This is for those of you who are NOT involved in problogging, internet marketing, etc. This is for the people who quietly read and don’t say much. I would like your help.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 20, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 33 Comments
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*This is actually how I made $12,246 in a day. You might make more. You might not.

So you want to write an ebook. Wicked. There’s money to be made in ebooks and unless you’re in internet marketing, the market is nowhere near saturated. With 1.4 billion people using the internet regularly, there’s a pretty good chance at least a few of them want to buy whatever crap you want to sell. So let’s get started, shall we?

There are people out there who believe that the first step in selling an ebook is writing an ebook. Those people are wrong.

The first step in selling an ebook is finding people to buy it.

Sound backward? It’s not.

Writing an ebook is at best time consuming and at worst incredibly difficult. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like doing incredibly difficult and/or time consuming things for no good reason. I have to know that there are people who want to buy what I’m selling before I put pen to paper.

Therefore, there are two parts to this lesson. First I’ll teach you how to tell if the people are there. Then I’ll teach you how to get those people to find, know and love you. Easy, huh?

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 19, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 33 Comments
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*This is actually how I made $12,246 in a day. You might make more. You might not.

On Friday, August 8, 2008, I made a lot of money. I have a feeling some Chinese people are not surprised as that day was 8/8/8 and they dig that kind of stuff. I don’t really know a lot about the whole Chinese-people-digging-the-eights thing, so I can’t speak intelligently about it. I can tell you, though, that while the opening ceremonies for the Olympics were playing, I was literally counting money.

Now I’m going to tell you how I did it. I’m just going to tell you, though. I’m not going to sell you anything, and this isn’t the precursor for something awesome that is all yours for the low, low price $797. (I do have another product coming out in a few months but it’s not related and it’s certainly not $797.) I’m not going to ask for your email address and I’m not going to ask you to sign up for my newsletter. I don’t even have a newsletter, although I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell people that. All marketers are supposed to have newsletters. It is a Rule.

By Naomi Dunford - Aug 18, 2008 in Small Business Marketing - 30 Comments
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