February 19, 2013 by

Yet another useless Webinar

I told myself I would not fall for another information webinar dressed up like an information give-away.

I lied.

I signed up for a webinar that promised to tell me the secrets to partnering with iTunes to rapidly build my audience and grow sales. I had a feeling all this was going to be about was an infomercial about how great the speaker is and how buying her course/product was going to help me.

I was right.

I didn’t pick up any new information during the whole hour-long webinar. There was plenty of references to others online. (social proof) There was plenty of name dropping. (getting credibility from association with industry leaders) And there was the ridiculously low price that was only good that day and then forever it would vanish like some rare and exotic species. (Fear of loss)

This webinar hit all the high points of a good selling webinar. What it didn’t do was give me any information I could use with which to base any reliable purchasing decision on.

I give up. (again)

Filed Under: Platform creation Tagged With: , ,
January 23, 2013 by

You Are Not My Customer!

I am really tired of all the people out there trying to get me to buy their stuff. You may have seen several of these websites yourself. You sign up for what sounds like a terrific free webinar, only to find out it was just an infomercial and you wasted an hour or two just to pick up a few tidbits of information.

I’m done

.

What this blog is aiming to do is just TWO things:

  1. To show the writers that follow, what some of the pitfalls of being a writer are, and where to find GOOD information, so hopefully you won’t have to go through what I did to learn what I know.
  2. Some day I hope to have the blog self-supporting by recommending quality tools for writers. If you click on a link from my website, I will sometimes get paid–sometimes not. Bottom line, if I used it, read it, tried it, hated it, trashed it, you will see it here. If I can make this blog self-supporting without costing you a dime, we both should be happy.

That’s all!

You are not my customer, you are a fellow writer who is on a journey that is going to take a lot of time, energy, patience and some money, just like me. This blog is a record of what I learned as well as a resource for good tools that I have found to help me get the job done quickly, and as cheaply as possible. You may also find many cautionary tales when you read my many mistakes. I, too, started out knowing nothing. Knowing what I know now, I will definitely do things differently, and hopefully you can learn to do them too.

So keep your visa card in your wallet or purse. I don’t want it. If I gain a friend out of this blog, I’ll be happy. If this site breaks even, I’ll be giddy. If someone buys my book, I’ll be ecstatic.

Oh, one more thing: the website that’s attached to this blog is devoted entirely to promoting my book. Yours should too.

What you choose to blog about, and how you wish to treat your readers–that’s up to you.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
January 18, 2013 by

This Sucks!

Well, I finally did it. I broke down and rebuilt my website using WordPress. The old website looked nice, but it was dreadful to edit. Never use a website template made entirely from an artist’s photoshop rendering of what they think a writer’s website should look like. Every time I edited it, the slices would scatter all over the place, and rebuilding it was almost impossible. I got tired of trying to make something work, that just was never going to unless I sacrificed more than I really wanted. There were so many compromises in that site I just couldn’t live with it another moment.

So now I am halfway into building a new website, and I would like to crawl under a rock and die. (have you ever felt like that?) Making a website is hard enough work, making one twice is agonizing. Save yourself some time and make yours right the first time. Use WordPress. Find a decent template and make your website. It will look pretty decent, and it will be easy to update.

Since there are many different paths you can take, and many different ways of making websites, I’ll just pass along what I’ve done and why it worked or didn’t work. I don’t pretend to be some expert or “guru” but I have done a lot of things so far, and I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and I can save you some of the pain and aggravation I have gone through.

I will say that I’ve been making websites since 1996 and I’m very familiar with Dreamweaver and Fireworks, (not to mention a whole lot of software that’s no longer around any more.) I am very comfortable with html, css, seo, and a bunch of other acronyms I won’t bother dropping. Suffice it to say, I’m going to stick with WordPress for now. It’s free and easy. Why learn all the other stuff if you don’t have to? (I probably wouldn’t have)

 

 

Filed Under: Platform creation