3 Mental Blocks I Dissolved to Write and Self Publish 126 eBooks

I think it's fine to write an ebook at 5,000 words. For one thing, people don't necessarily want to read long works anymore if they can get the same information in a quick read.

There is also a whole section on Amazon for short reads and people often recommend that new writers start with these short works to build an audience. As long as you price your book and label it as a short read people don't usually mind, although you always get someone moaning about something.

If you want to build a good readership in a single niche, which is what you should be doing, you should also be looking at giving a book away free in order to build a list. As Ryan says, you really have to market the hell out of books. I think it's easier to market non-fiction than fiction but that's just my personal opinion.

Good luck

Deb

Hi Junaid,

If you have loads of fun with writing those 5K words heck yeah you will draw in readers. You literally vibe on the same level as those folks who just want a 20 to 30 minute read to apply quickly.

Sitting down to read from a Kindle is different than reading a paperback. Folks tend to read a wee bit less methinks because although Kindles make for easy reading, paperbacks are easier.

More than that though, once you have blog readers, you have loyal fans. Loyal fans buy your eBooks, your products and hire you for your services.

Go for it buddy

Ryan

Hi Shana,

You're cheating! You live in gorgeous Antigua LOL Just joking, but definitely need to visit there. Must be awesome being surrounded by outward signs of beauty.

Agreed on that. Like all mental blocks, or fears, writer's block is an illusion. See through it. Sit down. Write.

Keep on writing

Ryan

Hi,

Neat take Writer's block can be what you mentioned, or any limiting idea based in fear.

When you move toward fear and love, away from fear, the block dissolves and ideas flow.

Ryan

Hi PPC,

Sorry for the late response

Neat approach. I see it as pretty smart. If you self-publish these to Kindle - or have already - make sure 90% of these reads are unique, as KDP Select won't allow you to self-publish with 10% of copied content, or more.

Note; I am not familiar with PLR. Do you own the rights to these articles? You need to in order to re-publish edited portions to KDP for a Kindle eBook.

Happy Writing and Self-Publishing

Ryan

Hi WA

I listen to my reader's problems, mostly.

Like, I'll spot questions or comments lobbed my way through my blog or through email and will tackle that problem via a Kindle eBook. At least for blogging tips themed eBooks.

For my travel eBooks I just have fun telling my travel stories.

For my LOA and inspirational eBooks I pinpoint some problems I had with the LOA, or how I overcame certain obstacles, and list the practical steps I took to conquer these obstacles.

Mostly though, just have fun writing the eBooks and think about a pressing problem being faced by your ideal reader. Warrior, Quora, Google and your own blog, as well as social media, are goldmines for unearthing these problems and for fleshing the solutions out into an eBook.

Those are a few idea for ya

Ryan

I do the same thing Ryan does. I can say that what he is describing does work. You can write lots of short books fast. Most days I write 7,500 words a day.


Every where, every thing. I never know ahead of time what I'll write about or where the inspiration will come from.

For non-fiction, often I'll be reading a forum post and I'll write an answer (like I'm doing right now.) And then an hour later I'll be thinking: "Oh wait... I forgot to say..." and instead of editing the forum post, I'll expand on it. Depending on how long it gets, I'll turn it into an article for my website or a book to publish on Kindle.

Fiction, I get ideas from reading. I'll be "Hey! I can have Quaraun do that, only he'd do it this way..." and next thing I know I'm writing a new novel.

Yep. I do this some times to. I'll be in my garden or walking my dog or painting my RV or whatever, and I'll see something (a dragon fly land on a rose) or hear something (a mountain lion screaming from the forest) and it'll just trigger my brain into a "Hey! I can rite ___ about ___..." and suddenly I'm writing about, something I absolutely had not expected to be writing.

I do a lot of "slice of life" literary "creative non-fiction" writing. The type of stff where the unnamed character is just walking through the forest listening to the wind. You know, a 3,000 word short story that has no plot, no point, and is just written to evoke atmosphere. These are usually inspired by a random bird flying by or a bug buzzing. Total spur of the moment, me literally writing down whatever random thing I just heard or saw.

There's not a lot of demand for this sort of story, you can't really live off it, but it's very fun to write and very peaceful and relax hobby to have.

I don't do this for either my fiction, or for any of my Kindle targeted non-fiction, but I do, do it for my articles for my website. My articles range for 3,000 to 20,000 words per web page. I tend to not publish anything to Kindle unless it's 36k words or more. (This Amphibious Aliens: The Story of Etiole & The World's Most Haunted Car <--- is a 20,000 word web page article, if you ever wondered what 20,000 words on a single web page looked like. People always see this page and go: "OMG! How am I to read this!" (It takes 8 hours to read, and then there are 12 hours of video footage embedded in it, so you can't read it in one sitting.)

The stuff I put on my website, I focus on the primary keyword of the article. My website, while it has multiple niches on it, still features a limited narrow focus of niche. Those being:

• self-publishing
• authorship
• character creation
• fantasy world building
• writing medieval high fantasy
• writing yaoi
• writing Elves
• writing wizards
• building magic systems for your world
• minimalist living
• building art cars
• costume making
• CosPlay
• Maine history
• Gypsy culture
• alien abductions
• the world's most haunted car
• etc (anything that fits along side any of the above)

The reason behind these topics is I write what I know. I write from personal experience. I wouldn't write it otherwise.

And I used to write for other people (magazines, Upwork, Freelancer Squidoo, HubPages, etc), but now I write for myself (Spell Casting Side Effects: Magic In Quaraun's Universe | Author Interview <---link to today's article, so you can see an example of what I mean, by - write for myself- I own the website.)

When I got started in freelance work, I thought you had to write for other. And back then, places like Squidoo & HubPages were a dime a dozen, each paying 50% cuts of Google AdSence incomes off the articles. It took Google closing down Squidoo and 100s of Squidoo like styles, for me to realize what worked and what didn't. I worked for Squidoo (was one of the "Squid Angels") so I got to see the demise of Squidoo from the inside and had a better knowledge of WHY they were shutting down, then most Squidoo authors did, and what I saw was, WAY too many short spammy articles... Google was striping them out, blacklisting certain pages, then certain authors, then certain sections, and finally the entire of Squdoo domain completely.

But Google NEVER blacklisted Squidoo's "Top 100" Not one of us got hit when Panda and Penguin came slashing through. Why? Because we few specialized. We wrote a lot of high quality articles on a few topics we knew inside out.

When the Panda death blow came down on Squidoo, Google targeted the writers who were spitting out new topics every day and not focusing on anything, to lash out at first.

The 2012 downward spiral of Squidoo, into it's 2013 death, taught me a lot about REAL SEO - writing for the HUMAN reader, not writing to satisfy a computer. Those of us who survived Google's attack on Squidoo, did so, because we had been writing for the HUMAN reader and NOT mad dash writing as much as we could an everything and anything, just to make money off Google AdSence.

And that's when I realized: "Hey! I don't need to write for ANY ONE!" I can write for ME. Why take a 50% cut of AdSence profits from ANY site, when I can start my own website, a place just like Squidoo, but a place where I am the ONLY author and I make 100% of the AdSence profits off my articles? I ended up buying a website through SBI and taking their training program, and now today 4 years later, my articles are reaching people everywhere. I have full control over my copyrights, I never have to worry about "finding work", and at the moment my site is getting 44,000 visits a month. Not huge, but also not the 100 a month most blogs struggle to reach either.

Like I did on Squidoo, I'm still putting out 1 to 5 new articles each week.

Like I did on Squidoo, I still narrow focus on just the few things I'm "expert" in.

But the fact remains, when you look at the success or failure of places like Squidoo: the people who earned the most money, where the ones who honed in on one or two topics and then wrote article, after article, after article on JUST that one topic. Squidoo writers who reached the top, did so by uploading DAILY articles on a single topic. I was Squidoo's 3rd highest paid member, and what did I do? I wrote 600 articles covering self-publishing, authorship, character creation, fantasy world building, etc. I focused. I'm an author. I write fantasy novels. I create fantasy characters and fantasy worlds for them to live in. And so when I added non-fiction freelance writing to my career, what did I write about? I wrote articles on how to teach new comers the art of writing and publishing fantasy novels.

On the side I also wrote articles on minimalist living, building art cars, Maine history, Gypsy culture, and alien abductions. These being the other "lesser" topics that I am also "expert" in, due to my lifestyle.

Writing a content site is a perfect match for me, because I have narrow focus on a few topics and can write daily articles about them.

I started SBI in 2013, my site has 800+ public pages and currently gets 44,000 visits a month. (Not super huge when considering the internet as a whole, but considering my topics, it's way higher then other sites of the same topics.)

I monetize with Google AdSence, LinkShare banner affiliate ads, Share-A-Sale affiliate banner ads, Amazon Associates affiliate links to products.

Also, I am an author (fantasy novels about Elf wizards) and artist (painter, acrylics & watercolor) and and art car designer/builder. I use my SBI site to promote those things as well, and so, links to my books (for sale on Amazon - print & ebooks) and are art on Zazzle (again product links) also brings in more income for me as well.

Anyways back to your question...

for these articles on my site, yes, I do quite a bi of keyword researching.

I write the article first, then I look into keywords using Google AdWords Keyword Tool.


Nope. AdWords Keywords Tool.

AdSence pays 61% of the AdWord bid for the keyword the person searched for before clicking the ad. (See Google AdWords KeyWord Tool, for a list of bid prices)

What that means if Google AdWords says the bid price of a keyword is $1; then Google AsSence pays you .61c per click you receive from that keyword search result.

This is why it is best to carefully research your keywords and strive to only use keywords with a $5 or more bid price and NEVER use one with a bid price under a $1.

Think about it: a lot of bid prices are something like .02c... meaning you get paid only .01c per click!

When writing my articles, I always pay attention to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and the bid prices of keywords. I try to ALWAYS have a keyword with a bid of $5 or more, and if I can find them I aim for the $20 or more ones. (A $20 bid = a $12 pay per click)

But then go back and look at my stats for the month.

Page Views: 75,171
Ad Impressions: 55,985
Clicks: 499

499 clicks with a .02 bid = income of only $4.99

499 clicks with a minimum of $1 bid = income minimum of $304

499 clicks with $20 bid = income minimum of $5,988

choose your keywords based off AdWords bid prices. That's the secret to AdSense income, even with low traffic and few clicks.

You have to have a Google AdWords account in order to access it, but the account is free to set up.

In your AdWords dashboard, click "Tools" and then "Keyword Planner"

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home (I think that link might only work if you have an account already and are logged in - not sure)

For each new page I create, I try to find a word that has a bid rate of $5 or more and use that as my primary keyword; then keep the additional keywords all at a bid rate of $1 or more. I try to avoid any keyword under $1, but sometimes there isn't any choice. Once in a while I find a keyword with a bid rate of $20 to $30 per click and I go out of my way to create a page on that topic, just so I can have a couple of super high demand keywords in the mix.

I started using Google's KeyWord Planner to optimize the tags on my old pages (give them new tags), and went from 7,000 pages views per month in October 2016 to 44,000 page views per month in February 2017.

Also, if you wanted to get into some advanced tagging techniques, Google themselves recommend you have 10 to 20 tags per pag, not the 5 you are limited to with SBI. You can do this in BB2 of your SBI site by clicking "head" and then in "this page only" copy and pasting the following code:

replace the tag# with your keywords for that page.

(SBI = Solo Build It aka Site Build It by Ken Evoy; if you don't know what it is. I built my website with it, but I write code so my site is heavily coded out and doesn't look like a "typical" SBI site. Most people who see it and are familiar with SBI, are always shocked by the fact it looks NOTHING like an SBI hosted site. Anyways, my instructions are assuming you are using SBI - they would be different if you were using WordPress or HostGator etc. So adjust to match your web host and site templates.)

If you end up doing this, you want to put your #1 primary keyword as the first one in the SBI slot as usual, with the top 4 secondary tags with it. Then put the top 20 minor tags in the meta code of the header.

Using a meta code like this pings the GoogleBot to actually LOOK for those words in your article, so you want to make sure they are only words actually in your article as well.

That's a bit more advanced then most people do and if you are not used to writing codes you might want to hold off on that sort of thing until you are better versed at building your site in general; but once you've got the basics down, adding meta data tags to the code of each page is something to look into.

But then there's YouTube. Combining SBI with YouTube worked wonders.

I started my SBI site in 2013, to transfer from a different web host, a site I had started in 1997. So I was already "established" when I started SBI, and jumped in with my SBI site having 400+ pages right at day one. So while I did the video courses and set up my SBI pages as per the SBI training, the brainstormer, while incredibly helpful in making my SEO for my old site's new pages on SBI way better, it wasn't something I necessarily needed in terms of "finding a nich" for my site.

Anyways, so I download all the files off my old site, shut down my original site, move the URL to SBI, set up my SBI site and begin the long process of transferring each page off my old site to my new site here on SBI. Because it's all coded out, full of java and css and html, it's a bit time consuming.

So, I get my SBI site up and running, and traffic to it is pretty much the same as traffic was when on my old web host: about 300 page views per month.

And yes, this does have to do with YouTube... be patent, I'm getting to that part...

After about 3 or 4 months, I noticed a change in my traffic and 1,000 views per month became the norm. Not much, I know, but I had a site since 1997 that in the early days was getting 10 visits a month and by 2012 had only just started getting 300 a month, so to go from 300 a month to 1,000 a month 3 months after switching to SBI, I started to realize, this SBI method of web site building really works, I wonder what I can do to get even more views?

I through myself into doing everything in the Action Guide after that. And for 3 years saw a steady increase in traffic, with every SBI recommended thing I implemented on my site. I reached 7,000 views per month average and then just stayed there. No matter what I did, I simply could not get more then 7,000 page views a month.

It seemed like I had done everything I could do. The advice in the Action Guide had clearly helped and had my site go from obscure to fairly well trafficked, but for some reason I just could not get past 7,000 views per month.

I set SBI aside for a while to de-stress and play video games. (I have dozens of game consoles and thousands of games - heavy duty gamer, it's what I do in my off hours.) I figure, with 6,000 pages in various stages of editing and 800+ pages published & live, I can take a few months off without uploading new pages daily and just let the site run on "auto pilot" for a bit.

Off to play video games with endless abandon...

In getting stuck on a game I went to Google seeking advice, and discovered the world of YouTube Gaming... suddenly I had a community of fellow gamers to talk to online. A community I had no idea existed....

And then I found at the same time the world of YouTube vloggers. And though: Hey, I can do that?

I started doing daily vlogs. My fans on FacBook started subscribing. I asked them: "What should I vlog about, I've no ideas"... they all started pointing back to my SBI site and my #1 most trafficked page ever: Amphibious Aliens - The Story of Etiole & The world's Most Haunted Car.

Well, in my obsession with cllecting haunted objects, I had gone out and hunted down and found and bought, The World's Most Haunted Car, the real Christine that was the inspiration for Stephen King's book and movie, and here it was sitting in my yard, and I was writing articles about it on SBI and a few photos were there of it, but people were saying:

"Make videos of it! You're on YouTube now! Show us the car! Make videos of the car!"

May 2016, "Meet The World's Most Haunted Car" a 3 minute video went up on YouTube.

By December 2016 I had 500+ videos, about 300 of them on various topics I had covered on my SBI site.

HERE'S THE IMPORTANT PART:

I had created that video in May 2016, by December 2016 it had 300 views. And I was: "OMG! I have a video with 300 views!!! YAY!"

I was clueless as to the power of YouTube combines with SBI and I was about to find out...


As I mentioned above, I found Google's AdWords KeyWord Planner, and started retagging my pages on SBI. I put the EXACT SAME TAGS on each of the matching YouTube videos, and then...

...

...and then I embedded each of hose videos into their corresponding pages of my SBI site.

That video:

Created May 2016

Had 300 views December 2016

My SBI site was getting 7,000 pages views per month...

February 2016, that same video now has 23,000 views and rising at a rate of 120 views a day, while my SBI site is now bringing in 44,000 views a day.

What happened?

Google OWNS YouTube, and by creating my own YouTube videos, and embedding them in my own SBI site, while using Google's AdWords targeting keywords... Google suddenly started bombarding both my SBI site and my YouTube videos with traffic.

Now, the important thing to note here is that thi drive in traffic ONLY seems to work if you created the videos yourself, on your own YouTube account, the one that is linked to AdSence - the same AdSense account that is linked to your SBI site.

Pages using videos created by OTHER PEOPLE do NOT get this insane boost in Google traffic 9at least not on my site) and it seems that Google is directly pushing the pages contain videos, that were created by the author of the article page itself.

I'm not sure how or why this is, all I know is, if you have the ability to make your own YouTube videos to match your SBI articles, do it, and link both your SBI and you YouTube to the same AdSense account, and add the Goggle+ author button to your site... this seems to trigger Google to shoot your site to the top of search results, because they seem to want to promote sites that make an active use of their Google owned products.

But, anyways, yes, that's why I say, if you can create videos about your topic, then put it on high priority, and create a video for every article you write. Google seems to "reward" you for doing this.

Of course, with lots of videos by others already out there - you could easily create an article for each of their videos, and embed the video someone else created into your article. Use Tube Buddy to to find out what tags they are using in their videos and use those same tags in your article. Become a site that show cases YouTubers... Most YouTubers will love you for that as you will be helping them gain views as well.

----------

Anyways, now, every time I write an article, I head to Google AdWords KeyWord Planner Tool and search for matching keywords for my article, and search for a $5 to $20 keyword. Use that.

Make sure it's in...

• the meta data,
• the title and description
• the breadcrumb tier 1/2/3 links at the top
• the <hi> header
• the <h2> <h3> and <h4> headers.
• Make sure it's in the first 100 words of text twice.
• Make sure it is in every paragraph at least once.
• make sure at least 1 photo has a file name that is the keyword
• make sure at least one outbound link has the keyword in it
• make sure there are in site links to other pages of my site and the keyword in the link title
• put the keyword in the navagational breadcrumb at the footer
• find 5 to 10 synonymous keywords with lower bid prices by higher search results
• add them to the meta data and description
• make sure each of the 5 to 10 syndrome keywords at least 3 times in the article, with at least 1 per paragraph
• use find replace to count the keyword use and make sure it is never used more then once per every hundred words of text - then either remove keywords or add text to adjust if the keyword density it too high (there is a danger of keyword stuffing - it's better to err on the side of too few keyword then too many)

(Tread carefully with keyword stuffing. It worked on Squidoo and HubPages and Helium back in the early days, but that kind of writing didn't succeed long and was quickly killed by Google Panda, then squashed by Google Penguin, then obliterated by Google Hummingbird. And just in case any of those missed any small local business, Google next sent out Pigeon. Google Phantom swooped in the prey on whatever was left, and now Google RankBrain is sending out it's Terminator style AI searching deep into our articles for anything the others might of missed. Keyword optimization is still king, IF you have good quality content, but you have be sure to balance the amount of keywords to text.)

Then, after doing all that, which seems like a lot, but after you do it on 10 pages, 10 days in a row it becomes second nature and you just do it without thinking about it after.

Then, after doing all that, I make a youtube video - 5 to 20 minute vlog about the same topic, using the exact same keywords, putting the keywords in title & tags and description, then embedding the video into the article. Then publish.

Sometimes I keep going and use the article as a bounce off point to a book. Using the article as chapter one, and then the web page becomes a "free sample chapter" of the book.

Some suggestions; things that I have done which might possibly help you out if you are looking to combine a content site with kindle book publishing:

#1: Create a web site page for EVERY chapter of your book. Post the first 1,000 words of the chapter in the body text. End the page with a text link that reads: "Read the rest of this chapter today!" Have the link go to the Amazon sales page of your book. This gives readers a taste of the chapter, wets their appetite for more, then puts a call to action for them to buy the book. It also gives you several new pages for your website which will help Google send more traffic your way.

#2: Add some "personalized" pages. Pages such as: "Meet The Author", "About My Childhood", "Where I Grew Up", "My First Pet", etc. People visiting an author's home page, tend to want to know more info about the author and less info about the author's books. You want to know the top two pages of my site that get the most visits? It's not any of the pages about my books or characters. Nope. It's the one page about my car (The World's Most Haunted Car aka The Real Christine) and the page about and alien abduction experience I had when I was 4 years old. Yep. Nothing to do with my books at all. Other pages that rank high on my site are: The Autism Awareness car with it's 2.5million marbles, The Transgender Awareness Tourbus (a big pink motorhome). What it's like being in a Stephen King movie. Pages listing facts about Gypsy culture, Maine history, and tours of the Gypsy farm (my home)) where The Thinner movie was filmed..... nope. My visitors couldn't care less about my books, they just want to know facts about my life.

#3: Add more book specific content pages. Is this your only book? I'm not sure from what you've said. Have you written other books? If so put up pages for each book. Do you have any fiction novels? If so, create a character profile page, for every single character in the book. Out of the 800+ pages on my site, 75+ of them are character profiles alone.

#4: Are you on YouTube? If not, you should be. Make YouTube videos. Then make a separate page for each video. Write a 400 word introduction to the video. This gives you lots of content fast.

And before you rush out and build a content site to promote your books with, a few things to keep in mind about the success of keyword driven content sites:

A couple of questions (you don't need to answer them on the forums, just answer them to yourself as you go over your site looking for ways to improve it.)

#1 How many pages will your site have? If you can not think of a way to add a new page every day for at least a year or more and bring your site up to 500+ pages, I think content sites like SBI style sites may NOT be right for you. The SBI program is designed for freelance authors as a way to have a place to post HUGE databases of hundred, sometimes thousands of articles. Articles written daily. If you only want a 16 page site, a place like Wix or Freewebs or Weebly or WordPress might be better suited to your needs. SBI is a rather expensive way to host a 16 page site, considering it was designed to host sites with 1,000+ pages.

The average successful SBI site has 1,000+ pages. Most did not seeing much if any income before a full year of uploading a new page DAILY - yes, meaning they often report not seeing an income until they have a minimum of 365 pages. My own site has 6,000+ pages started (but only 800+ live to the public yet, the rest are in drafts). I write 1 to 5 new articles a week, striving to ad at least one new article every weekday. My regular return users are the bulk of my traffic.

#2 Is your author page site targeting regular return users, to come back to your site daily, every day, for years to come? Or are you targeting users who stop at your site to see your book advertised and then never return? The reason I upload daily articles, is because this encourages my viewers to return daily to see what's new. This means, my site gets new traffic from new people now and again, but the bulk of my traffic is from people who subscribe to my RSS feed and return daily over and over again. The same few people returning every day.

#3: BEFORE you build a content site and use it to create an "Author Home Page" intended to do one thing: Promote your book. Have you tried searching for YOUR OWN NAME in Google AdWords Keyword Tool or SBI's Brainstormer Tool? Yes, author home pages CAN work on SBI and similar content article farm keyword driven programs, but ONLY if you are a popular enough author to have advertisers bidding on your name as a keyword in search results. My own website is an author home page. it does promote my books. I also published my first book in 1978, and while not a popular or big time author, my name does show up in keyword searches. People ARE searching Google for me by name, thus how my SBI site gets traffic. Are people typing your name in Google are searching for you? It'll be hard to use SBI as an author home page if they are not already searching Google for you BEFORE you start the website. I mean, you can Google me and get 10,000+ fan created websites, blog posts, articles, etc, that were not written by me. You could do that before SBI existed. Thus I can create an author website with my name as it's primary keyword. You can Google me, can I Google you? That there is perhaps the biggest factor to consider when using SBI or any other keyword driven content farm article site to create an author homepage.

Keep in mind too, that the power of content sites is in FREQUENT UPDATES & TARGETED KEYWORDS. At minimum adding one new page a week, optimally adding one new page a day. AND focusing each new page on 1 primary keyword, with a few complimentary synonymous keywords (I use 5 to 10; some people suggest 2 to 5; others say 10 to 20). This is the method on which SBI was built and the SBIers who use this method prove time and again that it works. Upload daily, focus on a single keyword for each page.

REMEMBER: Google looks for FRESH CONTENT and TARGETED CONTENT. Fresh meaning: new, released today. Targeted means: one narrow focus topic.

And that was a really long way around answering your question, but that's how I go about using keywords to help me find infinite daily topics to write about and then use said keywords to drive traffic to my site.

Hope that helps you out.

And yes, everything Ryan has said about how he's doing Kindle is true. Certain do follow his method if you want to get into writing lots of little quick read books. I've done it and it is a great thing to do, both for the fun of doing it and for the income it provides.

Hi AL,

Not thinking I can share here but if you search for "Blogging From Paradise" on Amazon you will see my eBooks.

Thanks a bunch

Ryan