This is a guest post by James Adams. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Online marketers often want to offer something tangible to visitors and potential customers that offers value, establishes credibility, and makes them want to come back for more. Often an eBook meets those criteria. If you want to offer an eBook as a free incentive or as a product for sale, you should first recognize that creating an eBook does not guarantee success.

To give the eBook you write its best chance for success, learn from the following eight characteristics of a successful eBook.

1. Write About Something You Know

Writing about topics unfamiliar to you does nothing to help your readers and hurts you in the long run if readers complain to the online world. Readers usually want to learn something from an eBook they have downloaded and possibly purchased, so do not disappoint them.

2. Get Unique Material

Let’s face it: anyone can scour the net and get commonly available information. Go the extra mile to make your eBook successful by getting original sources and uncovering new facts. Doing this can be as easy as visiting your local library or contacting a highly respected expert in your field for an interview. Often, libraries have a wealth of material online that you can use, and many experts will gladly be interviewed via email, so you can improve the quality of your work without even leaving your desk. read this entry »

I have been networking with Dan Lew for a while now and I recently had the chance to ask him a couple of quick questions about what he does, where he is heading and a couple of tips for the rest of us! I hope you enjoy!

(Tom) Hey Dan, I have been seeing your name around quite a bit lately, so thanks for taking the time to do this little Q&A with me. Can you give my readers a bit of an overview of who you are, what you do, and some of the things that you are working on?

(Dan) Hi Tom, to begin with thanks for the opportunity to post on your blog, first and foremost I breathe the internet and particularly have a huge passion for marketing which I found I had early back in 1993 when the first Power Macintosh was introduced. Ever since then I have been developing and making a living from the industry.

In the past 5 years I have focused all my energy on Search engine optimisation building a global presence with my company GSEO.net with over 50 major clients, but more recently changed the order of services to more of a community so that income will be generated automatively through a community style site, and in the past year and a half I have been very focused on blogging and affiliate marketing through my own personal website DanLew.com, and am now able to live the lifestyle I dreamed of, making money while I sleep, having an automated income!

(Tom) Awesome! We love that automated income. You recently made a post on your blog about how you make $2,000 a month blogging. I know this is a figure that a lot of my readers would like to reach themselves, but see it as an almost impossible task. Can you share a little bit about you were able to grow your blogging income to the point that it is now – and how you are planning on increasing it (because I know you are aiming much higher).

(Dan) The thing is I see loads of bloggers or affiliate marketers get into the industry and after like 6 months they think why am I still not making money and give up, the real reason is because you can see they are writing about things out of desperation to make money and hype which is really not the case, readers can see this. The main reason you should blog is because you love it, you want your community to know what it is you have passion about and what you like posting, then the money will follow. It should never be the other way around!

The earnings I recently stated I make in DanLew.com was to give my readers hope and to make them stick with it and for them to believe that it really is possible. This figure is divided up into around 8 affiliate networks, 3 major ones such as CJ and Clickbank and other smaller one-off affiliate networks I have joined and promoted. I really am determined to reach an average income of $5000 a month from blogging by the end of the year, I don’t think it is that unrealistic but I will need to fully focused in order to achieve this!

I have around 50 other sites I personally own and also need to keep working on as well, so it’s just a matter of balancing my time. One of my other newly launched sites I am currently spending time on is HotelORes.com

(Tom) 50 sites! So blogging is just a side project for you isn’t it? One of your main roles is the CEO of an SEO company, how much does search traffic play a role in your blogging income?

(Dan) I used to have my own SEO company in Thailand with around 12 staff, so I know how to manage a business. I more or less combined my knowledge in SEO which I have obtained through having my own SEO Company to stretch these skills so to speak into my own sites and get good rankings for those sites, social media also works well for me and other online marketing tactics.

The time I spend physically blogging is around 30 minutes per day, I do of course have some days I need to think and prepare for interesting topics in which my readers will enjoy. But apart from that, I spend quite a bit of time on other projects, particularly with clients and in meetings and other sites that also generate income on autopilot, some other money making ideas I wish to get going in the near future is having more products in Clickbank and having my own WordPress plugin.

(Tom) Looks like you have quite a lot going on and I can’t wait to see what you are up to in the next 6 months! Do you have a few keys that you can share that will help us target our seo and improve our blog traffic?

(Dan) I have been recently using a tool called SEOPressor which is bringing my blog posts to the first pages of Google. This for me is a really important aspect of blogging and particularly SEO.

On the other hand, there are tools like Market Samurai which I also see you use and as a serious website owner these tools are really essential. There should be no sacrifice to say that anyone out there does not need to spend money on tools to help them achieve success. You need to spend money to make money, but for the few dollars that it costs, it is really going to help you make that much more, so it is really worth it for the long term, both time saving and money saving.

Apart from that I always encourage to never stop learning, always read the latest news about Google and other search engines changes in the algorithms and what works best and what doesn’t . In order to be successful in this industry you must be on top of what is going on in the industry.

(Tom) Great tools! Away from blogging for a minute, I thought that since the both of us are from Australia, you in Melbourne, and myself on the Sunshine Coast, maybe you could give my readers a bit of an insight into your favourite local travel destination.

(Dan) I always have a soft spot for places like Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast, although I was born on the Gold Coast and spent a few years in Melbourne, I always love going back and spending a few good months there. Noosa is also one of my favourite spots, so you are lucky to be living there!

But as for the most part I travel a lot to Thailand and in fact have a house there, my wife is also from Thailand so last year for example we traveled back and forth to Australia from Thailand 3 times, just for weddings and family visits!

(Tom) A bit of a traveler I see, and a nice local pick with Noosa! I really appreciate you taking the time to share a bit about yourself and what you have going on. Just to finish things off, if you could share the one thing that you believe is the key to a successful and profitable blog?

(Dan) Being a blogger and affiliate marketer is really about being able to handle lots of different ideas and bringing them together and funneling it to one big community, you need to always have your eye out on what others are doing, and how you can also do it, posting regularly and being active and commenting on other blogs is also a key aspect in driving quality readers to your site. So you have to be active on all areas, create a Facebook page, have your own Twitter page, create your own video channel for Youtube is also another important part of branding and gaining peoples trust. The more you are out there the better!

Good Luck!

DanLew.com

I wanted to update the StandOutBlogger family with some exciting news. If you don’t follow me on Twitter (@StandOutBlogger) then you may have missed out on the massive news on Wednesday!

My gorgeous daughter Isabelle Rose was born and Mum (Fiona) and Bubby (Isabelle) and doing well.

I have just come back from the hospital and wanted to update you all with some of the details and a photo (plus let you know when some comments are not getting replied to and posts are not being written (no internet at the hospital).

Name: Isabelle Rose

Born: 30th June, 3:38pm

Weight: 6 Pound 8 Ounces

Where Did The Name Come From?

We absolutely loved the name Isabelle (which means God’s Promise) and it has a good range of options for nicknames (like Belle, Bella and Izzy) – and Rose is my wife’s middle name.

So forgive me if there are no posts over the next couple of days as I spend some quality time with my two beautiful girls!

PS. Wonder how many years until I can get her blogging? :D

After last posting about looking forward to the arrive of Dreamweaver CS5 and the ‘Content Management System (CMS) Framework’ and having a few days to play around with it and start to get a good basic understanding of how it works. From what I have seen there are people who will really benefit from the new features – and others who won’t. So in an attempt to save some bloggers a lot of money here’s my list of:

2 Types Of People Who Won’t Benefit From Dreamweaver CMS Framework

1. Blogger’s Who Don’t Want To Design WordPress Themes

A lot of bloggers are quite happy with their free or premium theme, and that is totally fine. If you have no interest in designing WordPress themes then it goes without saying that the new Dreamweaver CMS Framework will be of no benefit.

2. Bloggers Who Don’t Have Moderate Coding Knowledge

One of the reasons I was so excited about the new CMS framework feature of Dreamweaver was because while I have moderate knowledge of CSS styling – I really can only edit code and create basic code. By allowing me to see the changes I make in real time I knew this would improve my coding skills and help me create much better themes in a shorter time period than in previous versions of Dreamweaver.

If you have no CSS coding knowledge then I think you will really struggle doing anything more than changing colours as you are still working with the CSS stylesheet. So I would recommend that you do a bit of CSS studying before you spend the money to buy Dreamweaver.

What I Love About The CMS Framework…

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