Giveaway 3rd Day Report
Today is officially the third day of the cookbook giveaway (although my listing is actually only 2 days working), and I thought you might be interested to follow along.
I’ve only seen one marketer promoting the giveaway to his subscription list, but all the lists I’m on are internet marketing lists, so I guess it’s not that surprising. As we all, know, I don’t have a list to promote to; changing that is what this participation is all about. Guess I’ll have to actually hunt down some cooking forums and see if I can make a post about the giveaway. Which I’m supposed to be doing anyway.
So, I now have a total of 18 subscribers from this giveaway, 14 yesterday and 4 so far today. And I have to figure out what I’m going to do about them. I promised in my 1st email to them, along with giving the book download information, that I’d occasionaly write about interesting cooking ideas and tips. Of course, I also need to figure out what I’m going to be trying to sell. I think I’ll wait until the middle of November to send the first mail, though. See how many folks I have by then!
I spent last night putting together a new look for my site, www.smilingpartners.com, which will be the main ebook site. I decided I didn’t like the original header I’d come up with, so I went searching for a new one. I found one in a package I bought over a year ago for building adsense sites. I’m thinking that perhaps the reason I couldn’t get excited about actually working on and developing that site was because I didn’t much like the way it looked. Now I like it, so I have no excuse. Besides the listing stuff I do for each book to sell on ebay, I’m adding another step to get it posted on the site and offer it for sale there. I’m going to have to figure out a shopping cart system. Oh boy.
Another change, if you’ve been here before, is that I moved the blogrush box to the top of the page. Here’s where knowing at least a little about html and how it works came in handy. I could go into the code for this blog template, figure out where I wanted to insert the code for blogrush, and actually do it. And it worked! Geekdom again.
With so many wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) site building tools, you might think you don’t really need any html knowledge now, but that’s a wrong idea. I’m not saying you have to be able to build a 40 page website with code, but you do need to be able to recognize a bit what the code is doing. It’s not as hard as you think the first time you look at the stuff - really. Just spend a little time looking through the code, and you’ll begin to see how it works.
For larger projects, or if you simply can’t make sense of what you’re trying to get done, I’ve been told that www.rentacoder.com is an excellent place to find someone who knows what they’re doing. You post a description of what you need done and programmers bid on the job. And that is the way to go if you can’t figure things out. But I must say there is a very nice feeling of accomplishment when you do something geeky and it works!
A word here about BlogRush. It’s a tool to help build readership and links for subscribers’ blogs. It’s free to sign up, and they’re building all kinds of tracking information into the system. If you have a blog that you’d like to publicize, click on the bottom of ad box to find out more. Even though my numbers are in double digits, compared with some of the blogs that have 10s of thousands of readers, it’s pretty exciting to see that there have been people coming to my site and actually reading my posts.
That’s it for today. I’ll let you know again about how the giveaway is going. Now I have to get back to the eBay work.
