More Giveaway Event Adventures

Another day, another learning experience.

I realized that I didn’t tell you where to find the giveaway. If you’re interested in picking up some cookbooks, go to The Great Cookbook Giveaway.

The giveaway started today, so I excitedly logged on, found my book, and clicked the link. And got an error page. Depressed, was I. I sent an email. Nothing. I finally found a way to open a support ticket and sent that. And waited. Decide I’d best start poking around the site and discovered that I’d entered the link to my page incorrectly. Rather than just entering the url with www, I needed to enter http://, then the rest of it. So, got that fixed, clicked on it, it worked! (I did get a response to the support ticket, but by then had it figured out.)

But I decided my page was ugly and that it really needed to be a squeeze page (where you have to enter your name and email address to get the download link for the book). I originally put the book download on the page and asked for a subscription in order to get the bonus.

I also decided I needed to make an ebook ecover, rather than just showing the picture of the cookies. Another learning experience. I found a number of the ecover-maker programs I’d downloaded wouldn’t really do the trick, especially the ones specific to PhotoShop, which I don’t own and can’t afford right now. I did find one that would give me enough of an image to be able to put it into the IrfanView image editor I have and then figure out how to actually get the title onto the picture. After a couple hours of dinking around with it, I had some success. It probably will make a professional graphics person cringe, but I like it well enough. So, that then had to be uploaded to the giveaway and to my site, so I could use it on my two new pages.

Then I changed the pages. I changed the squeeze page, and I changed the download page. Then I had to change the aweber email. And I had to upload the whole shebang to my server.

It’s now late afternoon, so practically the entire day has been spent on this project. Sure hope I get some subscribers out of it all. Even if I don’t, I now know I can make a cover for an ebook. I also learned a little bit more about working with images. And, I’m getting to be an absolute pro when it comes to uploading files and working with my aweber autoresponder.

All good experience.