The Online Sunshine Plan

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I started out several times to bring this to you.

A couple of years ago, it was a massive hardcopy volume that wouldn’t even fit into 1000 pages. I had to edit it severely to get it down to 800 pages – and that was a real squeeze.

It never sold, though. I knew I had to do some online promotion to get it to sell.

So I kept researching – since I was still missing something. I could never get started applying what I had already learned about marketing from all the best sources. So I looked broader.

In dealing with some unscrupulous Internet marketers, who cared more about money than helping others – this gave me the final clue and nudge to bring this book and site to you – even though it meant a complete re-write of the book.

Site Design

The basic purpose of this site was to give you the information I had.

This site went through several incarnations – and changed as I discovered more about my own passion, my own purpose I wanted to accomplish within this life. It was originally only going to be promotion, then built to a series of courses (and a mini-website for each of several small books), but then settled on a single blog-site with a single book.

While I could see that someone could take this wealth of materials (the files themselves won’t fit onto a single DVD – I have 6 individual CD’s ready in my office just to complement this book) – and have an incredible impact with it – I couldn’t see myself worrying too much about having to get it marketed and so forth. Just no interest.

What I did have was the responsibility to get it out to those who could use it. You.

This is purely an informational site – although there are some affiliate links to others’ products.

The copyright went to a Creative Commons license. And I shelved any effort to upload and promote individual CD’s, or even a multitude of ebooks – all of which could bring far more traffic, which could then be converted into email opt-in’s, and then sold a continuing array of items which would be useful to anyone wanting to learn Internet Marketing. I didn’t do that because my heart wasn’t in it (but you can license it for your own use…)

First, I re-edited the book once I got that key lesson from those ripoff artists. This cut the book down to 300 pages. I also edited the book with the idea of porting it to a blog. So the chapter headings are actually researched keyword niches.

Next I set up this site and stated copy/pasting/tweaking the copy into various formats. Not everything, but enough to put a lot of pages up and make the whole site interesting. (A note here: you’ll see the categories fit the chapters – so the articles I pulled out to use as blog posts are aligned to the chapters.)

Specific and Interesting points

One of the basic problems of this type site was that it is more a Content Management System than it is a blog. You’ll see that I have reproduced a lot of the book as static pages, and then articles from the book as blog posts – but under categories which aligned with the book chapters. As well, the lessons are simply short descriptions and then assignments to use that book. The blog became a resource for studying the book.

In having the book already written, it’s much easier to create a website from it. While I’ve done this before with other sites, this is the first to have actual lessons. Probably the ability of WordPress to have both “static” pages and blog posts. The earlier books I’d published through Blogger didn’t have that option.

Another point which sped this up was to take it private during development. Keep the search engines out of it. What that did is to be able to let me simply post stuff at an incredibly rapid rate – something which would have gotten me penalized by Google and others, as they would simply see it as spam. Once I had this all posted, I opened it back up to the SE’s. We’ll see what they do.

I realized when faced with that: I didn’t need the search engines for this, anyway. It’s all a private scene – and I”m not going to try to carve out any section of existing “Internet Marketing” consumers any time soon, if ever. So I just shut them out. (Best use would be to tailor make this to specific niches – if you’re a contractor, you could offer this book as a way they could learn to build their own website – just for contractors. And I’ve been intrigued about offering this to farmers. But Internet Marketers won’t listen – they’re too distracted.)

I still have analytics running, even though I’m not particularly promoting this site. And we’ll see what they show by this. Because I do have many incoming links from my other blogs. And for all of you, I intend to add your sites to this blogroll – all members will get linked from here (in addition to any comments you leave.)

But this poses an interesting point in book-publishing online – is that I can update parts of this with blog posts any time I want – and edit chapters as data changes. This will then allow me to create a revised version any time in the future.

Style points

The style of this site is very modern. Practically, you take a template you like and then use it. If you want to customize it, well – that’s just so many days are you aren’t making income. Once you get so you can afford it, then hire someone to do it.

If you like this template, the link is at the bottom – it’s a free template from WordPress.

Some limits were the number of pages I could have across the menu at the top. So I pushed a few together and created sub-pages which may or not actually belong together – but they seem to work after a fashion.

This particular blog is hosted on paid hosting, as a sub-domain of Midwest Journal Press – which is the main domain name for this hosting. (And that is it’s own case study, coming out tomorrow or so.)

The trick with this site was to make it so, that if need be, it could be extensible to a paid membership site – which seems to be accomplished. And while room doesn’t permit to discuss all the various plug-ins I’ve used on this one, I’ll post that list if someone ever asks.

Again – the offer stands: if anyone wants to take this over and make it a profitable, going scene – I’ll be more than happy to license it to them.

But for the purposes of being able to get this information out – the vast bulk of this site is complete.

Thanks for visiting my blog and reading this entry.
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Or – buy a copy of “Online Sunshine Plan” from my bookstore.