I had previously heard about Kevin through one of his excellent Newbies Toolkit eBooks.  When a friend told me Kevin was going to release a Product Creation course I immediately took a look at his Sales Page and was impressed with what I read.  It was a physical product complete with daily videos, workbook and printed worksheets teaching students how to create their own eBook through a series of 35 daily lessons.  I therefore had no hesitation in ordering the course.

It was however not until the course arrived that I realised the large amount of work involved in creating and launching an eBook.  Kevin has taken the trouble to go into a lot of detail about each daily step but, although this makes his course an excellent resource to study and also to refer back to again and again over future years, it initially overwhelmed me making me consider demanding a refund (if you buy Kevin’s course you can read my rollercoaster range of emotions in rather graphic and expressive language in his forum as I worked my way through his course!).

One of the first things I learned from the course was the importance of taking baby steps.  Kevin has laid out the pathway to successful eBook creation broken down into small daily chunks.  I had to learn to focus and take each day as it came.  Kevin’s logical progression of daily tasks then means that, so long as you watch each day’s video, study the day’s lesson in the workbook, and complete the day’s homework using any supplied worksheets, you will find yourself on a sure road to success.

The second thing I learned was the importance of dedication.  Kevin’s course is not just a simple half dozen page eBook about how to write an eBook; but rather is a detailed, comprehensive step-by-step plan to success.  It covers the whole process right from initially researching ideas for the subject of your eBook through writing your eBook and laying it out using his supplied templates, creating your Sales Page using his supplied template, to installing the supplied Affiliate Management software on your website, and eventually how to market your finished eBook and generate sales.  In short Kevin’s course covers a lot of ground.  If you purchase Kevin’s course with a “let’s try this and see what happens” attitude you will fail.  It requires a lot of work.  The course covers each daily step in considerable detail but it is not until you receive a  comprehensive course such as this that you realise the amount of work involved.  No stone is left unturned; everything is explained in detail.  It is vital to approach the course with the vision of the successful completion of your eBook before you or you will fail.

Which brings me to the third thing I learned; that I was not alone.  Kevin realised that his students would be spread around the world and may feel isolated and alone so has made the workshop interactive.  In line with the fully comprehensive range of physical parts of the course (videos, workbook, worksheets etc) he also takes care of the emotional and motivational aspects of eBook creation by providing email support, an interactive weekly video conference call where students can fire questions at him (and each other), and a private forum where students can freely discuss ideas and help each other along the pathway.  It is easy to become discouraged along the pathway as you hit parts of the course which you may personally find difficult and at times your vision of becoming a successful eBook author may begin to fade.  It is at times like this when you really appreciate the interactive aspects of Kevin’s course.  It is nice when we can share our experience and skills and help our fellow students along the pathway; but there are also times when we have to humble ourselves and recognise we ourselves need help, encouragement and motivation.  That is when the interactive side of Kevin’s course becomes a life saver.

So what has the course actually done for me?  Well it has given me the confidence and skills to create eBooks and I now have over half a dozen eBooks for sale on my little website www.MadeSimpleGuides.com These eBooks are not rehashed PLR material but eBooks Kevin’s course has given me the skills and confidence to write myself.  As I mentioned; one of the things I really like about Kevin’s course is that it is a physical product which I will have forever, an investment I can refer to again and again and work through each time I create a new eBook as I expand my little library of Made Simple Guides.  Thanks to Kevin’s course I am now beginning to earn an income from the internet and hopefully soon it will grow into our main household source of income… but each journey begins with the first step.  Are you willing to take your first step along the path to successful eBook creation and buy Kevin’s Product Creation Labs Private Workshop course today?

Kevin isn’t just a master product creator, but also a wonderful teacher and his daily video lessons are easy to follow and understand. Then, he gives you easy daily tasks to build your own successful info product business. Those who took Kevin’s original Workshop are already selling their own products online.

Go check out the Private Workshop now at:

http://madeeasyguides.com/products/kevin-riley-private-workshop

After you get your own Private Workshop, you can join me in Kevin’s success forum and at the Mastermind Sessions. We’ll buddy up and support each other as we build our businesses. I’m quite excited about the possibilities and the future.

BTW, Kevin even has set up a great way for us to get our entry fee back. He helps us in the Quick Start Video that you get first.

Come join me and let’s do this:

http://madeeasyguides.com/products/kevin-riley-private-workshop

I am looking forward to us working together.

Searching the internet I found a free WordPress Bookmark plugin supplied by AddThis and have installed it on this Blog.

This Plugin (the new drop-down version) will automatically insert the AddThis widget below each post in your blog (see it below this post). It’s very easy to install, you don’t even need to change anything in your templates. Here are the instructions:

1) CLICK HERE to download the software onto your computer
2) Unzip the file
3) Upload its contents into your wp-content/plugins directory
4) Log into your Wordpress blog, click on the ‘Plugins’ tab, and click ‘Activate’

This Plugin supports Stats. If you want to get bookmarking statistics (e.g. top bookmarked posts over various time periods), open the .php file and set the ‘addthis_username’ variable to, well, your AddThis username.

Note that this free software is not just restricted to use on Blog Posts; you can also use the Bookmark icon on a normal website, MySpace page or in a newsletter.  You can get the code for these other uses from within your AddThis account area.

Have fun!

A couple of weeks ago I decided I could benefit from formal Internet Marketing training. I have enough technical knowledge to feel at ease using the internet and building websites but very little experience of actually making money from any activities on the net. I therefore had a look around the many different courses that were available and decided to join the Step-By-Step Internet Course (www.stepbystepinternethelp.com). I have to admit that one of the reasons I opted for this course was that it is completely free. Bearing this in mind I was not expecting much support however I am finding that the support is exceptional and the tutors very friendly and helpful. Again, bearing in mind I am already technically competent I was expecting the course, which is aimed at complete beginners, to be extremely basic and not much use to me; yet the basics, such as creating a simple website and using FTP are covered in a series of very good eBooks you receive free when you sign up and it is not very long before the Project Leader (Carol Smith) gets down to business and has her students brainstorming ideas for themes and niches they want to build their business on. The course it broken down into very manageable steps each prompting students like myself to take action and am finding the methodical way it is teaching me the process of building my Internet Marketing career invaluable.

I will keep you up to date with my progress via this Blog as I work my way through the course. I am currently at the brainstorming stage (Step 5).

One way around this would be to publish a simple “Free Gifts” download link in your newsletter. This can be ok but sometimes you may like the extra reassurance of password protecting the download page. You can then publish a new password in each newsletter with the reassurance that only current subscribers will then be able to access your protected webpage.

There are many programs available to create, and manage, Membership Areas on websites but these can be expensive, complex to set up and way over the top if all you want to do is password protect a single webpage.

I got around this problem for free by using a simple PHP script and thought I would share this script with you in case you also find it useful.

You can see the basic script in action by going to:
www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Subscribersonly.php
and using the username “subscriber” and password “letmein”.

My “Subscribersonly.php” webapge begins with the following partial script:

<head>
<title>eBook Download Shop Newsletter Subscribers Only Area</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php
if (isset($_POST["entered_username"]) && isset($_POST["entered_password"])
&& ($_POST["entered_username"]==”$current_newsletter_username”)
&& ($_POST["entered_password"]==”$current_newsletter_password”))
{
?>

I then typed in all the HTML text from my private webpage followed by the second half of the script:

<?php
}
else
{
  if (isset($_POST['entered_username']) || isset($_POST['entered_password']))
  {
     print “<p style=\”color: rgb(255, 0, 0);\” align=\”center\”>
           <b>Oooops! Incorrect Login!</b></p>”;
  }
  print “<form method=\”post\”>
  <h3 style=\”text-align: center;\”>Please login using the details from our latest newsletter:</h3>
  <div style=\”text-align: center;\”>Username <input name=\”entered_username\” type=\”username\” size=\”16\” maxlength=\”16\”><br>
  Password <input name=\”entered_password\” type=\”password\” size=\”16\” maxlength=\”16\”><br>
  <br>
  <input name=\”Login\” value=\”Login\” type=\”submit\”></div></form>”;
}
?>
<p> </p>
</body>
</html>

That is it. Simple and to the point. You can of course have a lot of fun fancying-up the appearance of the webpage as much as you desire but the above script is the basic guts which you need to password protect your page.

I hope you found this free Webapge Password Protect script useful.  Unfortunately this Blog template sometimes messes up the formatting of my PHP code snippets but if you are one of my newsletter subscribers you can, as usual, download the files mentioned in this tutorial from the subscribers area of our website.

I felt that I would like my own website to have it’s own little Favourites Icon (called a favicon ) and after reading up a bit about them realised that although there are many software programs sold to help you create them they are actually very easy to create for free. I therefore thought I would write this short Blog Post to show you how I created mine for free in case you would like to do the same.

The first task is to create your icon. I used the “Paint” program included free as part of Windows. All you need to do is create a 16 pixel by 16 pixel drawing using only the 16 colour bitmap palette.

Warning: A 16 pixel square is SMALL! Try to keep your icon simple or it will just be a blur!

The icon I created, and saved as 16 colour bitmap called “favicon.bmp” looks like this:

I then used the free image viewer program IrfanView to view my icon file. While viewing it I clicked on “FILE > SAVE AS” and saved it as “FILE TYPE = ICO – Windows Icon” with the name favicon.

Once I had my “favicon.ico” file I used FTP to upload it into the root directory of my webspace.

I then used a Text Editor to add the following extra line to my “index.html” file just before the “</header>” tag:

<link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”http://newsletter.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/favicon.ico”>

I uploaded my modified “index.html” page and when I viewed my webpage my little favicon magically appeared! Amazing; I had created my own little favicon for free without spending a single penny. Why don’t you try it!

Have fun!

If I was going to sell my eBook I could use one of the several Digital Download software packages (such as SmartDD Lite which I give free to my newsletter subscribers, or MyDigitalDispatch) to interact with PayPal and manage downloads but what if I wanted to give my eBook away free and was looking for a much simpler, no cost, D.I.Y solution?

I find it easier to explain through example so lets take the eBook “Opening an_AWeber Account Made Simple” and go through the steps of creating a cloaked link for it.  I have put a copy of this eBook HERE.  What I want to do is hide it in a secret location in my webspace and then create a cloaked link to it.  While we are doing this I also want to add a counter to the link so I can see how many times the eBook is downloaded.

The first problem is that if someone clicks on my bare Make Money Online link then the eBook will open up in their web browser.  This is good as it will enable them to read it, but bad because their web browser will show them the location of the eBook.

The first task is therefore to pack the eBook into a ZIP file so that it will not be automatically opened in a web browser but downloaded instead.  There are several ZIP programs but I prefer to use WinZip.  You can download a free trial version from HERE.

Once you have zipped your eBook try typing it’s location into your web browser and the web browser should, this time, ask you if you want to download the file rather than opening it (click HERE to see what I mean).

The next task is to hide your zipped eBook file in a secret location in your webspace.  For this example I have created a subdirectory called Secret_Location and moved my eBook into there.  The secret location of my eBook is therefore now: http://www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Secret_Location/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple.zip.

But I now have a problem in that there are several other files stored in this location and I want to to stop people I am giving this link to from stealing these other eBooks.  The first thing to do is to create a simple “index.html” file.  If I gave someone the above link and they knew a bit about websites they would know that to list all the other files in my secret location all they would need to do is type in the directory name and miss off the file name and their web browser would show them a list of all the files stored there.  One way to get around this is to use your Text Editor (such as Windows Notepad) to create a simple file containing the following:

<html>
<head>
<title>Error</title>
</head>
<body>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>You are not authorised to view this directory</p>
</body>
</html>

Save this files as “index.html” in your secret directory.  Now if a hacker types your secret directory’s location into their web browser they will simply see a warning message rather than a list of your eBooks.

To recap: so far we have converted our eBook into a ZIP file, created a secret directory in our webspace, uploaded the zip file into this directory, created a hacker warning file and also up loaded this into our secret directory.

Now that we have done the basics the fun starts as we firstly want to create a cloaked link to this eBook to hide it’s location and then add a download counter.

Our aim is to be able to give people a link such as:
www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Recommends/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple

The first thing we need to do is to create a directory called “Recommends” and then within that directory to create another directory called “Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple”.

Once we have created these directories then we can use a Text Editor (such as Windows Notepad) to create the following file and save it as “index.html” within our new Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple directory:

<html>
<head>
<title>Opening an AWeber Account Made Simple</title>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;URL= http://www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Secret_Location/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple.zip“>
</head>
<body>
<p style=”text-align: center;”>Please wait for a few seconds while download starts…</p>
</body>
</html>

Now you can tell people the link to your eBook is:
www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Recommends/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple

And they will have no idea at all that your eBook is actually stored in:
www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Secret_Location/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple.zip

We have therefore created our first cloaked link.  If your webspace is PHP enabled then you can make this cloaked link more useful by adding a download counter to keep track of how many times your eBook has been downloaded.

If your webspace is PHP enabled then we can delete the index.html file we created earlier within our MakeMoneyOnlineForNewbies directory and, instead, upload the following three files:

A file named “index.php” containg the following:

<?php
 $hits = file_get_contents(“counter.txt”);
 $hits = $hits + 1;
 $handle = fopen(“counter.txt”, “w”);
 fwrite($handle, $hits);
 fclose($handle);
 Header(“Location:http://www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Secret_Location/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple.zip”);
?>

A file named “counter.txt” containing just the single character zero.

0

and a file named “downloads.php” containing the following:

<?php
$hits = file_get_contents(“counter.txt”);
echo “My eBook has been downloaded “.$hits.” times”;
?>

The download link that we give to customers to download their eBook still remains:
www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Recommends/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple

But now we can see how many times our eBook has been downloaded by simply running the “downloads.php” file in our web browser:
www.blog.ebook-download-shop.co.uk/Recommends/Opening_an_AWeber_Account_Made_Simple/downloads.php

I hope you found this Blog post useful.  If you are one of my newsletter subscribers you can download the files mentioned in this tutorial from the subscribers area of our website.

As I have mentioned in my ABOUT ME page; I am currently only at the start of my long journey along the path the earning a full-time living online.  My online income is currently insignificant and I am no guru; but I would like to use this Blog as a medium to share what little experience I have already gained.

As I also mentioned; I am fully aware that with so much information overload and with everyone trying to sell everyone else almost every product immaginable, it is easy to colapse confused and exhausted then get caught in the trap of forever seaching for, and reading about, the latest and hotest techniques but END UP NEVER ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING.

I would therefore like to start this Blog sharing the simple steps I have taken so far in preperation for my journey.

The first thing I done was to seek out a group of like-minded people to accompany me along the pathway.  To achive this I signed up to John Thornhill’s 90 Day Powerseller program which has an excellent and very helpful members-only forum and provides access to an enormous range of info products with Resell Rights which I can use to start bringing in some income.

I opened an eBay account and a PayPal account.

I have purchased my own Domain Name and webspace.

I have installed the free eBook website shop from the 90 Day Powerseller Members Area.

I have subscribed to the Aweber Autoresponder Service ready to start building a subscriber list for my newsletter.

I have purchased an excellent eBook about creating your own info product and am using a “taster” version of it free of charge to people who sign up to my mailing list.

Finally I have set up this Blog with the hope that the experiences I share along my long journey to a full-time online income will be an encouragement and help to others.

So there you have it.  This is the start of my journey.  With trembling feet and shaking hands I make this, my first entry in my Blog, and, with new eBook website poised to receive visitor and my empty mailing list waiting for it’s first subscriber, I take my first small step out into The Big Wide World and begin my journey.

Wishing you sucess,
Ian.