Ebook obituary

Following a recent twitter link, I came across a page displaying a video of an IM seminar. The so called mentor had the audience in raptures.

They hung on to his every words,jotting down furiously, the bullet points of his speech. To keep this hub short and to the point I shall point out the bullets.

• Register a domain name (short as possible).
• Sign up with a reliable (paid) hosting service.
• Study web design and HTML coding.
• Learn SEO tactics and apply them to the website.
• Find niches that are not heavilly promoted.
• Secure an affiliation to a niche product that converts.
• Blog and write articles on the niche.
• Join social networks to spread the word.
• Make hub pages and squidoo on the niche.
• Write your own e-book for other affiliates to sell.

The mentor was probably paid thousands of bucks to give out this spiel and I agreed with most of his points, with exception to the following.

Dot com domain names are more valuable in the domain name industry, but for small businesses, dot org - net and info are more appropriate.

If you are just starting out and funds are low, there are free hosting services out there that are reliable on uptime, don't have forced ads, and allow you to foreward your domain name.

Freewebs has an excellent WYSIWYG website builder with lots of fun widgets to add to your pages, but although I recommend them for personal sites, if you do not upgrade (pay), you are stuck with their ads and may only use a subdomain.

If your niche is baby products and you wish to sell dolls or have a product showing how to make a doll, your ideal URL would be - www.babydoll.org (if the name is available). Potential customers would not like to type - www.babydoll/freewebs.com into their browser & it is simply not professional.

You don't need a degree on web design to create appealing web pages, and you can use online WYSIWYG site builders with easy applications.

The best way to plan a web page is to make your text short and to the point, people are becoming bored of reading long reams of text. Intergrate images to spice up the page, add audio with pleasant music whilst your visitor browses the page. More importantly - use VIDEO!

People love to watch a video and if the internal content is effective, you have more chance of making a sale. What is equally important is the presentation of the video surround, this is my own area of expertise.

Look at the following pics of online video and tell me which one is more appealing?

i am in total agreement with the mentor on SEO, if your site is buried behind several other entries on the search engines, how are surfers going to find you? Using a catchy site description and relevent keywords in the header code of your source HTML is essential.

The mentor is correct in advising to blog, write articles, social networking, hubs, & squidoo, but what he failed to point out is that you have to have a passion for your niche to be able to write with authority.

Going back to the video I viewed, I imagined myself being in the mentors classroom. When he came to the point of writing E-books, I'm afraid, I would have jumped up and corrected him.

In the near future, E-books will become extinct - they will still exist but not to the same popularity they once commanded. Video will become more evident in presenting relevent information.

I recently wrote e-books myself on "dynamic website building" and "how to create viral videos", but instead of releasing them in PDF or EXE book format, I am using the content in sections to create web pages.

E-books are great for portraying textural info, but they are static objects that gather dust on peoples hard drives. Information and technology is constantly changing, once the book is released it cannot be changed.

The author may perform a re-write and release a newer version each time, which would be good for revenue, or send updates in a news letter (build the list).

On the other hand, utilizing the content of your knowledge gives you great fillers for a website which can be constantly updated. Your content becomes (LIVE), and through aggressive persuasion, visitors may constantly return to your website, making it a viral proposition.

As mentioned earlier, surfers are now demanding more dynamic pages. If they land on your site and see just text and ads, they will click away from you faster than leopard in full flight. Your hard work of getting traffic to your site is lost and the conversion rate becomes minimal.

One other thing - don't push your own sales down their throats, add a pleasant musical video to entertain your visitors.

I leave you now with a video skin, I created for a friend. More skins and ideas are shown on our site - http://www.myvzine.com