I am not a fan of writing sales letters. However it is not something that I am willing to out-source when I am in the testing phase. There shouldn’t be a need for me to shell out mid-$XXX for a decent sales letter when I am not even sure that there is a market for my idea. So that is why I am stuck doing it myself, and it is not easy. I can write about a lot of stuff and simply ramble on, however to write a good sales letter there is a form that should be followed, and at the end I should be able to convince myself to shell out the dough for my letter.

All of that moaning aside, I have almost finished my first. There is some tweaking, design stuff, etc but the content, flow etc is there and done. I am going to spend a couple of hours this weekend finishing it up and putting it live. From there I am going to start research for an AdWords campaign and then get that started for one week on Monday. I still have to get my newsletter software finished and tweaked so that while I am testing I am building a potential list.

If you are wondering how I am planning on doing a reasonable test without a product, I am going to have the same set-up and when they fillin a bit of information to take them to the paynow page, I am going to have a blank page that describes that the check-out is closed temporarily and if they want to hear back via email when it is online they are to confirm there address.

If I they get reasonable conversions I will move onto the product generation phase. Then really start the marketing ?

But, before I can get there, I still ahve to finish that damn Sales Letter.

I have come up with a couple of ideas to get started on to start to reach for my goal of $500 per month of passive income. The big thing right now is that I have to come up with a sales letter that I can use to test the product that I am thinking about. One of the major things that I have learned is that you really have to test to see if there are people out there that want to pay for the service that you are willing to offer.

Writing a sales letter seems like it is a simple thing, but it is one of the harder things that I have done. I can write great articles, ones that people can get a lot of information out of, but trying to convince someone that they NEED to drop some quid on my product is not so easy. I have went back to the sites that I have bought stuff from in the past and I am going to start from there. I hope to have the letter complete by the end of this week and then drive about $100 with of PPC to it and see what kind of conversions I get. I am going to set a certain price point about mid-range from what I would want to sell it for and use that. If the test is successful then it is off to make the product. I think that it will take a good 2-3 months to complete the book, and then some more money to get it edited.

I am wondering how productive people think that they are. If I was going to put a number to it, I would say that in the time that I put aside for my work, personal business work not day job, I am probably around 85-90% productive. However, this is a new thing. I used to be closer to 50%. The reason was that I was in information overload. I spent a lot of time reading other blogs, participating in other forums and basically wasting time. Sure I didn’t think that it was a waste of time then, but now I do.

I am on an info diet. I took the marketing rule of 20/80 to heart and have added it to my daily life.

I have really cleaned house.

I check my business email once in the evening, and take care of everything that I can right away. Moderation of my forums, blogs and directories, following up on business transactions and participating in my forums now take me 30 mins most. It used to use up over half of my work time since I would be going to the blogs and forums immediately when I got an email to moderate something. NOw I do it once a day.

The other thing that used to kill me was keeping up on all of the forums that I participated in. So I have cut that back to only the ones that have served me VERY well in the past, whether that means that it was a great information source, great people or some great deals.

I still have some fat to trim, but I am getting better. I have a hard time figuring out how productive I am when I am researching niches, keywords, etc. But the more I do the more I know when I am “barking up the wrong tree”

So in the end, take a look at what you do with your time, and what makes you happy. There is a good post over at Hoserlife about some reasons why a Low Information Diet is good for you.

I just finished a very interesting read. I wasn’t expecting much out of it when I ordered it on Amazon, I just had some aff money in the US store, and you can pretty much only buy books if you are not in the US. I am doing a review of the book right now, so I will let you know what one it is then

Anyway, it really changed the way that I look at the way that I do online business, and my life/job in general. I think, however, that I tried to jump into the process laid out in the book way too fast. I got into the product creation portion way before I was ready, and before I had the spare time to do such. I have to learn how to “eliminate” before I “automate” (if you read the book, you know what I am talking about), I am working too many hours at the day job, and there are a few of my sites that currently need a lot of TLC. So what I am going to do is use some of the techniques in the book to see if I can raise my productivity at work so that I can get more done and get home at a decent time and therefore I have more time to work on my own projects.

I think that I will have the books review done soon, but if I don’t have time I will simply edit this with the title

It is a recommended read, as long as you have the correct mind set and don’t take the title too literally. You really have to do work, like every successful person online says so, however it is the way that you set up your company that is the biggest thing.

I have had a lot of different ideas in my head but for some reason I was having a hard time getting them out when I opened the word preocessor. I would simply sit there trying to think about where to start and what to write. I knew what it was that I wanted to write about but I kept stuttering off the start. Not really sure how I wanted to put it into words.

Then I stumbled on to a way to get around this, it worked for me and maybe it will help you.

I got away from the computer. I didn’t do this on purpose, I was waiting for someone and had a note pad and pen in my bag. So I took it out and started writing. Before I knew it I had 3 good blogs posts on paper, not to mention a couple of really good outlines for articles that I was hoping to write.

This method may seem to be counter productive since now I have to type them in, but I am a fast typer and the extra time does not affect my productivity much. It really is a moot point if I was going to be sitting in front of my computer for 30 min to an hour trying to think about what to put down.

Does anyone else have a good idea to get around writers block?