Ity Bites, The Art of Consuming Entire Elephants

Don’t know anything about blogging or bloggers or even what a blog is? No worries, in just 4 weeks, you’ll be blogging, writing posts on your own blog. You will be a regular commenter on other peoples blogs and you will be an official blogger. We will take Ity Bites everyday. If you read through all this and it seems old hat or you keep saying ‘I know that, get to the good stuff’, then, this series of lessons IS NOT FOR YOU. No apologies. I didn’t write it for those of you familiar with blogging. I’m writing this for folks like my mom. She is really excited by getting and sending email. She loves the fact that she receives 10 emails a day. I love the fact that she is so excited by getting 10 emails. I want to keep that love of online technology growing, even while I uncover it’s mysteries for her.

My mom has a dream of self publishing and selling her first book of poetry.

I want to help her. So I start sharing my love of the internet and revealing all the cool technologies she can use to help her publish and sell her book online, her eyes glaze over. I hear a faint, uh-huh’s every other sentence. Her head droops and I can tell, she’s gone. She’s not asleep though, I’ve just lost her. I’m using words that don’t mean anything to her, tweets, blogs, comments, widgets, marketing, teleseminars, podcasts, virtual book tours. I wasn’t being fair to her or her dream.

That’s what made me realize there were others out there, just like her, who want to self publish and sell their books online but it’s all too confusing. There is too much to process all at once. There are too many new tools and techniques and things to do and gosh darnnet you aren’t stupid but every time someone says something about blogging and making money and hosting and domains and marketing and online in the same sentence it feels like you’ve just gone deaf, dumb and blind. Yep, I get it. I’ve seen it. Heck I’ve lived it. My mother isn’t stupid and neither are you. It’s all just scary, new, overwhelming and confusing.

So because I wanted to give her a good reliable road map for how to do all the things she would need to do in order to properly market her books, you get the same steps she does. So that’s where we are. I’m still researching a lot of things on her behalf. I’m still coordinating things. It’s what I did in my day job for 12 years. It’s what I’m doing as a consultant for local businesses now and it is exactly what I’m going to do for my mom. I’ll be teaching her about all the things that I’ve been researching, listening to, reading, watching, doing and learning. I’ll make the mistakes, you get to see them. I’ll correct the mistakes and learn from them. Maybe you’ll avoid those mistakes. You reap the benefit. The focus here is on promoting and marketing a self-published book. That’s an elephant to someone who only reads emails and surfs to specific pages online. I’ll do my level best to keep my mom away from online scams and other not so savory marketing tricks and tactics and that means you get to know about them too.

Most of all I get to help my mom accomplish her goal. That’s where Ity Bites, Practicing the Art of Consuming Entire Elephants steps up to the plate. I won’t pretend to know everything. What I promise to do is help unravel the knot around publishing, promoting a book, internet marketing and in the process I’ll make eating an entire elephant doable and fun.

I’ll say it again, everything I”ll talk about here is geared towards self-publishing and actually making profitable sales as a self-published author. That doesn’t mean Ity Bites can’t be applied to any thing else. I just want to warn you, were talking about internet marketing and making money online as part of achieving a dream. Many of the how-to’s here will involve technology. Technology should never be the factor that stops you from achieving your dream.

Oh from time to time, fees will be involved. When a fee is involved, it’s been researched and determined to be worth our investment. You know your goals and dreams. Make the decision to invest because it moves you closer to those goals and dreams, not because I say invest. I’ll also tell you about those fees upfront and try to provide no cost options, where they are available.

So, I want you to join me, my mother and everyone else as we take Ity Bites, Practicing the Art of Consuming Entire Elephants.
We’ve already started but we are still missing YOU!
So come on. We’ve got plenty of elephant.