How I'm making my blog create my autoresponder series

I'm creating a blog (posting to an existing one) which creates a blook out of my book. But I'm going to get some other mileage out of it - and I'm not just creating a simple set of blog posts, but working to get some truly viral marketing going, just like from my book "An Online Millionaire Plan".

To do this, I take a few simple steps:
Caveat: I don't expect everyone out there to be able to do this. Note that I'm not using MS products (other than my O/S) to get this done. I don't think you can actually do what I'm going to tell you if you use IE and MS Word. Use Open Source products whenever you can. They are much better quality and much, much cheaper.

1. Start out with your source materials. For me, it's this 765-page book. Use the OpenOffice file you created it with. (Adobe PDF keeps the line breaks intact. MS Word copies some really strange symbols.)

2. Chunk this into sections, about 500 - 2000 words or so, more or less. (This makes lousy blog entries, and not much better use as articles, but pretty good mailings - I hope.)

3. Now, as you cut and paste, this makes a great time to make it into a podcast with text-to-speech. (You have to get a good voice, not the default noise MS gives you - I've got AT&T's Crystal, which is great for what I need - I quit looking when I got a decent voice.)

4. Now you have to put the podcast somewhere which will support the bandwidth - otherwise you go broke with the overhead... There's a few places to put this, like Internet Archives.org - but you just need something with a fixed location.

5. Next is to set up a blog post. Make sure you have a link for the title - this is where the MP3 file link goes.

6. Then copy/paste your text in there. It saves the formatting from your OpenOffice doc, so saves you some work in this regard.

7. Add some links, like to your subscription page - so readers opt-in to your mail list. When everything looks the way you want it, then post away.

8. If you think you're done, think again. Now the fun starts - we want to make it into an article (or several), but not until we make a lens out of it. But that's after we do a couple of more things...

9. Check it out on Google's KeywordExternal and see what keywords you're using for this post. Here, if you want to, you can tweak your page to put a few more in here and there.

10. Now social bookmark it everywhere. OnlyWire is a good tool for this.

11. OK, now we have the keywords you're using and we're ready to make a Lens out of it. Go to Squidoo and make a lens, just copy/paste your blog post into it. Enter the keywords you found above. Add some modules - at least four. Link back you your blog post. Then social bookmark your lens.

12. Finally, we're ready to make an email out of it so you can send it through your autoresponder. Another cut and paste job, from your blog (or lens) post into your autoresponder files. And there you go.

Now at this point, you can just split the thing up, make articles out of that post - and get people to sign up for your newsletter. Enough posts like that and you have an ebook to give them. Or you can just extract a chunk of the book and fork that over as it's own ebook.

Nice that you had that huge book to do all that work for you, eh? Write once, publish many ways/times. Great for us authors/editors out there.

What did you get out of this? Nice little viral podcasts to go with some blog entries. Backlinks to your blog from Squidoo lens - both of these now sending people to your mailing list. When they get there, they get all those blog posts they had been missing - plus a chance to buy your book from Lulu.com; not bad, not bad at all.

Keep this up and you're on your way to bestseller and millionaire status. Cheers!

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Oh -- go ahead and sign up for an Online Millionaire Plan Newsletter! You get some free ebooks right off and I've got some great stuff coming along as I build it.

And... feel free to visit my Lulu bookstore - Go Thunk Yourself!