Is Lulu.com any good for selling your stuff online?
How good is Lulu.com as a way of selling your digital content online?
It’s not a good way to sell your digital content online.
Lulu.com does exactly what it says it will do; it lets you park your digital files, can turn them into hardcopy - and gives you a ’shop window’ to sell them from.
But what it doesn’t do - of course - is find a market that wants your stuff. It doesn’t bring people to your shop window. Without a market, Lulu.com is nothing but a delivery vehicle parked in the drive waiting for the phone to ring and that’s something that’s easy to forget in the rush to get out there and sell. Lulu.com offers some kind of marketing and promotion services but they’re unknown quantities and at a price that will make them seem a risky proposition to most self-publishers.
What is it Lulu.com then? According to The Times it is “a collision of the web, new printing technology and a universal yearning to vent and dazzle”. Fairly close, I’d say.
Lulu.com exists because everybody is hungry to sell the digital content that their new technologies have empowered them to produce. It is a response to the dream of finding enough buyers in the much-heralded ‘long-tail’ economy to generate real wealth. In short, Lulu.com is a reaction to the ‘get-rich-quick’ dream that exploded with the Google economy.
At first glance, you would think that, since Lulu.com stands to make a hefty percentage on each digital product or book sold, they would put a lot more imagination and effort into helping people to market and sell their content. But they’re not stupid and if they don’t, there’s a reason why not. The reason is probably because they know better than anyone that, in the words of Linda Stilborne, “books that are not worth reading still won’t sell”. Unless of course, it’s to friends and family - which is why many people consider Lulu.com a ‘vanity’ press.
Having got the (badly documented) but so far highly effective ‘e-Commerce’ plugin for Wordpress working, I no longer need Lulu.com as an expensive delivery vehicle. In deleting my Lulu.com account, the only thing I lose is their uncontrolled internal ‘author’ spam which is no great loss.
If you’ve got digital content to publish my advice is to face the challenge of finding a real market before you do anything else.
Sales training mp3s, CDs and fully-loaded iPods from ‘mu:kaumedia
Sales training audio mp3s - now available from the new ‘mu:kaumedia store
It’s a double celebration as we get the Worpdress e-commerce plugin working on this site!
Firstly, it means that we’re able to extended our blog design services to include highly Google-visible blog sites you can sell from straight away. So why not ‘Start Selling NOW’?
Secondly, it means we can now offer you Brian Griffin’s superb ‘Selling Services With Integrity’ audio sales training seminars direct from this site!
Choose from the 3CD set, the pre-loaded iPod Shuffle or download each seminar on a track-by-track basis for the amazingly low price of just £1.99 each!
Recorded last year on his tour of the South West UK’s best breakfast networking meetings, ‘Selling Services With Integrity’ is the perfect resource for those people who aren’t comfortable with traditional sales techniques and want a more ethical, consultative approach to selling their services.
Act now and get my eBook ‘What I hate about internet marketing’ - worth $697 - absolutely free!
Heres the free secret of making money online with internet marketing:
All I ask is that you pay a reasonable s&h of $7.99. (That was it, BTW, the Secret. Did you catch it?)
What I hate about internet marketing like this is that it’s so soulless and empty.
Why? Because it sells a dream of achieving wealth through marketing digital content - but the content itself is only ever about how to market and sell digital content.
It ends up that there are no ‘end buyers’ of this content other than people who want to learn the secrets of becoming rich by, ah, selling content about how to become rich by selling content about how to become rich by…. 
The benefits of voice-to-text software?
Voice recognition software can save you time - but it can also lose you the most important data
This morning, I received a copy of an email referring to an event we’ve been asked to podcast. It contained the following line:
“As you know I also spoke to move came who are blog and sane recordists…”
Not the best ad for voice-recognition packages - although I’m flattered at being called sane
Q: How do I upload a digital file with wordpress e-commerce plugin?
A: I don’t know how you get a digital mp3 file uploaded using the e-commerce plugin.
Nor do a lot of other fed up people it seems because there’s no documentation to tell you how.
Since there’s no answer to my most basic question I’m doing what I advised here and using this blog to hijack the search phrase If you arrived here looking for answer, sorry to disappoint you. Sadly, I’m just filling a void that shouldn’t be there to make a point.
A lot of the people who want to use Wordpress and plugins like this aren’t techies. That means they need well-written guidance in order to get these things to work, otherwise they’re going to get frustrated and give up.
Surely a straightforward Wordpress e-commerce plug-in is the Holy Grail of blogging? If the developer could just make this thing easier to use, I’ve no doubt he’d end up with more paying customers. If I could get it to work, I for one, would have no problem paying a fee to build it into sites for small business clients
A low-cost, low-risk way to try audio marketing
Using audio to market your products and services can be easier - and less expensive - than you think.
With our simple ‘Fastcast’ option, all you need to do is know how to use a phone.
You call our voicemail number with your message, promotion, news update, briefing and for a single low price, we’ll edit, produce and host it for you. All you need to know how to do is copy and paste the link to the finished file in your emails, email signatures, forum signatures, blogs, websites, documents, directory listings, Facebook… and away you go.
How about using Fastcast for customer testimonials? Just get your satisfied customer to call the Fastcast line with their story about how you helped them and what makes you so great. What better than your happy customer selling your business for you?
There’s no limit to where your message can go - and no limit to how many people can listen to it. To get started just call us on 01822 610841 or click here.
Why blogging is STILL a mystery
Blogging is supposed to be accessible to everyone. It isn’t.
Most of the business people I know wouldn’t have the experience or the time to do what I’ve done to set up blogs and make them work. That’s the first problem.
A second problem is that when I need to know the basics of blogging (from a non-developer stand-point) I can’t find a simple, coherent resource.
The following is a typical example (and bear in mind that I’m relatively experienced).
Research tells me that the default permalinks that Wordpress gives to new posts and pages in our blog are not very search-engine friendly. Ok, I get that. They have names like:
http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/?p=237
which of course, doesn’t contain any useful textual or descriptive information for the search engine to hook into. It’s not to difficult to see that something like:
http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/who-speaks-for-your-industry
would be a far better option. Non-technical people still with me in principle? Good.
Ok. So I find a guide (one of many) to show me how to change my permalink structure (can you hear the sound of the non-computer literate business people starting to fall by the wayside?)
Here’s what you do. Ready?
That’s it. Geddit? Thought not.
So I go try it out and Wordpress tells me it can’t write to my .htaccess file, so here’s the code I need to put into my .htaccess file. The problem is that, apparently, your .htaccess files is (by virtue of the ‘.’) invisible - which means that I can’t see mine to change it. Ah bollocks.
Of course, Wordpress doesn’t tell you this. It actually doesn’t tell you anything that would increase your understanding of what’s going on here nor for that matter does anyone else - and that’s the issue. Still with me? I thought not.
The following two posts (from a thread in the Wordpress developer forum on this issue last year) sums it up perfectly:
Look - I’m #1 on Google for my own name!
To get your business blog or site found in Google, you have to use the keywords that you want to be found on Google for.
Now, for many people this will sound obvious. If, however, you’ve ever heard yourself say ‘I’m #1 on Google for my company name’ or if you know someone who has, then you - and they - are still missing the point and the following might be useful.
The Google marketing challenge is quite simple. People have problems and needs and they go to the internet and Google for solutions to their problems.
The tricky part is that they talk about their problems in their own terms, from their own perspective, not yours. This means that while you might know that professional ‘change facilitation’ will help their staff team adjust to the recent American corporate takeover, they don’t. This means that so long as your blog is full of references to ‘change facilitation’ you aren’t going to get in front of them.
Why? Because they’re in their offices typing something else.
The Google keyword challenge is all about discovering (through experience, intuition and primary and secondary research) what those people are actually typing. You have to find out how they express that problem, that ‘pain’ for which - ideally - you are the perfect solution.
So remember, getting your own name or company name at #1 in Google means absolutely nothing. Google is great at picking out very particular strings of words and letters. Doing a Google search on “Google is great at picking out very particular strings of words and letters” will return this blog at #1.
What does that mean? Just that Google has found that string in this blog. From a computing and marketing standpoint, it’s totally unremarkable. Your name or company name is just a sequence of letters that Google can find easily.
That’s great if your potential American take-over customer somehow happens to type in your exact company name. But the reality is that isn’t going to happen because if it did, it means they already know about you so you don’t need to the web to market yourself. No, the reality is that they’re going to sit down and type something like:
“how to manage a staff team unhappy about corporate takeover”
Which means you need to be writing the keywords “manage” “unhappy” “staff” and “takeover” into your posts.
Good SEO / Bad SEO?
Google search for ‘Business Blogging Devon’ reveals thought-provoking result
This result embodies an interesting contradiction. On the one hand, search engine optimisation knows no geographical boundaries so well done starjox or i-do-SEO of South Carolina for demonstrating you’re right up there for business blogging.
On the other hand, when geography is clearly a part of the search term it begs the question whether this result is relevant or not.
“Of course it is” the SEO co. might say “Our company is a perfectly good solution for a person looking for a business blog designer in Devon. This is the internet remember.”
Is that really the case?
And if it is, then it’s a clear sign that the supplier / advertiser - not the consumer - defines ‘relevance’ in the Googlesphere. Not at all surprising, but worrying nonetheless.
Blam! The old footshoot ;-)
If your business is words and images, make sure you’re good with… ah, words and images.
Make a mistake and people will forgive you…..
But make a mistake in the thing you just said you were a specialist in - and people will roll their eyes and walk away.
I stopped pointing this kind of thing out to people because if I have to explain why making obvious mistakes in the thing you claim you’re an expert in…. oh forget it. 
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