Hi everyone! I am LOVING my foray into the self publishing on Kindle world. Thanks to Geoff Shaw’s Kindling course – and Paula Seymour’s encouragement (and tons of nagging by a myriad of you guys), I finally got my butt in gear and am WORKING IT! The most exciting thing for me is that I’m not even halfway through his course. Imagine everything I have left to learn.

Update: I’m so excited. So yesterday I released the first in my business book series for Online Career Plans. It debuted at #4 in Job Hunting and made it to the 8k range for all Kindle paid products – but like most things, it begins slipping. Watching rankings will drive you nuts as Geoff warns, so I’m just excited that it got a good start and now I’m ready to learn the ins and outs of marketing and promotions.

That’s one thing you have to be careful about – you don’t want to plop it up there and forget about it. You have to market it! I see people going for volume instead of getting existing books to rank, and I won’t make that mistake. On to today’s lesson of Geoff’s course!

Recipe Niche

Okay I’m going to read this and go through it because I learn from all of his sections but I will say up front that I have NO interest in the recipe niche. Except…I would like to maybe develop something vegetarian one day. So we’ll see!

He starts out showing us problems in the niche. That’s always good to know – it’s how I crafted my entire IM career! The audio is a bit of warning about doing it right versus wrong. Then there’s a video and then text.

The video shows an example of a Warrior Forum member doing it all wrong. FYI he’s mentioning reviews of your recipe books. If what this example showed was given to me and I created it and it was a disaster, I would be livid! Food is expensive. When I go make a recipe for a family of 5, it costs a lot. So if you do it the way the example shows, in my mind, you’re a thief. And yeah, I don’t care if those are strong words.

In the text below I like how he differentiates between building a true business in this niche and just doing the shortcut (aka: spammy, profitless) method. He discusses how plr buyers are mucking things up.

This is a two page section. His pages are so tiny at the bottom, it’s possible you might miss them, and we don’t want to miss any of Geoff’s training, so make sure you scroll down and look to see if certain sections are more than one page long.

When you click on it, it takes you to a page called Recipe Problems. This is NOT the same page that’s in the sidebar called recipe problems, so make sure you go through both! This page is more about warnings and people doing it wrong. I know he has to hammer this home because so many people just don’t know any better.

Recipe Problem

I click on the section with this title in the sidebar. It greets me with a big red warning. The bold advice above the green section is so true – do NOT listen to typical marketing advice – listen to people like Geoff!

Wait, this is partially the same page as before. My advice to Geoff is to delete the second page of the Recipe page and just put everything on this one page.

Recipe USP

This is all about having a Unique Selling Proposition. I don’t call it that, but I generally like to tell people to develop your own style and slant. Same thing.

This is good advice for any genre or niche. He has four great slants to position yourself in this niche. I laughed at the last bold sentence on the page. LOL!

What Not to Do

This is a tiny bit of text and a short video. He talks about a specific section where people are messing up. We learn a lot about things being wrong. Oh my horrid newbie-trained-by-scumbag-marketer example shown here! He talks about a syndicate.

He’s really blunt here. Love it. Also helps naive people learn how to size up real from fake reviews in case you don’t know how. There are tons of good general marketing tips in this Kindle course that teaches self publishing.

These are the type of product launch people who will RUIN the marketplace for others. Makes me so mad. Just want to beat people like this. UGH.

LOL Oh my look at the second example he shows of this guy or girl’s work – whoops! They make a little review slip up in there. Oh and if you look closely, you’ll see they are doubly stupid. Look at the star rating. Oh my. Bet this was some marketer tactic. So stupid.

I just don’t understand it. I would NEVER pay for reviews or review myself. Is it just because I take pride in my writing? I truly want to see what real people think. It’s so scummy to do it falsely.

Good lesson for ANY niche.

He gives a good lesson on copyrighting near the end of the video.

You the Cook

He talks about branding and your fear of it. There’s a gold nugget here when he says, “Why did you pay me whatever you paid for this training? Because you trusted you would get the correct (the best) information for what you’re wanting to achieve.”

I want to touch on this for a second. Any of you (there might be a few) who learn from me and LOVE the fact that I’m thorough and teach you ethics and good information…yet still use blackhat or scumbag techniques to shortcut your earnings by putting out crap products – you should be SO ashamed of yourselves!

You expect others to give you good information, yet you’re willing to slap up any old thing as long as it makes you money. You SHOULD be taken advantage of – maybe it would teach you a lesson.

Geoff does a good job making sure you understand what you can’t rely on.

Brand Circle

This is for ALL of us, not just recipe people. It’s about the bigger picture. You have to understand this and it’s not overwhelming. Geoff reassures us of that.

Help

This left sidebar section is where you go when you need help. I want to add a note. Help doesn’t mean you email Geoff asking him to personally mentor you. It doesn’t mean you ask him questions that are already answered in the course. It means if you can’t find an answer anywhere in there, you email him a short and sweet note – not two pages of your story. He’s busy – and not many marketers will help like this, so be respectful of his time.

Affiliate Program

He’s mapped out the program for becoming an affiliate and I have to say – I LOVE the way JVZoo and Kindling have this set up. There’s a blacklist. That means no serial refunders get it. Just the good guys. And if you do refund, you’re put on his blacklist. Some people might scoff at that but when training is this good, I’d have to really see good reason (like duplicate purchase or you got a message that you’ll be abducted by aliens tomorrow and won’t be able to do the course) in order to refund.

Bonus 1: Mass Marketing Control

He gives us this bonus, but it’s not actually part of the Kindling course, it’s just complementary – meaning it complements the information nicely. I am not going to do this just yet. Later I will. He even says not to get distracted by it, so I want to forge ahead with my specific Kindling training.

I can’t wait for tomorrow’s review – it’s TRICTION TIME! Geoff said this part of Kindling would impress me and I can’t wait to see if it does.

Tiff

Find Part 1 here

Find Part 9 Here

Find Part 11 Here

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