Forgot to mention this the other day! Life really does get crazy sometimes.

My ebook, One Arm Recipes is approved and ready for purchase for anyone interested. Or you can join the affiliate program, since it’s through Clickbank. You can do it through Clickbank or sign up through my affiliate interface, which will allow me to contact you when I start offering other ebooks for sale as well.

Well this is taking longer than I hoped it would. Submitted my ebook for approval on Sunday, here it is Wednesday afternoon and no approval yet. I’m just about climbing the walls here.

That’s not to say I’m sitting still. Today I applied to eBay’s new Partner Network and was approved. If you haven’t applied yet, I read on the BANS forum that you need to list one of your sites on the application or it may go to manual review which takes about 2 weeks. No idea if it’s really that bad, but it’s pretty easy to list a site. Build a Niche Store has their new version out, so I need to get my sites changed over and start at least a couple new ones.

My son has speech therapy 3 days a week, and when it’s my turn to take him, I brainstorm. I have about 6 more ebook ideas lightly mapped out. I think I will get these going much more quickly than this first one was, now that I know a bit more about what I’m doing.

And of course I continue with my article marketing. My normal routine is to spend the first part of the month writing out articles to be distributed throughout the month. That works pretty well for me. A nice steady stream of articles linking to this site or that of mine.

So while I’m getting twitchy about this whole ebook approval thing, I’m still being pretty productive. Getting it off my to do list really helped. There’s something about getting stuff accomplished when you’ve been blocking your own progress that really feels good.

Fear is something most people don’t really like to talk about. You want to feel as though you are doing everything you can to succeed. But for most people there’s some aspect of their home business that is harder for them to work on than others, or something they would like to do but haven’t worked up the nerve for yet.

In my own case, I can cite two examples. The first is releasing my first ebook for sale. I’ve done a free one before, but the thought that people might pay for what I write is quite an idea. Releasing it has been a challenge, even though I know the information is good.

Then again, I get similarly nervous anytime I see someone reading my work, even though it is almost always praised.

But there’s a bigger step I hope to take: either podcasting or video blogging. I know I’ll work myself up to face those fears sometime; it’s just a matter of when and how.

How do I do that?

The first step for me is to simply work up to it. Getting things ready for release is one of the easiest times to procrastinate, of course, as I try to make everything just perfect. Perfect shouldn’t matter, however. Good enough should be, well, good enough.

The big step comes in deciding to take action. You have to figure out what it will take to make yourself do so. For me, that means not having an audience. Makes me more self conscious and therefore more reluctant to do what I ought to be getting done It may be different for you.

That decision to take action is a huge step, especially if you really do follow through on it. There are no benefits to failing to take action. Taking action means you might fail or you might succeed. It’s a risk.

Fortunately, it’s a risk that often feels good after. No matter how nervous trying something new for my business makes me, even if it’s a flop, it feels good to have just tried.

Sometimes fear is a good thing. If you’re fearful about overspending on your home business, you probably need to be looking at what it is you are doing. You could be right about that. If you’re considering something that might make a mess of your business reputation, that’s another good reason to think again.

Overall, I like it when something makes me a little nervous in business. It means I’m challenging the limitations I’ve placed on myself. While getting past my fears hasn’t always lead to success, it has helped me to move forward many times.

And for those who are wondering, no, things aren’t quite ready with the ebook yet, but it’s really, really on the list to get submitted for approval today so I can quit this whole procrastination thing. It took me a while to really acknowledge to myself that fear was the problem, and I have myself just about past that part now.

Edited to add:

Yes, I submitted the product for approval with Clickbank. Just waiting for that last bit now!

One of the things that is most important to me in deciding to sell ebooks is to do well with my affiliate program. I would like to sell more than one, and I’d like to make it easy for my affiliates to know about my products.

Now, being with Clickbank, it may seem as though I’m limited in that way, and you could say that I am. After all, anyone can sell a product through Clickbank as an affiliate if they know how to make the links. But I’m hoping affiliates will want to keep in contact so that if future products of mine are of interest to them, they can sell them as well.

Enter EasyClickMate.

Going through this software will have advantages both for me and any affiliates selling my products through the links it generates. It makes it less clear what the affiliate links are, as they don’t look like standard Clickbank links, even if they aren’t cloaked.

It also allows you to run multiple products on Clickbank through a single account, rather than having to register multiple ones. There’s a decision to make here… just have one account with multiple products, knowing that only one of your pages will be listed in the Marketplace, or register for multiple accounts, paying the fee each time. The first account is $49, but you can request secondary accounts for $29.95, by noting the request when you go for product approval.

EasyClickMate also allows you to subscribe your affiliates who sign up through the software to a newsletter hosted through a service such as AWeber or GetResponse. Communication with affiliates has always been one of the weak points of Clickbank. This allows you to limit that problem.

EasyClickMate is also compatible with DLGuard. Since I now have plans for a few other ebooks, I do think this will be worth the investment. The two products  should work together nicely to help me grow my ebook business well.

Probably the hardest part right now, in all honesty, is spending the money. With my husband laid off, it’s quite a chunk to be spending on my business. I do see it as an investment, however, and worth the expense. A bit painful, and if things don’t sell well a definite impact on the funds we have available right now, but I think I can deal with that.

Never get a sinus infection following catching the flu when you’re trying to release an ebook. It makes your original schedule go completely to pieces.

For a couple weeks there I was sick enough or just in enough sinus pain that there was no way I could work for more than a short time at the computer. It was miserably frustrating. But now I’m far enough along the road to recovery that I can and will get things moving again!

And talk about motivation!

Beyond merely needing the money (who doesn’t?), I learned that Build a Niche Store version 3 came out today. I love BANS; it’s done well for me. And my next project planned has long been to chronicle releasing a BANS site using version 3 just as soon as it came out.  Now it’s out and I’m not quite ready!

But I’ve made more progress on my sales page. Writing a sales page is in many ways harder than writing the ebook itself. Once that’s ready I also want to prepare a solid Affiliate page to encourage affiliates to offer my book… and to encourage them to sign up so that I can notify them of future ebooks I will write.

There’s still a goodly amount of work I want to get done, hopefully within the next day or two. I really, really want to get this thing launched and earning.

It’s been crazy around here, since shortly after my last post. I mentioned the kids were sick, which took up pretty much all the time I’d had scheduled for working on my ebook release. The only thing I managed was that bit of research on protecting my ebook from unauthorized downloads.

So of course as they’re getting better, I get the flu too. That is how it works most of the time. It’s a really annoying bug that has me often sleeping late in the morning and fully capable of taking a 3-4 hour nap in the afternoon if I let myself. Drives me nuts.

I’m determined to get this thing done, flu or no flu. Still sick, but getting to the point where I can function at least a little bit, and that’s enough. I just won’t stay up so late for a while so that I still get enough rest.

I’ve been doing a lot of research in the little bit of spare time I’ve had these past few days. I’m behind the schedule I had set for myself of launching by Monday, but I have what I consider a good reason.

Two kids. Both sick with fevers in the 102-103.5 degrees F range. Sometimes you have to take a step back and just be a mom.

It’s frustrating to have to slow down, though, especially since I’m trying to get this launched quickly for a very good reason. My husband was laid off from his job a few weeks ago. So this launch really matters to our family. It’d be nice to make up for that lost income.

I want to have my downloads protected, even though I know once the product is downloaded it’s easy for people to share the files. I just like to use what protections I can that won’t make the experience unpleasant for my customers.

Right now I’m pretty sure that I will be choosing DLGuard. It’s between that and Easy Download Protector. Both look to be excellent products, but when I check them out, I see a lot more comments about DLGuard by people not associated with it. But I’ve seen from a few trusted sources that I could pretty much be happy with either one. That’s good to know.

The one tossup for me right now is deciding to actually make the purchase. While I’ve been planning this ebook for some time, I didn’t anticipate having to launch it on a tight budget. Spending over $100 for either of these solutions is just a little painful right now. But I also see them as an investment, something to protect my sales.

It’s an interesting thought process to be going through… protect my sales right from the start, while increasing my cost to launch, or take a chance on losing a few downloads to scammers and buy the software once I’m earning some money.

I’m finally just about there. Nearly done writing and editing my first ebook. It’s definitely been an adventure.

Of course, if you want to make money from ebooks, writing your own is decidedly the slow way to go about it. Writing takes time, and there are plenty of writers who will gladly do the job for you for reasonable prices, or private label ebooks already written and affordable. But this was a topic I wanted to handle myself.

I’m working on details like the sales page now. That and deciding for certain if I’ll use Clickbank. Probably, if only because they take care of paying the affiliates, and have tons of them. I like that kind of simplicity, and the competing services don’t have that. You have to remember it yourself, although I understand they make it easy.

Finally, I’ll be figuring out download protection. You can’t 100% keep an ebook from being passed around, at least if you’re doing it in PDF as I am, but you can do your best to keep people from downloading it directly from your site without permission, and that’s what I’m considering.

The topic? Cooking with small children underfoot! Something I’ve dealt with quite a bit.

I’ll be sharing my progress as I make it. I have a busy week around here even without trying to get anything done online, so my progress won’t be too fast, but I’m hoping to release it by Monday or sooner.