Deja Vu and the Sound of Success


A quick update this week. Recently I’ve been looking further ahead and trying to identify good topics for Kindle books. I purchased a course related to choosing Kindle niches and found that I already had access to a software that the course recommended: Ebook Niche Explorer.

You put a keyword that’s related to a niche into the software and it gives you a number of stats that indicate whether the niche is potentially profitable. It takes the prices of books on Amazon that are in that niche and their sales ranks to give the estimated sales and estimated monthly income. To make it easier to judge whether the niche is worth pursuing there is a traffic light system where red means don’t bother and green means yes, go for this niche.

Watching a demo video I saw several keywords highlight some good niches. Unfortunately they were not ones I would care to enter. I’m uncomfortable with medical and fitness related niches as these are not areas in which I have any expertise and wouldn’t want to contemplate the potential for damage. I avoid financial niches for the same reason. So, having watched the training I started to enter keywords related to niches I feel I can contribute to.

Unfortunately as I entered keyword after keyword I never found a niche that produced a green result. After a while I began to get a sense of deja vu.

This was just like the bad old days last decade when some internet marketer would say you only had to enter some keywords into the Google Keyword Tool to find ones that fit into the sweet spot where you could get tons of traffic if only you incorporated the words into your website. So I would sit at my computer for hours at a time until I began to suspect the only words that did fit the criteria were the ones shown in the expensive course I had bought.

So, I’ve abandoned this course of action for now. Perhaps it’s yet another example where watching what the experts produce is going to be more helpful than following a method from a course.

I’ve also been working on a Kindle book about list building. Unfortunately I decided to try a new method I have found which involves taking multiple pieces of PLR material and combining them to make a Kindle book.

Amazon banned the use of PLR material some time ago, but I had found a course that shows how you can still use it without upsetting Amazon. Part of the process involves spinning the PLR material for use on Kindle.

Spinning in this context is changing the words in a piece of text to create a different version.

I’ve trialed spinning software before and was so unimpressed that I’ve never used it again until now. I’ve even found some of my own articles written years ago that have been mangled by others putting it through spinning software. However I thought it possible that the process had improved over the years and so was worth another try.

The problem is I haven’t been able to discover how Amazon decides whether a Kindle book contains PLR. How far from the PLR material must it be for it to be accepted? So how good does the spinning have to be?

Unable to answer these questions to my satisfaction I’ve decided to abandon this method too. Deja vu again as I decide spinning still isn’t good enough. Or perhaps it was more a failure of nerve. With the threat of being banned by Amazon as a consequence, I’d rather be too cautious than too relaxed.

On a more positive note I have also been trying working with background music. Usually I find it too distracting, probably because I listen to the wrong type of music. So I went to YouTube and searched for ‘best music to work to’.

The first couple of days it seemed to be working. I stuck to tasks and was completing a number of repetitive jobs, but after a while it became too distracting or wasn’t to my taste. Then I found recordings of ambient noise, usually sci-fi related. The most effective ones for me have been the Enterprise engine from the 2009 Star Trek Movie and the sound aboard Discovery from 2001 (though I couldn’t get my garage doors to open while it was playing).

Give it a go if you think it may help. You might also take a look at www.focusatwill.com. It plays music that gets you into a better flow of concentration and is based on the findings of neuroscience. There’s a music library to choose from and you can set the length the music plays for, so it’s useful if you work in set blocks of time.


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