I just found the coolest tool ever! And it’s absolutely free!

I keep seeing those really cool eBook cover images that look like paperback books.

I’ve been trying to make one myself in Photoshop, but I can’t quite find the write distortion filter to do what I want.

Then I found a website with a FREE Photoshop action that will do exactly this!!!

You do need Photoshop; a version that supports Actions. If you see Actions under the Windows menu, you’re all set. I have Photoshop CS.

Next go to this blog post and download it: Creative Techs blog. Unzip it and then load it from the actions window in Photoshop.

You’ll see that the action has two steps. First play Step 1. It will create a new Photoshop document with a template of a book:



Next edit the template and customized it to your own book cover. You can just paste something in on a new layer if it matches the proportions and then hide/delete the layers you don’t need. But don’t get rid of the blue blackground layer. I don’t know what it does, but you’ll get an error if you delete it.



Once you have it all set the way you want it, run Step 2. It will create another new Photoshop document that looks like this:



As you can see, it create a paperback book image from your flat ebook cover. I has the nice reflection on the bottom as if it is sitting on shiny, white table.

This has got to be the greatest free tool I’ve found yet.

Later—I just poked around a little more.

The website this action is from is called Cover Actions Pro and they have similar Photoshop actions for all types of covers. It was just coincidence that the exact one I needed is the one they offered for free.

If I ever start making money at internet marketing and develop a bunch of information products, I’ll probably pay for their other covers.

I like their tool so much that I just signed up to be an affiliate for them, so if this post was helpful to you, I hope you’ll check out their site using this affiliate link: Cover Action Pro

Posted by susb8383 under Recommended Products | No Comments »

I discovered a webpage that will generate permutations:
http://users.telenet.be/vdmoortel/dirk/Maths/permutations.html

So in other words, if you type in:
red,blue,green (Note: make sure you type commas between your words or else it will try to use all the individual letters in its permutations)

it will generate:

red,blue,green
red,green,blue
blue,red,green
blue,green,red
green,red,blue
green,blue,red

So now, you’re asking, ‘Why in the world would anyone want to do that?’

I’m going to use it in conjunction with AMAutomation when I spin my articles.

So for example, suppose I have this original sentence:
There are three builds for a Paladin: Holy, Protection, Retribution.

It would make sense to spin it so that those three items are listed in all possible ways. So I use the handy-dandy permutation generator and I type in:
Holy,Protection,Retribution

It gives me back all the combinations:

Holy,Protection,Retribution
Holy,Retribution,Protection
Protection,Holy,Retribution
Protection,Retribution,Holy
Retribution,Holy,Protection
Retribution,Protection,Holy

I still have little tweaking to do since this tool ignores spaces.

• Replace all the commas with comma space
• Surround it with curly brackets
• Replace the paragraph with tilde paragraph
• If I really wanted to be grammatically correct, I would add ‘and’ before the last item, but I can’t figure out how to easily do this in a word macro

The I just use this in my AMAutomation tag:

There are three builds for a Paladin: {Holy, Protection, Retribution ~Holy, Retribution, Protection ~Protection, Holy, Retribution ~Protection, Retribution, Holy ~Retribution, Holy, Protection ~Retribution, Protection, Holy}.

Cool, huh?

Posted by susb8383 under Recommended Products | No Comments »

Product: Article Marketing Automation (AMAutomation)
Website: AMAutomation.com

In the training videos of AffioBlueprint, Mark Ling recommends joining AMAutomation. It’s a paid service (can try for free) that has two parts:

1. A network of blogs where they’ll post your article. (You can add your blog to this so that you can get content, but it isn’t required to take advantage of the second feature).
   
   
2. A function to ’spin’ your article into different versions, thereby getting around Google’s duplicate content rules.

The first function, posting to a blog, is interesting. The main purpose for doing this is not to get traffic but to get backlinks. Each time someone carries your article on their blog, you get a backlink (assuming that you’ve put links into your article text).

It is similar to when you submit articles to an article directory, but your article is totally anonymous. You don’t put a bio box at all. When someone else decides to carry it on their blog, it looks like they wrote it.

But I’m more interested in the second function of this service, spinning an article.

Here’s what I mean. Suppose you’ve written an article that starts like this:
What you do in AMAutomation is imbed spin tags in your text and add alternate wording. One type of tag lets you specify an alternative sentence, like this:

Recognize the potential here? With the example above, we already have multiple versions of the first two sentences of the article:



If my math is correct, just those few spin tags will generate 12 versions of my sentences.

Then when you submit this, a different variation becomes available to the network. Blog owners can choose to display it or not and there’s no problem with duplicate content if more than one blog carries it.

Unfortunately there is no way to tell which blogs are displaying your article, but you do get a count of how many sites. You also get a count of how many rejected it, so this will tell you if you need to write a better article.

So, all this is well and good, but does it work?

Well, I just signed up for a trial account and forked over $47.00. The site I set up using the AffiloBlueprint methods does not have any traffic from search engines so far. I’m going to start spinning articles, posting them to AMAutomation, and then see if I get backlinks and traffic.

Later…I’ve posted my first article. AMA submits the article to blogs over time so that Google doesn’t see a huge increase of back links overnight.

So here are my results (Day 1 is the day I published it to the network):

Article 1
Day 1: Total blogs who are publishing it: 0. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 2: Total blogs who are publishing it: 2. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 3: Total blogs who are publishing it: 6. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 4: Total blogs who are publishing it: 6. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 5: Total blogs who are publishing it: 10. Ranking on Google: n/a.
**Fixed a mistake that caused my pages to not be indexed.
Was also offline for a few days
Day 9: Total blogs who are publishing it: 14. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 24: Total blogs who are publishing it: 18. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 29: Total blogs who are publishing it: 19. Ranking on Google: n/a.

Article 2
Day 1: Total blogs who are publishing it: 0. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 2: Total blogs who are publishing it: 3. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 3: Total blogs who are publishing it: 6. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 4: Total blogs who are publishing it: 10. Ranking on Google: n/a.
**Fixed a mistake that caused my pages to not be indexed.
Was also offline for a few days
Day 8: Total blogs who are publishing it: 15. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 23: Total blogs who are publishing it: 17. Ranking on Google: n/a.
Day 28: Total blogs who are publishing it: 17. Ranking on Google: n/a.

Posted by susb8383 under Misc. & Recommended Products | 2 Comments »