Let’s not mince words – creating a website and starting a business or popular blog are not easy things to accomplish. We’re still perfecting our recipe for success and striving to better ourselves while fine tuning our methods. It would probably have been even more difficult to leap the hurdles had we not had one another (or our families) for mental and logistical support.

During that time, we made a lot of mistakes. Here are 10 of our biggest, in hopes they will help you clear the hurdles a bit swifter than we did.

1. Not believing you are an authority. We know, it can be tough to step into the shoes of an authority, but believe us, there is no better payoff. Look around, if there is someone you admire online who is making good money and living their dream, the chances are excellent they are being paid for what they know. You can only trade your time for money for so long. The smart businessman knows that at some point it is best to package their knowledge for dollars. If you only need to know more on a subject than 95% of the population to be an authority, then you are already an authority at something. Now go and find those people willing to trade their dollars for your knowledge.

2. Pricing too low. Many new freelancers have a hard time asking for what they are worth. We are not suggesting you manufacture an arbitrary number, but there is a value in both the time you spend on your project and the expertise you bring to a job. You should be paid for both. Once your roster is full, it’s time to raise your rates. You are worth it. You’ve worked hard, you’ve built your reputation and now it is time to capitalize on it. The clients you want are happy to pay a proper rate for someone they know will do the job they need done without any hidden surprises or missed deadlines. Be kind to your old clients, but be judicious on the new ones you sign. Remember, fewer clients can be a good thing. You can make the same amount of money, give them more of your attention, and have time to work on the things that truly matter to you – your passion projects!

3. Too much time reading blogs, not enough time building your business. Being social and widening your reach and overall exposure is of course important, but leaving comments on random blogs just so they will leave comments on yours is silly. Don’t flutter around the blogosphere and call it work. It’s not. It’s okay once in a while, but if you’re spending hours a day in your reader, you are probably not using your time to the best of your ability.

4. Not building a list. This is the golden rule. If you have an online business, you want to build a list of opt-in subscribers. This is where the majority of your money will come from. If you’ve heard this over and over it’s because it is true. The bigger your opt-in list, the more money you will make. Access to the inbox is powerful, allowing you to develop a relationship with a lead for a long period of time. Don’t focus on RSS subscribers. A subscriber could never open their reader again and you have no way to reach them or even know their number is no longer legitimate. The power is in the opt-in.

5. Writing without purpose. Everything you write should have an eventual in not immediate aim. Think about it; what is yours? It’s okay to have a personal blog that’s there for you to vent, connect, or just have fun. It’s also okay to have a business blog where you occasionally go off on a tangent, but by and large, it is essential that you treat your online business seriously. This means writing with clarity and focus every time you publish. Ask yourself, why am I writing this content? Is it for opt-ins, subscriptions, link baits, traffic, etc.? If you can’t answer that question, take a breath, think about it and publish a day later if you need to, but know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

6) Ignoring SEO. Don’t ever be a slave to search engine optimization, but learn the basics and implement them wherever you can. Even a couple of tweaks to a few of your pages can carry a dramatic impact to your overall bottom line.

7. Waiting for things to be perfect. If you wait for things to be perfect before you release them, you may as well spray hairspray on your future potential and light it on fire. Nothing is perfect. Gmail was in beta until a couple of months ago. It’s okay, get it out there. Don’t allow your inner perfectionist to strangle your potential.

8. Confusing popularity for a paying audience. These are not the same thing. Though there is, on occasion, a bit of overlap, you are taking the long road if you go this route. A tiny audience of highly targeted readers could potentially yield more actual earnings than a five digit audience of regular readers.

9. You can’t know everything. Don’t learn from the people who say they know, look to the people who are actually doing what you want to do. There is a lot of advice out there. Some of it good, some of it not so much. Don’t believe what people say, look for the proof. If someone on Twitter is trying to get you to sign up for some program guaranteed to give you thousands of followers, yet they have less than you, they obviously don’t know what they’re talking about.

10. Clarity over cleverness. Just because you can write creatively and use lots of big words, doesn’t mean you should. Clear and concise rule the day when it comes to most online writing. Don’t make people wonder what you mean or you will have a difficult time getting them to do what you want them to do.

While these are our biggest mistakes, they were also learning opportunities which greatly helped our business. If you can also learn from our mistakes, just think how far ahead of the game you’ll be!

Thanks for staying with us while we looked back on our first year. We hope it was as much fun to read as it was to write.

We have a remarkable year planned for the Inkwell. We’d hate for you to miss it. Click here for free updates.

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Client work is an enriching experience. The relationships are rewarding and the content is fun to produce, but it could never compare to those things we build with our own hands, directly from our minds, without a middleman in between. We have an embarrassing amount of projects, from drawing board to final draft.

The following list is comprised of those projects that are currently the furthest along in their journey to completion

Writer Dad – Sean’s home site, where he writes each weekday about his family and about a life well said. His essays span the range of emotions, including sentimental, nostalgic, humorous, serious, thoughtful and thought provoking.

Blogger Dad – David’s home site where he writes humorous and heart warming essays about his experiences raising his two year old son. He also rants about the inane things which drive us all crazy.

Ghostwriter Dad – Our office, Ghostwriter Dad is our online net helping us to gather business clients big and small who need anything from direct response copy and marketing to branding. We also work on an individual basis with authors and content creators, ghostwriting everything from fiction to info products.

Collective Inkwell – The always-evolving Inkwell is currently our most welcome home to harbor the best of our creativity. It will remain the prime location for us to showcase our thoughts on writing, creativity, partnership, as well as the first spot where we will unveil any upcoming projects. From the scores of comments we’ve had on this story, this one from Marc at Welshscribe might be our favorite:

Available Darkness – Our genre bending first novel, involving elements of horror, suspense, thrillers and fantasy. Available Darkness will be published in the near future. We have serialized the production with fresh pages every Friday published on the upcoming book’s own domain. Marc, from Welshscribe left one of our favorite comments on this story so far. “So I thought I’d make some lunch, sit down and read the next chapter of Available Darkness. Constantly thinking, as I always do, of what to put in the comments that’s going to do Dave and Sean’s masterpiece the kind of justice it deserves. Indeed, there I was, lost in thought when I smelled something burning. I think that says it all.

Children Write the Future – A fledgling site that’s just now taking off, Children Write the Future encourages young writers to find their voice. Backed by Sean and David, and managed by Sean’s wife Cindy, a teacher of twenty years, the content at Children Write the Future is quite the mixture. Writing advice and prompts for young writers, thoughtful posts for parents, writing samples from children of all ages, and every Friday there is a fresh installment from the serialized chapter book, “Penny to a Million,” which is also the first book to be published under the Collective Inkwell imprint.

Penny to a Million – A book with fourth and fifth grade children in mind, but born from the brain of a serial entrepreneur who has been going since he was a kid, Penny to a Million is a chapter book with heart. The book is being released with a small print run with a larger second run to follow.

Four Seasons – A novel consisting of twelve interconnected vignettes, each told throughout the months of the year. The book has been called “Amazing,” “Gripping, touching, and emotionally charged,” and “Words with a magical feel.” Collective Inkwell will be publishing Four Seasons in POD format sometime early next year.

Potty Training Power - A prime example of a niche site blending many of the things we do best: web design, blogging, direct response marketing, general content creation and branding. Potty Training Power is our first pass at passive income.

Those are highlights from the forty or so things that keep us busy each day. Stick around for much, much more.

Stay tuned. Monday we’ll be publishing the final part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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There were plenty of things we did well during our first year, but even more that we needed to do better. We both knew it was paramount that we not take the success gathering like storm clouds in the distance and simply wait for it to pour.

We needed to streamline and refine our systems. Our blended voice was natural, our ability to communicate exceptional and our natural comfort with our level of communication completely second nature.

But we knew if we wanted to keep up with all the paid work that was coming our way, as well as continue to stoke the fires of our personal projects, we would need well-oiled systems to smooth the production line to the level of instinct. Fail in this and we would only end up running around a different track with better shoes.

Here are 10 ways we have been able to pull the most from each day.

1) Create an online office. We use DropBox, an online storage application that allows us to drop files and share web space. At $10 per month for up to 50 gigs, it’s a dirt cheap setup to allow you to trade information with no downtime and no residual worry about loss of data. DropBox even stores deleted files you can retrieve later. We live on opposite coasts and can’t work in the same office, but we can share office space thanks to DropBox.

2) Create an online to-do list. This list must be pliable and both partners should check in with and report on their progress every day. We call ours a worksheet and it is worked. Each day to-do’s are listed. If they aren’t done, there is a notation made with an estimated time of completion next to it. This type of fluid communication is essential for momentum.

3) Be consistent. If one partner doesn’t know what to expect, it can be extremely difficult for the other to plan, produce or bring momentum to the team. Output should ideally follow some sort of steady, regular rhythm. Peaks and valleys lead to kinks in the flow, not good for production and poison for growth.

4) Helping out. Countless emails, client phone calls, dealing with tire kickers, writing guest posts, gathering new clients, constant learning, first drafts of new work, idea generation, graphic design and maintenance; not to mention keeping up with paid work and personal sites. It can all be a bit daunting. Each partner should know what they are best at. If one partner is handling certain areas of the business, the other must do everything they can to help with the burden however they can.

5) Clear the worksheet every day. If something has to sit for longer than a day or two, there should be a reason and a re-articulated completion date. This gives both partners faith that the team is constantly trudging forward, keeping pace with paid work while leaving room for their own dreams as well. Think of the day as a big glass jar and all your tasks as a pile of rocks. Naturally, to fit all the rocks into the jar you would put the large ones in first and then let the small ones fall into the created pockets. The same is true with tasks. Knock the largest out of the way first. Then at the end of the day clear the smallest.

6) Productivity begets productivity. Think of this as going to the gym. You may hate the idea of getting out of bed and hitting the treadmill, but 10 minutes into your workout, you find your rhythm and it’s easy to continue. After the workout, you feel great and can’t wait to do it again. Humans are creatures of encouragement. By clearing the list each day and being consistently productive you are teaching yourself that you can do it, thereby multiplying the chances that a new habit will turn into a fixed routine.

7) Have clear goals and sharp focus. It’s important to know what you are doing and why you are doing it. As soon as your business reaches the point where your time is all accounted, then every minute means money either in the bank or missing from the account. Use them wisely. Know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and then do everything you say you are going to do. It isn’t enough to spit theory. There has to be action in the lab. Writing with a purpose and consistently building toward a long term plan will pay off far more handsomely than winging it possibly ever could.

Be quick to adapt. The online world moves fast. You never know what your clients are going to drop in your lap at the last minute or what the Web has waiting in the wings to surprise you. Be ready for anything and nothing will surprise you.

9) Lean into the dips. It is not enough to simply keep pace, you must always be moving forward as well. If client work is light on any particular day or week, use those extra minutes to tend to the seeds of your personal projects, those are the things that will pay dividends in the end, after all. Little things add up to big things. The most important thing is getting started. You don’t have to be great to get going, you have to get going to become great.

10) Never stop learning. Things change fast and you need to keep ahead. Learn everything you can and keep your appetite for knowledge stoked. You can never know it all, but you can always pay attention. The more you know, the better you can perform. Never be afraid to pay for the best advice, and always be willing to implement what you learn.

BONUS TIP: Network with great people in your field. There will be times when you need to farm out work and you cannot afford to compromise on your quality. This is important for the success of your business.

Stay tuned. Wednesday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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We re-launched Potty Training Power on July 17, one year to the day from when Writer Dad first went live. We grossed more from our re-launch in the first weekend than we had in the entire six months the product had been previously available. At the same time, Ghostwriter Dad was appearing on the front page for numerous search phrases, including the general term, “ghostwriter.”

After a year of plugging away, things were finally starting to pan out and pay off. We were selling a niche product on semi-autopilot and booking regular jobs, each one paying a multiple of what we were making for similar work a year before in both dollars and appreciation.

A year’s worth of stress, fear and defeat; setbacks, pitfalls, and false hopes, were finally melting away like ice under sun. With the future no longer so uncertain, Sean was able to improve his present by chipping away at the debt he had gathered over the last year; the high cost he was willing to pay to make his dreams happen. Dave was soon able to stop his job search, confident that he would be able to make it on the back of his work. More importantly, we were both able to look our spouses in the eyes without feeling like failures.

The relief in our stress made an immeasurable difference in our productivity. Never timid, we were no longer hesitant, now able to fly through paid jobs and personal content creation with a speed and refinement we had never before tapped.

Home life and work life had never been better, each one nudging the other toward something great. It was easier to justify the countless hours at the desktop for the first time in a year.

The signs are sometimes subtle, but it is important to catch them as they come. Here are the five things that let us know our online business was nearing its tipping point.

1) We no longer doubted ourselves. Doubt has a way of hovering over and suffocating you when things aren’t going well. It’s hard to move forward when each step is a shaky one. Having solid footing under us allowed us to venture more bravely into our futures. Every success is an enemy vanquished for the hero. With bodies behind us and better armor hanging from our shoulders, we were ready for whatever lay ahead.

2) Our direction felt natural, allowing us to operate on instinct. Old lessons rose easily to the surface like muscle memory helping to guide us. Athletes, musicians and artists; all spend countless hours in practice refining their movement until it is finely tuned to the key of a sixth sense. Writing and running a business are no different. Follow the same motion over and over, while paying attention to your technique, and soon enough you will gliding through the movement of your day.

3) Work was fun. When we started out, we were indistinguishable from any number of other writers offering their services and unfortunately, the work we got was not of the best variety. However, success breeds success. We were being recognized for our quality work and able to choose the clients we wanted to work with while also commanding a fair price for our work. Our clients are no longer anonymous people but close contacts, parts of our networks, and most of all, happy and satisfied with the care we put into everything we do.

4) Not having to work as hard for a bigger payoff. The first year, for us, was spent like an indentured servant, working for days that rolled into weeks without pay, sometimes for all of daylight, just to deliver quality content to an ever increasing audience while spreading our names as far as we could. Now, every piece of content we put out has a larger return, in both social proof and dollars in the bank.

5) We looked in front, behind, and around us for examples. There is always inspiration available if you are willing to look at the world with all 360 degrees. Yes, there are many fine examples of awesome Internet success if you draw from a pool of people who have been doing it for years. There are also many models to follow from people who ran ahead of us by just a year or so. Naomi Dumford, for example, started Itty Biz just fourteen months before we went online. For a blogger finishing their first year, that is quite inspiring. Eric Hamm, developer of the popular Frugal Theme for WordPress, started at the same time as we did; as did Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Non-Conformity. We were also able to take a look behind and see a fresh wave of noobies cresting behind us.

We were smoking for sure, but we also knew that good enough wasn’t good enough. We cranked the knob to 11, kicked it in the ass, and ran even faster.

Stay tuned. Monday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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Though we had written and released our first niche product and nurtured a site to go along with it that was receiving a regular amount of decent traffic, we had gone months without making a single sale. It was clearly time to take everything we had learned and shine new light on our old product.

So we wiped the board and started over.

We took Potty Training Power off the market, ripped it apart, and then put it back together with more care than ever before, stitching it together with our new found and hard won experience.

In many ways, a well-oiled niche site is one of the holy grails of online success. In theory, a niche site can be a set-it-and-forget-it entity, driving dollars into your bank account on a steady basis, long after the initial work has been finished. In reality, a niche site can just as easily sit inert on its domain doing nothing while you run around in circles for countless hours attempting to make it work.

We re-launched our product, paying close attention to all the “new” rules we’d recently learned. The meticulous mapping of our strategy and the careful deployment of each action, for us, led to a wonderful result. Here are the broad strokes.

1) Write for people, not SEO. Your site must be user friendly or you will not make any sales. It’s important to drive traffic to your site, but if readers bounce away the moment they land, the traffic is worse than useless. It took your valuable time and gave you nothing.

2) Eliminate all barriers to entry. Make it simple for your customers to buy what you are selling. Make your site crystal clear and easy to read. Layout is important, and you must clearly direct your prospects to precisely what you would like for them to do.

3) Price is irrelevant. If you aren’t happy about your price, you can’t expect your customer to be. If you don’t believe your product is worth the price you would like to charge, don’t lower the price, raise the quality of the product. We took our $27 Ebook off the market and turned it into a $47 info product that was far more successful.

4) An inbox is an infinitely easier place to close the deal than a landing page. Every niche site needs an auto responder and a consistent, well written email newsletter. Setting this into place and keeping the traffic generation in motion will equal money in the bank. Best of all, you get to keep the list and sell to the same audience again. This time with trust already established.

5) Twitter is a great place to generate new leads and good business. Twitter is best when you can be authentic and respond to people in real time. However, there are also many free tools that can help to automate this work flow. We use TweetLater to help us maintain a presence when our time is at a premium.

6) It’s better to build a real business than a fickle niche site. Real businesses with real people behind them can build on their established trust. You may have to work a little harder for that first sale, but it means you’ve earned a customer with potential years of related products and services, not to mention their lifetime’s worth of referrals. If you can develop a syndicate of slightly related sites, there is no ceiling on the possibility.

The successful re-launch of our first product gave us a level of hope we’d never had and allowed us to see true light at the end of the tunnel.

Stay tuned. Wednesday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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The world has never moved faster. It’s the ability to quickly adapt that will separate the merely capable from the truly prosperous in this new great age. The good news is, there has never been more information readily available to everyone. For the 21st century learner, limitations are only legend.

Blogging is relatively new, and though most of the rules are still being written, it would be foolish for the budding blogger to ignore the examples already set by the first few pioneers to blaze the trail.

There is an abundance of free information out there. Much of it is good. There is however, also a ton of repetition. For those in a hurry to get where they need to go, it is a wise investment to pay for sage advice delivered by those who were walking in your shoes as little as one year earlier. For us it was inspiring to know that many of the models we looked to began to achieve their dreams shortly after their first year.

These are the 10 most important lessons we learned in our first year online:

1) Clarity over cleverness. Sure, it’s nice to be able to weave words together in a poetic way, but sometimes, especially in business, clarity trumps clever tenfold. Your readers should never have to guess at what you want for them to do. If possible, directions should be as clear as a big red X drawn on the map. Just because you can please yourself with your clever writing, doesn’t mean you’re on your way to the conversion.

2) Headlines. Grab your readers’ attention. The web is thriving with competition. Demand your prose is read by increasing the strength of your headline. This is one area where cleverness actually helps. Just make sure you deliver on your promise once you get the click through.

3) Organization. The importance of organizing yourself, work processes and resources cannot be overstated. With so much to do each day, from writing and publishing, to being social and gathering leads, it is essential that you are intelligent in how you strategize each day. A little bit of disorganization can have a cancerous effect on your overall productivity.

4) There is no competition. Do what you do well, don’t worry about anyone else. Observe what is around you and learn what you can, but focus on yourself and what makes you unique – that is what will put you on the map. It is okay to emulate those who inspire you, but you must shed the tired skin and step into your own true self as soon as you can.

5) You are not a freelancer. Freelancers are a dime a dozen – sometimes literally. Stand out by owning what services you provide. Own it, market it accordingly, and watch both your fees and client appreciation easily double.

6) Guest posts are necessary. A well placed guest post leads to increased exposure while also helping to build powerful links that will strengthen the character of your site. Consistently placing yourself in front of new and complimentary audiences is a tremendous way to build your business in a short period of time. Never deliver anything less than your best. Treat each post with the same degree of importance you would if writing for your own audience and try to write on a schedule so there is always a stream of new guest spots with your name in the byline.

7) Never be afraid to experiment. Not everything will work, but many things will. The good news is, you are sure to learn something either way. By only focusing on what is already proven, you will never be able to break new ground. Many of our experiments in the first year didn’t work, but each experiment strengthened our partnership and deepened our understanding of the way things work online.

Marketing is essential. Time spent (wisely) on social media yields a high return on investment. This doesn’t mean spending all day on Twitter talking about what you had for lunch. Time spent with social media is best when it is spent with strategy. Know what you are doing and why you are doing it if you expect to reap the richest rewards.

9) Openly share your knowledge. It is short sighted to believe that once you share your knowledge someone will then use it against you. Never be shy about articulating what it is that makes you great and don’t spend valuable minutes worrying that someone else will come along and use your methods against you. There is only one you. Build your business on the strength of what you know, and share that information freely. Don’t worry about your competition and don’t worry about giving away your “secrets.” There will always be new things to learn and new things to teach.

10) Authority rules! You are an authority on any subject where you know more than 95% of the population. Even that is a soft number since authority is really all about perception. Perceived authority, it turns out, can lead to more money in the bank than actual authority, since the general population and Google both look to what others decide is the most relevant expertise for any given topic. It is no longer degrees on the wall that matter the most. These days the currency’s in conversation.

Stay tuned. Wednesday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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In many ways, our arrested growth was more beneficial to our futures than modest expansion ever could have been. Modest growth might have left us with the false impression that we were on the right track.

Spoiler alert, we weren’t.

We gave our best to every post, but even posts with long strings of comments rarely led to new subscribers or did anything to invite fresh links. For Sean, desperation and debt were in a fight for his piece of mind. His mortgage had hit the credit card for the fourth straight month and he had started to feel as though his overzealous ambition was rolling his family along the razor’s edge of disaster.

David was in a similar boat, though it wasn’t sinking as quickly, as his wife was still working. David was still actively seeking other employment, because he had to do something. Times were growing tougher as there is only so long you can wait for something to work.

We were failing to make our families the money needed to survive. From a battery of fuses, everything had failed to detonate. The only thing that felt close to explosion were us. David had worked since he was 15 and was not used to not working, or in this case, working for no money. Sean had been in business since he was 12, trafficking candy bars and coverless comic books. He was used to selling his wares, and to find nobody lining up to buy them was too much.

If we didn’t do something to build a bridge between our abilities, we were going to find ourselves on the wrong side of an inferior forever.

That month was the hardest we had. Rather than receding, we stretched our muscles and ran ever faster. Rather than losing hope, we magnified our faith. The theory that it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at anything played on an endless loop echoing through our core beliefs. We had made it this far, the best thing to do was to just keep right on going.

But the truth of the matter was that clients were few, prospects were inconsistent and the future had never looked more uncertain. Our families were waiting, the country was in crisis and we were looking disaster dead in the eye.

We found relief right at the lip of despair.

After several months invisible to the eyes of Google something happened. It was one unforgettable morning when Ghostwriter Dad finally showed up in the search results – on page 32 for the general search term, “ghostwriter.” The SEO was made of steel and 32 was just a slow start. The rise through the results was rapid. We gained about a page a day and soon enough the phone was ringing.

We breathed a giant sigh.

Even through our most terrifying moments, we always believed we’d find the other side of the sea, we just had no idea how many waves would have to crash against the welfare of our families before we were finally able to find safe harbor.

With Sean carrying a ton of debt, we were hardly out of the woods, but clients were coming in a steady stream and the outlook had never been better. We realized then that we knew so much more than perhaps we had given ourselves credit for. We had read miles of copy and purchased many info products, each one giving us a slightly different angle for understanding what it takes to earn true online success.

It was that compound knowledge met by our willingness to work hard and dogged determination that had allowed us to push through the worst of it. We had never felt more grateful for our teachers.

The best teachers don’t tell you what to do, they allow you to excavate the answers that are already inside of you. That’s exactly what we did.

Stay tuned. Wednesday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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After becoming fast friends, starting a book and launching an info product and companion niche site, we finally decided to make it official and start a website together which would bring us freelance work. In April we launched the first version of the Collective Inkwell, an online informal café/studio where we could join our voices and open our doors for business.

It was a place where we could be ourselves, all while demonstrating what we did best. We would write about writing and creativity with the warmth and knowledge we were known for. Though we both had successful family sites with loyal audiences, but those sites were not the best environments for doing business.

Be ourselves, clearly demonstrate the quality of our work, and eventually, we reasoned, the business would come pouring in. With our high quality copy and Dave’s wonderful eye for branding and design, it was only a matter of time, right?

WRONG.

The last thing the Internet needs is another site posting top ten tips on writing. We were just another bar band looking for a record deal. Yes, we may have been singing in a slightly different key than everybody else, but it was still the same old song. Worse, we were referring to ourselves as freelance writers, no different than a million others offering their wares. That simple label meant all the difference in the world. How would our prospective clients know we were different if we didn’t take the time to tell them?

We needed to stand out or we would fade fast. To hedge our bets we also launched Ghostwriter Dad.

We attempted to carry our previous audiences over to the Inkwell; using the domain as a launching pad for fresh faces and new exposure. Ghostwriter Dad, on the other hand, was set up as a niche site, using our previously picked up SEO skills to draw business from search engine queries.

Ghostwriter Dad felt like the perfect domain. The two of us both love the craft of writing and have never cared so much about the byline. Ghostwriter Dad was able to build off the strength of some of our previous branding, and so long as we were delighting clients and continuing to build our dreams, all would be right with the world.

Launching the two sites at relatively the same time allowed us to quietly compare the two strategies.

Ghostwriter Dad published keyword rich copy, solely intended to target search engine traffic, each post targeting a particular keyword or search phrase. At Collective Inkwell, we put our best writing feet forward. It was a creative space to show off our skills as high-quality writers, including publishing our in-development novel Available Darkness in a serialized format every Friday.

The problem with the Collective Inkwell strategy was that it had us running in the exact same circles we had already been running for our first six months. Yes, people loved our writing and weren’t afraid to tell us so. But a high percentage of our audience was comprised of other writers(!), and the rest of our readers were people who were not in the market for what we had to offer. After starting with a bang, the Inkwell was growing at a crawl. The design was gorgeous and the content top notch, but it simply wasn’t enough.

Ghostwriter Dad, it seemed, was also in a hurry to go nowhere. We had maintained a consistent publishing schedule, but even after a couple of months online, it was still in Google’s sandbox and not showing up in any Internet searches.

We had been online for more than half a year and things were looking grim. For the first time we began to wonder if perhaps we were on the wrong track. We had poured countless hours into various projects, many of which yielded results that paid out well below minimum wage. Mistakes are, of course, part of the process and growth always takes time, but maybe we were making too many mistakes, wasting too much time.

Was it supposed to take this long?

Many bloggers agree that the six months slog is the most difficult part to get through. Yet the rewards are richest for those who continue to plow on through. We looked inside ourselves and saw the truth that couldn’t be argued. What we had was rock solid, we just needed to be patient until we reached our tipping point.

Sometimes, it turns out, two is the strongest number of all.

Stay tuned. Monday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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After finally understanding how to make SEO work for us, we decided to write and release our first information product. Obviously, we wanted to write about something which we had some authority.

Sean’s previous experience running a preschool had left him with a thorough understanding of not only potty training children, but the psychology of dealing with parents going through it and how to approach the process in a friendly, developmentally appropriate way. Potty training can be a traumatic experience and we knew our product was not only viable but would also be welcome by those looking for help.

The best info products are those where you can speak with fluidity on the subject, know more than 98% of the population, and have an excellent track record of personal success.

Check, check, check.

We couldn’t have been more excited about our new project. Sean had the experience and David had the artistic skill needed to bring the dream to fruition, build the niche site and brand the product. Working in tandem through drafts, landing pages, and posts, we developed the site and put the product out for sale.

Every child needs to be potty trained. Millions of families need help each year.

We were gonna be rich!

But it doesn’t work like that. We barely made a dime at launch, and again, that dime had to be divided. Much like our early crack at wee-books, a blog post to facilitate a product launch just wasn’t going to cut it. We weren’t worried, though. This time, we had SEO on our side. That would be more than enough to drive sales, right?

Wrong.

No matter what business you think you are in, you are really in the business of marketing. If you have a product, you have to sell it. No one is going to come begging, no matter how much they might like you as a person.

There is also trust to consider. Trust is a major ingredient in every sales recipe, but even more so when it comes to online sales where your clients cannot look you in the eyes or hear the tone of your voice when they are asking you questions. This is why it is so much more difficult to sell from a landing page than it is through a prospect’s inbox, a lesson we had yet to learn.

All wasn’t lost, though. Our Potty Training product rebounded six months later to become our first generator of passive income. Of course, this only happened after we hit a few more walls and bloodied our noses on the basic tenets of successfully releasing an info product that rocks at launch and continues to roll through the aftershocks for a long while to come.

There is quite a bit to learn, but here are the three most important components.

1) Rock Solid SEO. This means having plenty of posts in place with the appropriate inbound links that will help you rank for the keywords that draw the most highly targeted traffic. In other words, your leads will have been looking for whatever it is you’re selling before they ever land on your page.

2) A deep understanding of direct response copy. This is the stuff that makes you a marketing Jedi. Effective direct response copy takes your prospects by the hands, guides them precisely where you need them to go, then helps them to take the action you want them to take. Learning to write highly effective direct response copy is like learning to print your own money.

3) A smart auto-responder. Selling to someone from a cold landing page is a lot like expecting to get lucky on the first date. It can be done, especially if you look like Brad Pitt, but it’s a lot more likely to happen after a bit of wining and dining. Carefully crafted email newsletters will allow you to bond with your prospects, let them know you a little better, and help them understand why they should care about what it is you have to offer.

Despite the wobbly early success of our first venture, we could feel success starting to mount. It was time to take the things we did best and plant the flag in another online opportunity.

Stay tuned. Wednesday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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One of the most difficult things about blogging, writing for a living, or creativity in general, is the constant stream of words and ideas you must regularly wade through, and the loss of perspective that invariably comes along with it.

What if there was a way to write three to four times as fast while adding an exponent to your creativity?

We know, it’s pretty difficult to believe, but we stumbled on the secret early and have used it to fuel our many endeavors, from blogging to direct response copywriting to ghostwriting books for happy clients.

It started one day when David sent Sean a few pages of a story he had been sitting on for years and had pretty much left for dead. David loved the edits Sean sent back and Sean loved playing with the story. We passed the pages back and forth until they sang in a wonderful key that didn’t quite belong to either of us. It was something new and, to us, rather remarkable.

Though we had passed words back and forth before, there was some kind of tipping point embedded in that day. It’s one thing to pass copy, it is another to pass the creative drafts that are borne from the heart. As most artists will tell you, its hard to allow someone access to your ideas, believe in them enough to let them knead the creative clay. It is also difficult to assume the responsibility, knowing you must be careful with another’s ideas.

There was no ego, and therein lay the magic.

Each of us was able to add what we do best while allowing the other to subtract the worst of the other’s weaknesses, and never with a threat to feelings or ego.

Not only was our first novel, Available Darkness, born that day, but so was a system that we’ve since finely tuned to fly through copy that takes us less time and is of a higher quality than either one of us would manage on our own.

This is the Power of WE in action and it’s benefits are many.

• A fuller roster of clients – running through copy in less time means you can manage more clients in any given week.
• Happier clients – four eyes on every page means everything we deliver is top notch. This means our clients are always happy and eager to return for more.
• More projects on our plates – writing copy is fun, but product development is a blast. The power of collaboration allows us to harness our creative energy for the collective good, helping to pile on the paying projects while still having time for our own creative endeavors.
• Bigger dreams in less time – We got in this game to achieve our dreams. Collaboration is helping to pull it toward us at an accelerated pace.

With a system in place, it was time to put it to practice by creating our first information product and niche site to match. After all, the SEO dragon was laying in a headless heap, all the kids were doing it, and sales while we were sleeping was certainly part of the overall dream.

Stay tuned. Monday we’ll be publishing the next part in our series looking back at our first year online.

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