Article Marketing & ClickBank - My Documented Journey

How do you track?

 

Liam,

I'm trying something similar. I'm only using ezinearticles though.

I started mid-August, and have been writing at least 5 articles every day. I have approximately 100 articles up so far.

Results have been... underwhelming. Conversion rates for the Clickbank products I'm promoting have really been terrible on average... about 1 sale for every 300 clickthroughs, which is like a 0.33% conversion rate.

Anyway, I hope there are some things I can tweak to improve this, but I'm not too sure.

What worries me most is that the lifetime of articles seem to be 2 months tops. After that, they probably won't show up in the search engines anymore and you're back to square one.

I could be wrong. We'll see what happens when I hit 300 articles or so.

 

That's not too bad. How many clicks are you getting a day? Are you sending the traffic directly to the publisher's sales letter/landing page, or have you built a blog around it?

Day 10 - September 9, 2007

Nothing terribly exciting today. No sales, but I did manage to write 10 more articles and have almost finished writing another 2 (hence there being 2 drafts). I was really looking forward to getting all 25 articles done today, but I'll guess that'll have to wait for tomorrow.



I think I'll have to improve on my article writing efficiency. Each article is taking around 30-45 minutes to write, but they're only 300-400 words long. Keep in mind that I'm not basing my articles on others -- it's purely written out of what I already know. Any advice for quicker article writing techniques would be greatly appreciated.

 

I think it is bad. With the ~100 articles I have up right now, I get about 100 clicks a day.

Some of the first articles I submitted barely get any views now though, much less URL clickthroughs. Articles seem to just fizzle out after a few weeks.

Right now I am using URL redirects to publishers' sales pages. In June I tried this with a whole site I built, with an opt-in list, free e-course and affiliate links. I submitted over 120 articles for that site... and made barely $300. Now it is completely dead.

I really have no idea how people are making $2,000+ a month from bum marketing/article submitting. I can out-work and out-write all of them, but I am getting barely 1/10th of the results. I hope they aren't lying.

 

nope. people are making 2000 a month by promoting residual income products.
they aren't lying, it just depends on the products you promote.

& you got to remember that there's always something better you can do when it comes to internet marketing...hell that's anything in life. here are some reasons you articles fall off so shortly:

- The traffic you are receiving is simply ezinearticles traffic, not organic Google traffic. keyword optimization is critical to article writing success
- Once your articles are taken off the first page of ezinearticles, your traffic comes to a fatal stop.
- You have to saturate the internet with articles focused on different unique long-tail keywords
- If you are building a mailing list, make sure it's for a big niche, not some microniche.
Examples of Major niches:
Make money online <- there will always be room to compete for the make money niche, I don't care what anybody says.
Internet Marketing <- Same, until internet marketing becomes common knowledge [that'll never happen btw.] there's always room to compete for this
Weight Loss, Diet, Fitness <- Because everybody wants to have an athletic body like me :]

If you want to bring in serious income. 300 articles focused on different unique keywords for one landing page would be great. One of those keywords might be a 3 pointer.

I've been sending you PM's but for some reason you don't reply :]
But some advice on writing articles?

I've pumped out 300 words in 3 minutes

The key is consistency, when you have a consistent plan, thing become more efficient. For example: I don't come up with titles, I search for great keywords and base my titles off of the keywords that are suggested to me.
For example, if my niche is make money online, and a great keyword suggested to me is: "make money easily"

my title will end up being "Make money easily - Beginner's Can Start Now"
Then I put the main points I will discuss in the article:

- Introduction - I discuss what I will talk about, what are the benefits of starting an online business, where to start, is it right for you.
- What are the benefits of an online business? <- I type 100 words on this
- Where do I start? <- Then I'll type 100 words on this
- Is this right for me?< - 100 words on this
- Conclusion, summarization of what I just told them, briefly go over on what i just talked about & finish it.

You do some quick self-education, then just start typing away, you don't think, you just type.

 

Now that sounds like a great way to write quality content No, too bad I can't do that; will have to practice.

 

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I actually already do write articles based on keywords that receive relatively high volume searches and have a low number of competing sites.

Perhaps some of the articles will stay up longer on the search engines, but I'm not sure. As of now, I think most of them are still showing up on the first page of search results for their respective keywords.

The problem that I'm worried about though is that they will disappear in 1-2 months. But I guess that's always been the case, and it just takes consistency.

Also, I have not been promoting any of the Clickbank products that offer recurring payments, so maybe I should look into adding those (if that's what you're talking about).

I'm also promoting several different products, and not just one.

 

Also, it seems like I only make sales the first few days after a submission. I will continue to get clickthroughs weeks later, but won't make any sales.

For example one product I am promoting made a couple sales a few days after I started submitting... it had received about 250 clickthrough Clickbank hops (since I'm using URL redirects in the author bio box).

And now, 1200 hops later, not a single sale.

Is it possible that the sales are being stolen somehow, or if something else is mechanically going wrong? If I visit the site from my domain that redirects with my affiliate ID, it still shows up when I go to the ordering page.

 

Wow 1200 hops and not a single sale?
Well if you want 2 build your own bum marketing business.

You want to build your own e-mail list, for repeat sales. Because the vendors that you are directing the customers to are probably collecting e-mail information anyways. It's a proven stat that most sales are made after the 7th contact.

1200 hops later though? that's unheard of! and really discouraging if you're a newbie bum marketer.

you should have had atleast 5-6 sales.

either the page doesn't convert, or you have the worst luck in the world. But keep working hard...
you'll make it, simply because you have persistence & work ethic.

but check your product.
you should have at the bare minimum least - 5 - 6 sales
tell you the truth. you should average 12 sales with that.

 

1200 Hops to my product pages yields around 19 sales with my current conversion statistics. I wish I could send 1200 people to my store a day

My guess is you are promoting a poor product.

 

I couldn't agree more. A lot of people say that these niches are too saturated to make any money out of them, but the fact that they are so lucrative and popular definitely makes it worthwhile. Everyone using the internet wants to know how to make money online.

I'm really sorry. I've been receiving a whole heap of attention from this thread so unfortunately I haven't gotten around to replying to yours yet. I keep promising myself every morning that I'll make the effort to reply to all my PMs across all the forums that I visit, but I never end up doing it. I'll be sending you a PM later tonight, promise!

Thanks for the article writing tips too, I'll definitely be practicing them tonight. I think I'm too much of a perfectionist to just write and not think though.

Riposte, I'd definitely move onto another product if you're not seeing success with it -- 1200 hops and no sales generally means that there's an issue with the sale's letter/landing page. Take ExpertForumGuy's advice and stick with it. Don't let this discourage you.

 

Day 11 - September 10th, 2007

Again, no sales today. I didn't have as much time available as I thought I would've, so I only managed to write 7 articles (and 2 more that are almost done). The good news is that I've managed to cut down my article writing time to around 20 minutes per article. I now only have to write 3 more articles until I reach my Basic PLUS submissions cap.

Article views are up on yesterday's, but the CTR on the resource links is drastically lower.

 

Awesome thread. It will be interesting to see how many sales are coming in on day 30. Hopefully you will keep us posted on how many sales you are making on day 60, 90, etc.

 

1200 hops to Fat Loss 4 Idiots from fat loss/weight loss articles.

The other products are all just as bad... all supposedly top converting products (according to the CB Marketplace, that is).

 

1200 hops with no sales!?!?! you would think their sales page is horrible, but i checked it out and it seems like it would convert well. I think you are just very unlucky! or something is broken...

You did say when you clicked through to the order page your aff name was at the bottom of the page, right?

 

I have a question about the keyword research and bum marketing. When searching for phrases/keywords to to use for your articles do you search in "quotes" for exact term, or without quotes?

I am using Google keyword tools to find keywords/phrases. Is the search volume of that term in "quotes" or not?

 

FatLoss4Idiots is a great product! Heck, I started out with CB with that same product. Using PPC though, I got quick sales.

The product is fine, just need to work on your pre-sell article. Make sure you are providing as much information you can! Remember, FatLoss4Idiots is a FULL site. They convince the user really well. You just have to see what's missing and add it to YOUR article. This way, the user KNOWS what is coming when they click on the link. If they don't know what's in the link, they will go to the site and be dumbfounded. Yes, they will know that it has to do with your article but they will say "WTF is fattloss4idiots.com??" So, try to pre-sell as much as you can. See where's the missing point and take advantage. Make the article interesting with keeping in mind the product info and you will do fine!

 

I'm promoting FatLoss4Idiots also. Since it supposedly does really well. I haven't had one sale from my articles. That's with 194 views and 57 resource link clicks.

I've even started using Adwords to promote it also. So far I have had 7 Adwords clicks and 0 sales with that as well.

I'm thinking about cutting my webpage and having the domain forward straight to the FatLoss4Idiots website. Personally I think their page looks stupid and that may be part of the problem, but I don't know. I am getting pretty discouraged with it though.

 

Personally, I won't buy a product that starts selling me with the words "I'm certified Idiot"

 

11 days and already a sale, so your efforts are truly paying off. Keep at it