Decided to start one of these myself - My 50k Journal

Well since it seems that a few others are doing well once they start writing a journal to keep track of everything, I am going to try it out. My biggest problem has been constantly jumping from one idea to another and then I always read too much and over analyze everything. I do always take action on my new ideas but I think I need to stay focused on one thing at a time to get it working before I move onto the next. So I'm hoping by keeping this journal it will keep me on track and at the same time some others can learn from it.

If you wish to follow along then great. If not, that's fine with me too as I'm writing this as a way of keeping myself on target with my goals.

I look forward to all of your recommendations too because I don't know everything yet and this is a way for us to help each other out.

I will be doing bum marketing with articles and Clickbank. All of my methods are going to be free except I will be outsourcing some of the writing since I'm not the best writer. The articles will link back to a landing page where I review the product I want them to buy.

Also, I want to make my own product and have it on Clickbank after I start making sales and I have money to pay people to help me develop the product, sales page, etc. My goal is to start working on this product in March or April. I already know what it will be too.

So, here is my current breakdown. I'm sure things will change as I go along and monitor my progress but this is my plan right now:

I want to target 1 new niche every week and write about 20 articles for each niche starting out. If those 20 are producing good sales I will try to write more and if they aren't selling I will just leave em. The way I will be doing it is like this:

Sunday - Monday: Product and keyword research for the niche I will be targeting that week. I will be doing very thorough keyword research to make sure I have a chance at hitting the 1st page which is why I've given 2 days for it. Plus, Sunday is usually a lazy day for me so I don't work too much and the bulk of this will be done on Monday.

Tuesday - Friday: I want to write and submit 5 articles per day to either Ezine Articles or Articles Base. I was thinking that I will be using both of them at the beginning to see which one works better for me. If the 1st page of Google already has an Ezine ranked for my keyword, I will use Articles Base so I'm not competing with another established EZA. And if the 1st page has an AB article, I will use EZA.

As the articles get approved, I will ping and social bookmark them and begin building backlinks. Currently here is my backlink strategy:

I will be having my sister do 1 rewrite for each article and that one will be used as a submission on all the directories and Web 2.0 sites so it's unique to the main article. (Gotta love having smart family members) Those will link back to the main article.

Submit the rewritten article to these do-follow directories after main article is approved:

Go Articles
Article Dashboard
Idea Marketers
Easy Articles
Articles Factory

Then I will be submitting to these Web 2.0 sites:

Scribd
Squidoo
Weebly
Blogger
Wordpress

If you have more Web 2.0 sites or article directories that you like and think work good I would be glad to hear them.

Next I will be taking the RSS feed from the articles and submitting that to some RSS sites. (This I still need to look into to see what works best. If anyone has a good plan for submitting RSS feeds on articles and wants to share it that would be appreciated.)

And now for my goals:

1. At the end of each month I would like to be targeting 4-5 new niches and have articles and a landing page established in each of them. The ones that bring me good sales I will try to do more keyword research to see if I can milk them for more. The ones that don't produce a lot of sales will be left alone and I'll move onto something else.

2. My end goal for this year using all free methods is $50,000. I think this is a reasonable goal for my first ever journal and one that can be reached if I work hard at this. To achieve this goal, I will break it down into smaller steps as follows:

- By the end of February I want to have made $1,000 with these campaigns. Since the hardest part is getting the momentum going, I think $1000 is a small but reasonable target.

- From Feb-March I want to average at least $50 every day so my target for March will be $1500-$2000

- March through April, I want to make at least $100 a day so my total for the month should be around $3000.

- Around the March-April time period is when I want to start work on my first product as a vendor. I will be putting a lot of work into it so it's not just another crappy CB product so I expect this will take me about a month or longer to get everything setup. My goal for this year is to get 2 products on CB as a vendor so I will probably start on my second one right around when I finish the first.

- From April to the end of the year, I would like to add around another $1000 every month to my profit and this should put me around the 50k mark. At the end of this year, I am aiming to be bringing in about 10k a month through all of my bum marketing and my own products combined.

I will not be disclosing my markets, landing pages, or articles so please don't ask. I will try to update this every day but if I don't do it on certain days it's because I was busy getting work done and didn't have the chance to come on here. Once I start making sales, I will post those earnings too.

Also, I'll setup a blog since that seems to be what most people with journals do and a lot of people like that idea. It will take me a few days to get it setup though as I have a lot on my plate right now that needs to be finished. As soon as it is, I'll post the link here.

So today will start as Day #1. I already have my keywords for my 1st niche ready and one article has been written. I will be writing 4 more today and submitting them to my main directory. I'm thinking about starting with Articles Base for this niche since the 1st page has an ezine article for my keyword that has been established for a while now. Hopefully I can outrank him or at least come close.

I'll try to do an update later today once I'm done with everything.

Thanks for following along everyone and I hope that we all can learn something from this.

 

Hi J1218, great idea setting yourself targets and keeping a journal - it should help to keep you focused. As a matter of interest why are you targeting so many niches every month (4-5)?

20 articles per niche as a one off will get you near to $zero.
20 a month per niche may generate something worthwhile after 3 months but don't hold your breath

20 articles per month x 5 niches = ...

month 1 100 articles
month 2 100 + 100 articles
month 3 100 + 100 + 100 articles
month 4 100 + 100 + 100 articles + stress symptoms
month 5 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 articles + cardiac problems

Unless you have experience in this (and lots of help) I would recommend that you pick a good niche and then stick at it until it works or it is obvious it will not.

Its a bit like going to the gym for a week and complaining that you have no muscles! It takes weeks and dedication.

Just my view of course - you can always prove me wrong!

 

Hey Andy, thanks for your response.

I do have some SEO experience and I have done some article marketing before so this isn't completely new to me it's just my first time actually making a journal.

I should have been a little more clear with my keywords though and why I chose 20. I am only going to be focusing on keywords that get around 1000 searches a month or more. If I think the keyword is good and it gets like 600 or something then I will go for it but anything less and I want to stay away from it.

So if you do the math and I write 20 articles a week for a month (4 weeks) I will have 80 articles written on keywords that get on average 1000 searches each so that's 80,000 potential hits I can get to my site. After the 2nd month, that number doubles so now I have 160,000 potential customers and so on. Obviously I know that not all of them click the article, visit my landing page, etc. but thats why they are "potential" customers to me.

Of course, some keywords of mine might get 2-3k searches per month which would mean even more people that can see my articles.

If I see that a certain niche is converting well then I will go back and start targeting some keywords that may get 300-400 searches a month or something so that's still roughly 10 people per day that could see my article.

I believe in article marketing it's more about quality not quantity. Sure I could write 100 articles on 1 niche on keywords that have no real traffic value or no chance of me hitting the 1st page but I think that's a big waste of time. It takes just as much work to build up an article with a keyword that gets 2k searches per month as it does an article with a keyword that gets 400 searches a month.

Hope that answers your question.

 

Ok, here's my end of day 1 update for everyone (Finally, at 3 in the morning lol). Today I got my first 5 articles written and I finished the landing page for my first niche. I also setup a PPC campaign for something that I'm trying out but that part has nothing to do with my overall goal since I plan to only use free methods.

So tomorrow I will start by writing 5 more articles and then I will have 10 total to submit. I am going to use Articles Base for this niche because there's already some articles from EZA on the first page of Google for my keywords so I'd rather not have to deal with that.

Will keep updating as I progress...

 

Sounds like a plan to me. Best of look with it and keep posting the updates.

cheers

 

Hey J, that's very reasonable. Only thing is, you need to stay focused all the time. Good luck!

 

Yep, that's the reason I started this thing. To stay focused.

 

Hi J this is a great way to stay motivated, really like some of your ideas. I will be putting some of these to good use thoughout 2010 and this should help me acheive my goals.