Hi guys, finally I pushed myself to starting my own journal. To be honest I am quite worried about your response since lately there seems to be a general dislike for journals here. Doesn’t surprise me though since 99% of the journals die off after 1-2 weeks. But I am hoping this journal will be different and I will do my best to keep it alive and updated. So what’s the goal here? My goal is to reach $1000 account balance in my clickbank account (currently at $389.19) by this Christmas (December 25th 2009). I know this goal might seem quite small compared to the typical journal goals here but I have 2 reasons for this: Reason 1: I noticed people usually set their goals WAY too high and in very long time scale. E.g. "Make $XXX,XXX in X months.". Now there are a few people who can pull such thing off (Petehols being the only one I know here on DP) but generally these people become demotivated very quickly because it’s like trying to run 1000km without stopping. I personally find it much more motivating to set achievable short term goals and run 10km the first time, maybe 20km next time and work your way up. Reason 2: I cannot do full time IM (like Pete for example). There might be a busy week where I wont get to do anything. So how am I going to try to achieve this goal? 1. SEO I am working on a niche site/blog where I concentrate mainly on SEO (search engine optimization). I know SE traffic is not the best type of traffic source for short term goals but I am not planning to make all of this $1000 off this site. By Christmas I am just hoping to start receiving some decent constant traffic (50 visitors a day would be great) and maybe a few sales. For me as non full time marketer SE traffic is ideal because once your site gets a good position in search engines it requires very little maintenance. Whereas I usually can’t write 10-20 articles every day like Pete. 2. Article Marketing This will be the major short-term source of income for this journal. The main reason why I will include Article Marketing in this journal is not because it will make me a whole lot of cash (it could if I was IM full time) but it is mainly for motivation. Another thing I noticed is that it gets very demotivating when you are working on long term traffic (such as SEO) and your CB stats are at $0 for weeks/months until your site kicks off. It feels much better to get at least a sale or 2 a day than looking at empty account for weeks. 3. Video Marketing I am just testing this method right now. I have a video with a direct link which sends hundreds of hops a month but I am not making any sales. It’s probably due to the fact that I am not pre-selling it and the product (how to grow taller) mainly interests people aged 13-17 which often don’t have the money or possibility to purchase it. I don’t really care about this video, I might make a simple landing page on blogger if I have time but what this proves is that YouTube can generate nice amount of traffic. A week ago I uploaded a proper video that I made myself pointing to my landing page but due to the competitiveness of the niche it has barely received any views. Although it’s somehow making its way up (2nd page for a great keyword!) so will see how that goes. I might do some backlink building to bump up it to the first page. The reason why I am starting this journal is to finally get myself going. I have very bad habits when it comes to working on my IM business. I created my CB account in March 2009 and my account balance is only at $389.19 although I usually spend from 3-6 hours behind the PC daily. I should have made thousands with that much time on my hands! The main problem is I am generally quite lazy and spend the time behind PC gaming or surfing crap and every time I tell myself I am going to start working tomorrow. The second problem is that if I finally decide to "devote" my time to IM I don’t work on my own business but I hang out here on DP looking at the success of others while I should be working on my own success. My 3rd bad habit when it comes to IM is that I NEVER stick to a method. I think I have some very good ideas but I never finish them and after I generate a few sales from the method instead of scaling it up I move on to something else. I really hope this journal will help me to finally stay on track and focus on completing one thing at a time (which is currently my SEO website) and also give something to you guys. I will be very open in this journal. I will be posting exactly what I am doing (maybe even reveal my niches) once I start making sales and see what works and what doesnt. I am always open to any questions or suggestions so ask whatever you want guys and I will do my best to answer. Also, I don’t know about you guys but I personally LOVE seeing screenshots of stats in journals. So I will try to include a lot of stats screenshots in this journal. So, this is Day 0 and here are the stats: Account balance: $389.19 To earn: $610.81 Days left: 42 Screenshots: Better change this quick! Goals: Day 0 (its 10pm already so no time for too much work): Write 3 articles and submit them to EZA (I use only EZA because of the immediate initial traffic which actually converts!) Day 1: Build 20-30 backlinks to my SEO website (article directories + blogs) + write 3 articles and submit to EZA.
Awesome, looking forward to read more I'm almost like you now, so it will be nice to read your stories. Maybe I can put myself to work than - Aquarezz
Thanks guys! Goal for today fullfilled. 3 Articles submitted to EZA. I am direct linking in these 3 articles (through domain redirect of course) but I think it could work with this type of product. Articles will hopefully go live on Tuesday (i will be writing more over the weekend) and I am expecting at least few sales.
Journals are not allowed any more on DP, so dont waste your time into this. Sooner or later it will be deleted.
Mine was .. Put a blog up and write your journal there. That's a lot better.. $1000 by December is achievable.. keep it up! Al./
Really? I didnt find anything about journals in the forum rules. Maybe other journals are being deleted because they either indirectly promote some product/are full of spam/are no longer updated? Well I will keep writing and if it gets deleted, too bad
Its upto you, but once when petes thread was closed at that time I had spoken to mod. By the way, best luck with your campaign.
YES! My website was finally indexed by google a few minutes ago. And positions for good keywords dont look bad at all considering how little backlink building I have done so far! I am going to start working hard on backlink building. Today I had quite a busy day, I was able to build about 15 backlinks (takes much more time than I expected!) from articles and blog comments and I am going to do some more backlinking right now since getting indexed now really motivated me. I also found a very interesting micro niche for which there are 2 CB (1 is a copy of the other ) products. There is barely any article competition for the best 8 keywords which receive around 10,000 searches a month together. It should be relatively easy to get to top 10 in Google for all of them. I started writing articles targeting these keywords and I am going to build a landing page on blogger to which these will point. Will keep you updated on both campaigns guys! Gdwebs and Robert: Thank you guys ++ Goals for day 2: 1. Write remaining 6 articles for the new micro niche I found and submit them + create a landing page on blogger 2. Continue back link building to my SEO website
If your product converts, then you had found a goldmine there. You had done a solid keyword research. Go ahead, keep us updated. I am always in favor of journal, only thing is it should be transparent enough to get some solid info from it.
Ah finally, blogger landing page created and running, all 7 articles written and submited to EZA. It is such a pain to write about things you are not interested in! These articles should go live Thursday-Friday and I am really looking forward to the results. I hope it was worth it. Today I havent built any backlinkings to my niche SEO site due to lack of time (ok, it was actually due to my laziness on which I still have to work on). But today I received the first 4 organic visitors to my website Still a long way to go though! I also decided to set a few rules for myself. I have the bad habit of constantly checking my clickbank stats, website stats, google analytics etc. ... and DP. So starting tomorrow I will only chceck my stats and DP when I wake up and in the evening before I go to bed. Goals for day 3: -At least 20 backlinks to my site -Submit a new post to my site -write 3 articles
Ah very busy day today guys. Didnt get to do pretty much anything. Well I submitted one article for a backlink Moving Day 3 Goals to Day 4 (tomorrow) but I might not have time again. Today, I had 7 organic visitors to my site, although the average time they spent on my site is over 5 minutes there were no conversions yet. 3 articles that I have written on Saturday and 4/7 articles that I have written for the micro niche yesterday went live just a few minutes ago. Will see how they rank tomorrow. No sales yet which is getting a bit annoying but I guess it just means I have to work harder. Im really tired so off to bed. Hoping to wake up and see at least a sale in my account.