My Article Marketing Journal For Clickbank

Well, I've decided to start a journal to keep me on task. I will hopefully keep it updated everyday as the famous petehols has done.

I'd like to start off saying that I have no money amount goal. If I make a goal, I'll have an expectation. And I don't want to expect anything because all I will be doing is setting myself up for disappointment, which is the last thing I need.

I started affiliate marketing because of the money. Let's be honest people, who hasn't joined because of the money and the possibility of working at home? My ultimate goal would be to buy the new 2010 Camaro SS, and pay for it in cash. If that happens before 2010, then I know I have found a way to make a possible living. That's $30,000, so it probably isn't likely, but it's one thing that keeps me going. In fact, I don't believe it will happen, but it still motivates me.

A bit of background from my previous month in affiliate marketing. I had been using Adwords for the past 30 days, quite unsuccessfully too. I have lost about $1100, and spend a total of $1400 on Adwords, so about $300 in Clickbank sales. Seeing that 4 figure number told me I need to start over, and start from a different spot.

So I have decided to do article marketing. I avoided it at first because of the long approval times from ezine, and having to deal with getting ranked. When I started this past July in affiliate marketing, I wanted fast results. I sure got fast results, but they weren't positive. So article marketing it is.

I like to think that I'm a decent writer, so hopefully that will be a strength for me.

My true "goal" is to make at least 1 sale in the next 30 days. That's it. If I can do more, then good for me. Maybe it sounds boring to you, but having an easily achievable goal(hopefully!), is one that I can work on top of.

Now the Day 1 Update

To date, I have written and submitted 4 articles to Ezine. 2 articles for 1 niche, and 1 each for 2 other niches. I want to use these to 'test the waters' if you will, and to see if EZA accepts them or not. If they do, then I want to get a feel for how high I can get my articles on the search results for their keywords. And then I want to see how much traffic I can expect from the highest positions I can get, and then on top of that I want to see what the conversion rates would be.

Using that info I will have a better idea how to write the articles and how much competition I can go up against.

I am still going to write articles tomorrow and submit them to get reviewed.

So the tally-

Articles Submitted: 4
Articles Approved: 0
Traffic (views): 0
Sales: 0

I hope to see some changing numbers in the following weeks!

I also hope that this thread will be of help to other affiliate marketers. It's tough to get started, and losing $1100 isn't easy, but I won't give up!

Thanks to Petehols for the inspiration. This thread is based upon your diligent efforts and success seen in your own thread.

-BurtGummer

 

how did u lost $1100 on adwords? did u use targeted keywords?

 

Best part of article marketing is once you have ball rolling you will love it and the worst part about PPC is it eats money like a demon. So keep focus on article marketing and take consistent efforts, this will surly pay you off.

Wish you a luck!

 

good luck man! You can do it!

 

It seems to be easiest to follow someone who has done it successfully - don't you think?

 

Hi Burt

The best of luck to you. My journal has helped me keep focus a lot more than I probably would have. If you are wanting quicker processing times why not use articlesbase. It gets your articles approved within 72 hours and after a certain amount of articles they are then auto approved. I have seen no difference in traffic from articlesbase compared to EZA. Just a thought. Anyway I hope it all goes well for you and you end up getting that Camaro!!

All the best

Pete

 

Best of luck Burt. The marketers that put forth consistent efforts and don't expect to get rich quick are the ones that typically do well.

 

Good luck, always test what works and what doesn't.

 

The best of luck in getting that Camaro. It is one sweet ride, that's for sure. I'd love to have one myself but it's fairly impractical considering I have two little girls that are both under 2 years old. My goal is to be able to afford a brand new Toyota Tacoma Prerunner crew cab. I hope we both get our vehicles and I'll be following your diary here.

 

Day 2 Update

I wrote some more articles and submitted them to EZA, so I've got a total of 8 articles. Two niches have 3 articles each, and I have two smaller niches with 1 article each. I don't think the smaller ones will really convert, but they were the first articles I submitted to get a feel for EZA, so I might as well leave them up there.

None of the articles have been approved yet. My first article was submitted on the 27th of August, so it hasn't even been 7 days yet. I'm trying to be patient.....but I just want to start seeing results so I can tweak things! Due time I suppose.

I'm fairly happy with a new niche that I found though. I won't release it's category of course, but I will say that the keywords i'm targeting have about 10k-18k search results, and get around 800 searches per day. I haven't been able to find any high ranking EZA articles for these keywords, so my fingers are crossed.

Here's the Tally

Articles Submitted: 8
Articles Approved: 0
Traffic (views): 0
Sales: 0

So things really aren't going to start happening until I can get some approved articles. Either way, I'm still going to continue writing more articles, as it is getting easier and faster with every one I write. I wrote my last article in about 15 minutes, and it's about 500 words.

Thanks for all of the kind words everyone! And if I can get a Camaro eventually from affiliate sales, it will hold a special place in my heart, no doubt. Whether that is in 4 months or 4 years, I really don't care....money is money! At least I know I can't lose any more money with bum marketing.

It could be safe to say that losing money in PPC has given me much more motivation for bum marketing than I would have had if I didn't do PPC. Still, I would have preferred to not have lost so much money, but life is life.

 

Good luck to ya, I hope you hit your goal and then some. I'll definitely keep a eye on your journal. FREE Traffic or organic traffic is the way to go. This is my first summer of all organic and FREE traffic and I've been happy with the results.....Nothing beats it. PPC can be a pain in the butt sometimes having to keep an eye on your campaigns all the time.

Don't Give Up!

 

No kidding. Although it did give me something to do, and I did learn a lot from it. A pretty pricey way to learn though, haha.

How successful have you been in article marketing? How many sales are you seeing per week or month, if you don't mind me asking? I'm just trying to get a feel for how many articles I have to submit to start seeing daily sales.

 

you must work hard to make profit consistantly, however after you've done that you can outsource article writing, ooh and for articles.

300/350 words is often better than 500, since people tend to get bored with longer articles

 

Day 3 Update

As of a few minutes ago, 10/10 articles have been approved. I've got to get to be now though, as I'm going to apply to Disneyland tomorrow.....so more article writing will have to wait until tomorrow. I did buy the premium membership because I wanted to get the ball rolling. I'm not going to be just submitting 1 article a day, so I figured I may as well try it out.

I'm now waiting to get upgraded so I can submit more articles.

Here's the Tally

Articles Submitted: 10
Articles Approved: 10
Traffic (views): 0
Sales: 0

Is there an easier way to find the total views, like an analytics page?

How long should I expect it to take for Google to rank/index my pages?

 

Day 4 Update

Well, after having my internet down for 4 hours I'm not too happy with my ISP.

Anyways, I took that time to write 3 more articles. I was at Disneyland most of the day, so I didn't get any other time to write them. I just submitted them a few minute ago.

It's taking me about 20-25 minutes per article, so not horrible, and they are pretty good quality articles. My first 10 got approved on the first try, and I'm already a platinum status author. I'm planning to write at least 5 more articles tomorrow.

Here's the Tally

Articles Submitted: 13
Articles Approved: 10
Traffic (total views): 349
URL Clicks: 53
CB Hops: 43 (31 were for 1 product, the rest were equally spread amongst my other products)
Sales: 0

I'm pretty happy with one of my niches, as the CTR on the article is about 26%. I know it isn't amazing, but I'll take it because it's free! I mean seriously, 43 hops for free. After failing at PPC I feel like an idiot for not trying article marketing in the first place.

Sure, I haven't made any sales yet, but hopefully this one niche will see some conversions at least 1/100 or 1/150, because I'm confident I can get my traffic up way farther. The 31 hops are just from 2 articles, and one of the articles got most of them. So I know the keywords it's targeting and I'm going to work off those.

That particular article received 70 views and 16 clicks today.....my next highest article was at 38 views and 3 clicks, so there's a difference for sure.

My worst performing article got 121 views but only 3 clicks. I'm rather amazed at that, because I considered it one of the better articles because it has a lot of valid, useful information that heavily relates to the keywords. I'll see if it was just a weird fluke today or if it continues like that.

The ball is officially rolling though, as my pages are getting indexed and are getting views. Hopefully I can see a sale within the next few days.

 

hi,
Nice thread and nice goal , I hope you get the camaro
I had 4 articles approved 48 hours ago in Ezine articles. I dunno why but I don't see lot of traffic. I got 31 views and 10 URL clicks ( for all of them ) . The CTR is OK ( 32 %) but the traffic isn't ok At all. I've chosen good keywords with 10000-25000 searches and 5000-15000 competetors. The articles are optimized for those keywords. I can find my articles in google's page 1 when I search for " keyword with quotes " , but when I remove quotes I can't find my articles anymore. This sucks, I've waited 15 days to get those articles approved and this is all what I get ?

 

Just keep trying and don't give up. That's all I can say because that's all I do too, haha.

Write more articles and try different keywords constantly. I found an amazing keyword with search volumes in excess of 400 per day, but only 17k results. 1 article is already on the front page. Of course it could disappear at any instant, but progress is progress.

 

Are you using a landing page or linking to a domain which re-directs to your hoplink?

 

I was linking to a landing page as a wordpress blog, but it was getting a high bounce rate. I just don't think people want to read another wall of text after clicking on a link to possibly get a product. So, I changed to direct linking for today, so we'll see what happens.

 

Please post your ezine bio here so we could check out the articles!