Sales pick up!

Interestingly enough, it is PPC marketing that has begun to show promise. If you have been following this thread—who knows if I am just publishing this into a virtual black hole—you know I blew some money on PPC marketing. Well, when Wealthy Affiliates decided to offer a $1 trial membership, I remembered how I had agonized whether to join or not when I first heard of them. I was very leery of all of the "Get Rich Quick Schemes" on the Internet. And even though WA didn't use that claim It was associated with Internet Marketing and thus suspect. I would have loved to have a $1 trial to check out Wealthy Affiliate University.

So I thought why not promote WA's $1 trial directly to those who are in the position I was in? In other words, market to people who had already done the research and wanted to try WA, but were afraid of being ripped off. When I picked the keywords that were very specific to those people the clicks I was getting almost stopped. They went from the maximum number of clicks to 2 to 3 per day, but out of those I begin to get a sale about every 4 clicks whereas before I'd had 70 + clicks with no sales. So I will stick with this for the time being.

Until Next Time,
CW

Writing For Money: The Funnel

When you set out to do affiliate marketing by writing articles you are really trying to earn money through a chain of events or as some put it, you are creating a money funnel. If you make a website and do a great job of it, what are you going to do next? You can put all of the best advertising on it that you want, but who will see it. It is like getting a great deal on a store front except the store is on Unknown Street in Deserted Town USA.

You have to drive traffic to your website or else all the rest is a waste of time. So the wide mouth of the funnel is your articles which lead people down the cone of the funnel to your website with all of your affiliate advertising, landing pages, and squeeze pages. Once you have delivered the potential buyer to the affiliate pitch page the rest is up to them. Creating articles that presell rather than articles that are sales pitches is the key to sucessful article marketing. That and quantity of course. So get out your pencil and paper and start writing.

Work, work, work

Don't be fooled, this Internet marketing is either going to require an investment in time or money or both.  You will have to work smart and hard to succeed.  Getting the rudimentary principals down is relatively easy, but applying them is the heard part.  If you are going my rout, primarily article marketing, you have to write, write, write!  Even then you can never tell exactly how an article is going to perform. And then there is the funnel.  If you don't have all of the parts to your money funnel working correctly it will clog and you will get nothing out of your hard work.

In my next post I'll go over the money funnel,

CW

The Daily Grind

Now I am not talking coffee here.  I have been writing articles for a month now.  I wanted to write two a day, which turns out to be a bit aggressive for me.  I haven't really managed one a day, but I get two to three a week.  So far it has increased visits to my websites to 3 to 4 visitors a day up from zero per day and I have made a sale through them.

Just to remind everyone and to slip in a less than subtle plug, my web sites are http://www.thedietclearinghouse.com/ dedicated to finding great diets that work.  I am not interested in scams or unhealthy remedies.  Also I have http://www.healthjournal.biz/ which is more of a health blog.  I write articles there about weight-loss and fitness.  Last but not least there is this sight and http://www.holmes-people-search.ws/ a people search sight.  I love this one because it creates 8 income streams for me.  You can check it out at Acme People Search .  If you know what your doing you can make some nice spare cash here.

Until Next Time,
CW

Ok, PPC Restarted

I restarted my PPC campaign to promote Wealthy Affiliate's new 7 day trial for $1.  If you have wondered if this site is a scam or if it fits you, you should definitely go have a look.  It only will cost you a dollar and these guys are really good about cancellations.  No game or other garbage.  You can just cancel any time during the 7 days and only pay a buck.

So take advantage now!

PPC Marketing Shut Down

I shut down my PPC marketing campaign last night.  It was just bleeding money.  I jumped into that boat way too soon.  Of course that is my nature.  Leap then look.  I am now back to full time article marketing.  The one nice thing about article marketing is that it doesn't cost you money, only time.  My mentors inform me that when I get good at it it should bring an average of one sale per article per month.  So if you get enough quality articles out there you should be able to get a nice income going.

So far by reading the tea leaves of Google Analytics there is a growing interest in my websites http://www.thedietclearinghouse.com/ and http://www.healthjournal.biz/. (Shameless plug alert!)

By the way, starting on the 15th of September you can buy a trial membership to Wealthy Affiliate University for only $1. That way you can see what I am talking about and check it out for yourself!

Until next time,
CW

More Sales

Well, I have made another sale over this weekend.  Slowly I am beginning to make progress.  At this point I would say that relevance is the hardest thing to understand.  Most of the stuff I started with was far too general.  You literally have to find a niche in niche marketing.  Just advertising how to groom dogs will not get you anywhere.  You need to advertise, how to groom adult pugs etc.

Check out my money making links,
CW

PPC Marketing Scramble

So I ended up with $150 in my Yahoo PPC account.  I transferred it mistakenly from Pay Pal--oops.  And I didn't get the promised $50 from Yahoo. (Not their fault, it was a mix up with the guy that was promoting it.  There had been a $50 coupon, but the offer had expired and he hadn't updated his affiliate information.)  Any way I decided to go with it.  Wow, one thing it did was to spur me on to learning PPC marketing.  I really would be in trouble with out Wealthy Affiliates.  If you are going to try to do what I am doing, please find a reputable place to learn and be supported like WA.  They are in my money making links.  There is only two places I would trust.  Wealthy Affiliates and Bum Marketing.  Bum Marketing is run by a guy named Travis and he is HELPFUL.

Until next time,
CW

PPC Marketing

Ok, so I started too early.  I didn't intend to but I ran across a coupon that was suppose to give me $50 of free ads on Yahoo.  When I joined I was informed that the offer had expired.  Why me?  Anyway I had placed $150 in the account so I thought I'd give it a spin.  Well, nothing so far except watching Yahoo go Kaa-ching with my or what used to be my money.  I am learning though, learning all of the ways to lose money on PPC marketing.  I do know that it is possible to make money with PPC and I intend to find out.

So far I have found out that I am not converting, but I don't know whether it is my landing page or ads that are irrelevant.  I have changed up my landing page 3 times, if you care you can see the current one at www.thedietclearinghouse/stf.html.  By the way if you want a good diet buy this one while your there.
I am pretty psyched about the new up grades to Wealthy Affiliate that are going to be launched on September 15--stay tuned.  I will also update you on my PPC adventure.

Until Next Time,
CW

Making Conversions.

The chain of events from contact to conversion are wrought with peril.  Contact is when you first contact potential customers either with a paid ad or a free article.  Using your contact instrument (article or ad) you try to nudge them over to a landing page.  From their you hope they will go to the pitch page and finally buy the product.

The rub comes in tracking all of these components.  For instance I might write a dynamite article that attracts 100's of people, but if I get zero conversions I need to find out where in the links of events I have a break down.  When you are article marketing it is compounded by the number of articles you write, where you published them and how they are performing.

Paid ads are a bit easier to diagnose since you know when a customer has clicked on your ad and you can easily follow where he or she went from there.  It is a beautiful thing when you have a great chain operating for you, but it is a frustrating waste of time and/or money when there is a broken link somewhere.

Until next time,
CW