Feeling Run Down

I recently wrote about the importance of persistence and perhaps I should re-read and better implement it myself. I feel like I have allowed procrastination to take over to some point. I have found myself tired and saying “I can get to it tomorrow”. What happens when you find yourself with too many things to possibly do tomorrow?

I haven't been consistent with my article writing campaign for almost 3 weeks and have seen the views of my articles drop substantially. Some of that can be attributed to the lower amount of articles I have actually submitted. I have added 4 to my EzineArticles but only one to StreetArticles. I have updated my other blog with a creepy situation that was surprisingly exhausting for the week.

The following week after the cat incident, I had gotten very ill. I think it came from feeling run down from a non traditional schedule I try to maintain for my article marketing. I work a full time job from 7-4 Monday through Friday and have 5 (soon to be six) members of the family that deserve my time.

The only time I can consistently count on to have to myself is early in the morning. With all the children and my wife, the one computer we have is a hot commodity. I've circumvented this obstacle by changing my sleeping schedule.

Since my wife is pregnant now, she tends to go to bed quite early. So I have been going to bed with her, around 8-9 pm during the work week.

I start my morning, usually at about 3 am. It has seemed to be the only time I was able to feel like I was getting something done in peace. It gives me about 1.5-2 hours in the morning to work on my article marketing and blogs. When I get home in the evenings, I might get a half hour here and there. Sometimes it's enough to finish what I had started in the morning.

After doing this for about three months now, I think it finally caught up with me physically. I started staying up a little later (the kids had spring break) and started getting the flu. My morning routine was shot because I still had to go to my 7-4 job.

I feel better now and have the old routine available again. As I look at the numbers on my article marketing, I realize that these drops are due in large part my the lack of new content. More article submissions mean more views, which in turn transpires to more clickthroughs.

My landing page is due for an update, but see an increase in ranking by the links I'm giving it now. Again, being persistent is important, but it makes me think about the importance of consistency, too.

Persistance In Affiliate Marketing

It's been about two weeks since my last update/post about my progress with affiliate marketing. If it's been that long since my last post, there hasn't been anything to update about. I never realized how quickly life can over run everything.

My son had spring break (he's still in grade school) so he was home. While he was here, some crazy events took place that needed my direct attention at the time. With what had happened and the time I spent with him and my full time job, the week quickly got away from me.

I usually work on affiliate marketing early in the morning. I work 7-4 Monday trough Friday every week and spend family time together until at least 6-7 in the evening. Sometimes I can sneak an hour in here and there in the evening, but because I'm ready for bed at 8, it's not always that productive.

I go to bed so early because I get up quite early. 3 am seems to be the magic number, giving me enough uninterrupted time in the morning to make progress. It can get frustrating when I have some ideas but can only work on it intermittently. Waking up at 3 gives me two and a half hours of alone time on the computer, which is unheard of with four children in the house.

After my son spent the week, the flu hit and took me out of commission for four days.

I can already see a dramatic difference in the performance and decrease viewer ship to my articles with taking that short amount of time off. Without adding fresh articles, my views are generally down around 60% and have had zero click-through.

If anything, I will need to walk away from these two weeks with a learning experience.

I do believe article marketing can be profitable, but only through persistence.

I have decided I need to develop a schedule for myself, laying out what I need to do. Something that breaks  my time down into manageable blocks with some room to diversify into other form of marketing I may not have even begun to explore.

Affiliate Marketing - In The Begining

Well, I started this project in January with no expectations of immediate success and told myself I wanted to see where six months of legitimate effort would get me. But when I began, I spent a lot of time researching and studying how affiliate marketing works. All in all, I didn't publish my first article until the middle of February, spending a substantial amount of time trying to figure out my writing style.

I have only published 11 articles as of now, far below the number I had anticipated, but I attribute it to working on my own style. I originally wanted to publish 3-5 a week, right out of the gate, but I didn't want to publish something just to publish it. Working full time and a family of 6 makes for a difficult task to find time, but I am. Things are taking me longer than I thought they would, but it's a learning curve.

So, January I developed my landing page. In February, I published one article, continued to develop, and published 8 more in March. April, I am attempting to meet my original demands on production and have 3-5 articles a week starting now. I have 2 this week so far and have an ultimate goal of 15 articles for the month of April.

I've been concentrating harder on keywords and how to utilize them best. The viewer-ship of my articles in March were low, so I am going to be looking deeper at my keywords. My articles are averaging 1-2 views a day which I find disheartening.

But, ultimately, my click-throughs are non existent, meaning nobody is going to my landing page. And if no one is hitting my landing page, there are no sales. So that leaves me another facet of article marketing to learn more and work on.

I've tried pinging my blogs and articles using Pingoat,Blog Ping and Ping-o-matic. but haven't noticed a difference in views since I've done it a few days ago. I hear conflicting stories on the subject, so I'll just keep doing it anyway for now.

Well, I have a few more things I wanted to get into this weekend, so I should have plenty to share next week. I need to begin using social media and leave some forum and blog comments to get some exposure. I also intend to do some editing/updating on top of some new article submissions to try and keep the content fresh. Also need to add some pictures to some of my articles when I am able to take advantage of it.