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.

My Game Plan

Since I plan on going this penniless, I'm starting with some landing pages on squidoo. I actually have 2 now and I will track to see which approach is working better. I am using an article marketing campaign to start off with to drive traffic to the landing page and have my affiliate links there.

I have mentioned I have been using EzineArticles and StreetArticles for the articles linking to the landing pages. I don't really have a reference to tell me what to expect starting out for traffic numbers other then what the sites report. But I do see a difference in CTR between the two.

With my Ezine account, I have 4 article with just over 100 visits . Not all articles were published for the whole month and with the addition of new articles, I expect it to go up. The click through ratio was at just over ten percent, which from a little reading, feel this is quite high, maybe got lucky, but don't expect it to sustain that figure. I have heard 1-3% is an acceptable level. If someone else knows otherwise, please correct me.

I am also using StreetArticles to continue the campaign and diversify a little. I want to add a third sight, but think it better to become more familiar with my writing style than mass produce a number of filler or regurgitated material. Anyway, with StreetArticles, I have five articles published and combined had almost 120 visits for the month. The big difference I see now is the CTR I am experiencing. At just below 1.5%, there is a dramatic difference between these and my Ezine articles. Or is this just a more realistic number that I should expect to see? I'm going to do some testing (well, figure out how to) to see if it simply has to do with how the links are presented

I have also mentioned my blog on Wordpress that is bringing in some minimal traffic right now. I had 35 visits to approximately 7 posts for the month of March. I still don't have a structure and am trying to figure it out and right now, it feels as if it's all over the place. Once I get this settled in, I feel confident there is going to show an improvement.

I have also sold some old stuff on Ebay in an attempt to build up my PayPal account. I guess I'm not technically going penniless, but my wife likes the idea of getting rid of the unnecessary and it will assist in getting my own web page and explore PPC campaigns.

I also am going to open accounts with social networking sights under my article publishing and keep it separate from my personal accounts. This will include comment posts. Not sure how well this will work, but it's a learning experience, right?

An Affiliate Marketer's Start

I first came across affiliate marketing in the beginning of 2009. I stumbled upon it when I was unemployed and I was going through a divorce. I was spending a lot of time on the computer and was looking for some work-at-home business to earn some extra money.
At the time, I tried a couple programs I came across but nothing actually did what it said. Over my life, I have spent quite a bit of money on programs that never fulfilled their promises, so I have remained skeptical. It took me some time to see "if it's too good to be true, then it is", but I did, and at that point, pursued a 9-5 job and have been here ever since.
Affiliate Marketing has stuck with me for quite some time. When I stumbled upon it in 2009, I gave it a very poor attempt and threw in the towel early. I think I may have wrote one article and it was in a niche I had no business or interest being in. I wasn't emotionally ready at the time to do the actual work required to move forward and succeed and didn't have the patience to learn more about it.
It's three years later and like I said, the concept has been with me for the duration of that time. I don't have any capital to invest so it's going to be a ground zero start-up, but I am ready for some change and am going to work around the lack of investment funds for now.

What I want to do is track my progress as I pursue a self-supporting lifestyle. I am working full time 7-3 and have a large family to spend time with, so the amount of time I spend on my new en devour will have to be reasonable. Both a business and family balance.

I technically began this project in January. I've been doing quite a bit of research and trial and error as I'm learning how this business works, so I have a bit to catch up on in this blog.
I should begin with my intentions and layout of my plan to achieve my goal. I simply want to be able to spend my time with my family. After going through a divorce, I have realized the important things to me and I want to enjoy them. So, to financially achieve this, I will have to bring in approximately $XXX a day after any business expenses. ( I had a figure in mind but always kept finances to myself, so feel free to fill in what you would want)
I don't want to and can't spend any money on this now, so I haven't and won't. A simple re-investment of any capital will sustain any growth until I am able to leave the current employment I have.

My first pursuit will be article marketing since it doesn't have to cost anything. I have written a few articles on ezine and streetarticles, a couple lenses on squidoo and have started a blog on wordpress. It took me quite some time to first develop a writing style I was comfortable with, so it took awhile before I released anything public. Now, between the middle of February and the month of March, I have 9 total articles and a blog plus this one.

I have chosen to focus on divorce and recovery, simply because I can relate to it so well. This is an opportunity to make all that misery pay a little bonus to the lessons  I learned about myself and others. I can already see issues of not concentrating and allowing  myself to "spread thin" across niches, so that is something I hope I can remain conscience of.

Right now it's focus for me. I need to focus on a game plan and stick to that game plan, follow through and give it an honest chance to get me and my family where we want to go.