My Article Marketing Landing Page

Obviously it's been a while since I have updated anything, but have been busy “behind the scenes”. The last couple of weeks have been extremely reveling to what I really want out of life and I have been lucky enough to enjoy it.

I have not been to my 7-3:30 job since 5/15, a Tuesday. My beautiful son was born at 8 PM on 3/14, and I took a 2 week leave of absence to spend time with the family. It has extended another week due to complications, but everything appears to have settled down for now. I thought I could get some affiliate work done while I was on my leave, but medical issue and paternal duties have occupied a majority of my time. So I haven't got much done, but that's ok. Like I had said before; It's given me an opportunity to experience what I really want and why I am pursuing the chance to work from home.

After all the scares settled down and I no longer spent my days at the hospital, I got an opportunity to get back to work again. I began a lens introducing people to the fantastic world of article marketing. The way I see it, I am going to come across all sorts of things that I can learn and share my knowledge on, so why not make a page that can help others achieve a self-sufficient lifestyle?

The more and more I participate in article marketing, the more I come to appreciate it and benefit from it. I've said it before and I will say it again; article marketing can be great therapy. Working with the recently separated/divorced niche can be exhausting, but every day I learn more about myself.

I had written quite a few articles earlier this month and have seen an increase traffic in bit. The biggest thing that surprised me were the click throughs I received from my articles on EzineArticles were up substantially and I haven't really figured out why. A majority of the articles were there for a couple months prior to now but never received this much attention. I'm not complaining, just surprised I received the attention I got this month considering I lost half a month. But overall, my numbers pleased me. My total visits to articles on Ezine totalled 182, while URL clicks were at 19, which gave me just over 10% click rate

I only had three submissions for StreetArticles this month and have reached an author rank of 506. I did break 400, but I have fallen back the last couple weeks, assuming because of the lack of submissions.
 I have changed my approach just a touch and designating StreetArticles for my affiliate marketing campaign and EzineArticles for my niche Getting Over Divorce For Men. It just seems to simplify it for myself.

Keeping The Momentum

That little push forward did sustain for a little while when, again, life intervenes. It felt good to have the motivation at the tail end of April/ beginning of May. I wrote a few articles and updated my blogs fairly well. Now, the challenge is going to create a routine and be able to stick to the routine on a regular basis.
What I have encountered issue that occur through the whole routine off track. And once you're off track, it is even more difficult to obtain that level of consistency again. It is so much easier to maintain a level of performance than to contribute in spurts, falling in a valley of performance, struggling to get to the mountain top again.
I have seen that with my own personal performance over the last few months. I have had a couple weeks that I am writing consistently and fluidly. The routine will be disturbed some way and I falter. My attention focuses on the issue at hand while my performance in article marketing suffers. I re-adjust after getting control of the interruption, and begin playing a game of catch-up with article writing.
My latest issue that hindered my article writing was the death (or so I thought death) of our cat. After that incident was resolved, I proceeded my article writing campaign full force. Again I have been faced with a obstacle at home that has consumed more time than I had thought it would.
It just so happens this particular events this week relates to my niche of marketing. Having custody issues of a child whom you care about deeply isn't easy. But I have noticed a benefit from the experience I have been obtaining through my article marketing.
Writing articles has given me excellent practice in writing and conveying information to the reader. Now, writing a court document didn't seem so bad. In light of taking a day and a half to sit down and write (not including research time), all the article writing I have done over the last few months have proven useful. I am happy with what I have to submit.
Now that I have addressed that issue at home, perhaps I can continue this forward push.
 I haven't increased the click through on StreetArticles, but had one article hit 24 visits in a day! That has given me something to investigate, learn, improve and attempt to replicate.
I submitted enough articles with EzineArticles on May 1st to reach Platinum Author. After writing 10 articles I have achieved that level, making the approval process for an article much quicker than before. Basic author's articles are approved after a 7 day evaluation, whereas, platinum are approved in 48 hours. The click throughs with these articles have reached 11%, hire than ever before. Keeping in mind the faster approval rate from the site and not even being half way through the month gives me great optimism for this month.
On another exciting note, I have someone following my blog on Wordpress now. They have liked a couple of posts and just recently started to follow it. Just a little gratification for all the work that gets put in.
We'll see what this week holds in store for me.

Keeping The Momentum

It seems that the little fire that got me going again has burned a little longer than I thought it would. It has been a very productive couple of days, despite work schedules and issues that arise while home. I think I have a better understand of how productivity works and can be optimized, but there was always a part of me that would go strong for some time, eventually running out of steam and dwindling away.

I recently wrote an article discussing characteristics of an affiliate marketer and I believe something in that opened up a different thought process for me. In it, I speak of having a passion and enjoying what you are doing. A lot of my articles talk about divorce, learning how to cope with the loss of a loved one and relationships while I continually plan to have them cover many other related topics. But as I have written more and more articles about the subject, the more and more it has seemed to help me handle the difficult situations I still face today. It has become a therapy for me, opening up an understanding of the events that happen in every day situations.

That being said, there is still fuel to continue this notable submission of articles I have been begun. I had submitted 4 articles for the month of April with EzineArticles, generally spread out through the month, week by week. I only submitted only 1 article with StreetArticles at the beginning of the month, so over all, my views would be expected to suffer.

In the month of May, I have already submitted 3 articles with EzineArticles and one with StreetArticles. The views have already gone up substantially and I am seeing some click throughs again.

Both my Wordpress and Blogger blogs had suffered from updates for the month of April. I believe I only had a couple updates for each on. I am anticipating on changing that to a couple of updates per week.

I have begun to witness and can appreciate the amount of work that can go into affiliate marketing and writing articles itself. In order to get results, you need to constantly adding unique and original material on a consistent basis. I have not invested any money, so I still have a long and difficult journey to profit. Even if the results I see are minimal, they are a move in the right direction.

A Push Forward

I have actually had a pretty exciting couple of days for me. Something got up somewhere and lit a fire under me,creating a very productive couple of days.

It began Sunday when I wrote a post for both of my blogs and submitted an article to EzineArticles. At that point, I was at my eighth submission and you can move up a level when you reach ten articles. I wrote and submitted an article on Monday and then one more Monday morning. I came home after work, checked my email and got a notification that I had achieved Platinum Level! Never realized I was so easy to please. With this achievement I am permitted unlimited article submissions (which seems silly. You are only allowed ten article submissions as basic author, but if you write ten, they upgrade you to unlimited? Maybe has something to do with accepted article submissions) and faster approval. This will definitely be nice, considering under basic, you generally have to wait seven days before your article goes live.

All in all, my article submissions were down for the month of April. I had 1 new articles with StreetArticles as opposed to 5 In March. Total views of all articles at this time were 367. This is a running total, not broken down for the month. I still only had the 2 clickthroughs that carried over from March, so I had a big fat 0 visits through StreetArticles to my landing page.

Now my Ezine account surprised me in performance. As of 2 days ago, I was far behind any progression from the previous month. I was surprised to see the payoff with the work I had done in the tail end of the month. My article visits were a total of 127 for the month, up over 5%. My clickthroughs were down almost 50%, but these all came in the last 2 days. This just shows me you won't get results without effort.

I realize these numbers may seem small, but that doesn't concern me right now. I see a reaction to the effort I am putting in right now and hope that carries through for a while. Besides, I haven't spent a penny yet. But the first expense will definitely be a web site.

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.