If you’ve been reading my posts here you remember that I outsourced the writing of about 100 articles on water purification in September.  I put an ad on rent a coder contracted with the writer for two dollars per 400 word article. But I got back was between 300 and 350 words that made little or no sense. And of course after trying to work this out with the author I just gave up and chaked it up to a lesson learned.

But even though the articles aren’t in any shape to be posted they do provide some research for each of the topics. So I’m just taking them one at a time using the data in them and rewriting them to be useful.

But since I have such a great love for writing articles, not. I’m not letting this experience cause me to quit looking for outsourcing help.  I’m just basically looking for someone to write for me that I can just take the article and able to posted directly to e-zines without me having to change it at all.

So I recently found an outsourcer on digital point forum. He charges a penny a word and guarantees US writers 100% perfect spelling and grammar.

So I ordered 20 articles from him and recently got them back. Well I must say they’re better quality articles then I got before and are well researched but they still had a number of grammatical errors in them.  So I contacted the author and he’s going to go through them again and fix all the errors.

I really hope he comes through so I can use them again in my quest for a ghostwriter, I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Now for a quick wrap up on the week,  I did get five more articles posted this week and made some adsense income and have another sale at xtend-life.

So through October 11 I have just about doubled my income from September, while still not much money but were going in the right direction.

Here’s wishing everybody a good week and more sales and you had the week before.

All I need to do is keep reminding myself that if I just do the work the money will come.

Along those lines I picked up a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 and I got to tell you it’s the BOMB!  It is so much easier writing by just speaking then typing I can hardly believe it!

Just got done posting 3 articles and I”m shooting for 5 tomorrow since the weathers kind of bad here.

Cheers!

I also have to remember that I only got to work on this for two of the four weeks in September since my day job had me traveling with little time to work on this.

The fourteen articles I wrote was my highest article output in one month in quite some time. I fully expect that if I continue and increase my article writing output that the commissions will follow.

And since I’m a numbers kind of guy I’d put together a couple of excel charts that show the relationship between the number of clicks to the dollars earned. Of course there’s no surprise here the more clicks the more dollars made.   Here they are:

I have to also remember that I also published all fourteen of these articles at articlesbase as well as a few other article directories along the way.

Also if you follow this blog you’ll know that I’ve been messing around with article marketing for quite a long time without a lot of success.  But as I’m writing this I realize that maybe one of my issues is I’ve never set goals for myself.

So in October my goal is to get 50 articles published. If I can accomplish that I will almost double the number of articles I’ve published. And then going forward the goal is to increase the number articles published per month by 10% until I can get to a 100 articles a month level.

Wish me luck as I wish you all the best in your affiliate marketing endeavors.

I’ve submitted 6 articles to ezinesarticles.  But more importantly for me is I’ve finally got a plan in place beyond ezines.

I started thinking about what others had said in the Affiliate Article Writing forum about other directories to add your articles to.  It seems that articlesbase.com is making a run at ezines and many people in the Affiliate Article Writing program are having great luck with it.

So after each article is approved at ezines I’ll be posting a version of it at articlesbase.   But that is just a small change to my process.

Since I control my pre-sale site, I added a blog to it and I’m posting my ezinearticles on it with a back link,  seems back links can’t hurt so why not.

I’m also doing an experiment with other sites and back linking.  My goal is to get get some link love to my ezine and articlesbase pages without a bunch of work.  I’ll let you know how it goes, and the particulars soon.

And lastly I put together a spreadsheet that tracks clicks to the product sites vs sales.  There is some interesting data there that I’ll post when I get a free moment.

OK, well it’s going to be a wild week again,  I’m heading to the east coast for a couple of days but I hope to keep writing on this trip.

I’ll post a september summary post on the 1st, so there is still a couple of day to catch a sale or two.

Cheers,

I started this journey about 5 years ago.   At that point in time I was buying and selling items on ebay trying to put a little extra cash in the bank.   While that did prove to be profitable it was a lot of work to buy, list, pack and ship items every day.

While I was doing the ebay thing I learned about affiliate marketing.  This approach to making money on the internet immediately peaked my interest.  I’m a I/T guy in my day job so I thought this would be great to build websites, build unix servers, learn PHP, etc.  Could the money be far behind?

So I set off and built a web server, put up some PHPNuke sites with affiliate datafeeds, posted some crappy content and volia I was an internet marketer.

The only problem was I didn’t know how to create traffic for my sites so I made hardly any money.   Strike one.

So I then ventured into the PPC / adwords game.   At the time on-line poker was a big deal and I love to play poker.   So I jumped in and created a bunch of adwords campaigns for poker sites and started making some money.   At my peak I was netting between $500 and $1000 a month.  I thought I had made it and it would be easy to grow from there.

Well it wasn’t,  I tried promoting some other products and services with adwords without success.  At the same time google decided to stop allowing poker adword campaigns.  Back to square one.  Strike 2

So I then joined the next coaching program, and then the next membership, and the next, and the next.   All of which didn’t work for me.   Why?  because I was looking for that no work, work model,  silly me.   Strike 3

Luckly this isn’t a baseball game and  after a couple of year of chasing the golden ring without success I reflected on my experience over that time.

I wondered if all the time, effort, and money I put into this without hardly any return was worth it.   I wondered if I would ever figure out how to make a go at this affiliate marketing gig.

A couple of weeks ago my wife, who has been very supportive, sat me down and asked my why I continue to spend time and money on affiliate marketing.  All I could say was I still had a goal of making money on the internet.   She reminded me that all I was doing was losing money on the internet.

I realized she was right.  If I had just saved all the money I’ve spent…..

So I decided to make one more shot as this with a membership/service called affiliate article writers.  This service is focused on only article marketing.   I have been a member for about 8 months and this approach is showing some promise.

OK so here’s the deal,  it’s August 25, 2009 and I’ve decide to devote 12 months (starting Sept 1 2009) and $1000 seed money to make one more run at this.   If I don’t start making a profit in this timeframe I’m hanging my internet marketing hat up!

So this blog is going to be about this journey.   Wish me luck!