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,

So what gives you ask?

Well I since my last post on 9/7 I’ve been on the road in Chicago doing a big project.  I’m an I/T guy and we had a huge systems install that cause me and my team to work 12-15 hours a day for most of the time I’ve been away.

I know excuses, excuses.

When I look back over the last 2 weeks there were times I was sitting in my hotel room and could have wrote an article but didn’t.  Shame on me.

But this is a learning experience for me.  I’ve been at the affiliate marketing thing for a while now and have never make it big.  I’ve had the tools, the ability, the knowledge but have lacked the execution.   I wonder why,  could I be afraid to be successful?

Well I’m not sure of the answer, but one thing I do know is I’m very attracted to shinny objects.   And what I mean is I have a very hard time focusing on what’s at hand,  which is interesting because its not that way in my normal job life.

I’m always looking for the next approach or tool.   I think this is mainly because I’m just not fond of writing so I avoid it like the plague.  But I need to get over that or find a great writer to pay so I don’t have to do anything but submit articles.

Not sure I have that much money…   OK time to just buck up as my wife would say and get it done.

Thanks for the therapy session,  It’s good to write your thoughts down every now and then because what flows out of your fingers may shock you.

Now on to what little I have done.

Just tonight posted a new article on ezines.  I’m working on the 100 I had a ghost writer do, the problem with them is while they have some good content they need to be re-organized, partially re-written and some points added to each one.

I had also mentioned before that my son was going to be helping me out.   Well that’s not happening.  Now he has started his senior year of high school this project doesn’t even hit his radar.  Guess I can’t blame him,  I would have been the same way in my day.

One last thing for tonight,  while I didn’t get anything submitted in the last couple of weeks I did make another sale,  this one from a repeat customer.   Got to love life time commission programs!

Oh and I did get a small check from one program as well,  now I need to add a couple of zero behind the amount and we will be cooking with gas then.

I’ve updated the sidebar with my latest status and look forward to submitting more tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

Well my first week of my affiliate challenge is complete.  I will end my weeks on Sunday evenings.

This first week is a short one and I was worried that I wouldn’t make any commissions other then a few cents on adsense but in the last 24 hours 2 sales came through!

So here’s the recap of the first week,  7 articles posted and $25 and change in commissions.   Not a great start but not too bad.

I’m off to play some golf with my son tomorrow as school starts on tuesday and he will be a senior in high school.

Anyhow,  I’ve taken a few days off here so I’ll be back to the gind tomorrow night.

Talk to you all soon

Today I’ve submitted 3 articles to ezinearticles, added to the 4 I did yesterday I’ve now submitted in 2 days 10% more articles than I did in the first 8 months doing this. At this rate I’ll double my article count by the end of next week.

I’m going to try beat that but it will all depend how much I get done over the labor day week end.

I’m focused right now on submitting articles for the Aqusana and Affiliate Article Writing opportunities.

On a couple of house keeping notes.  First off,  I cleaned up my commissions earned in the sidebar to only include commissions and adsense earning from programs I’m promoting with article marketing.   Please don’t ask me to split the two apart because I can’t,  it’s against googles TOS to talk about what one makes from adsense.  Let just say for the sake of augment it’s a very small part of the total number.

Secondly,  I’ve decide I’m only going to update the monthly numbers once a week, probably over the weekend.

Thats it for tonight,  good luck all with your affiliate marketing dream!

So I’ve updated my progress to date in the sidebar,  71 articles published at ezinearticles.com and a $959 income from them.   This include commission on sales and google adsense income.

I really, really, really need this to work.  I need to prove to myself and others that this just wasn’t a wild goose chase and a money pit.   So wish me luck.

I’ll be updating the sidebar as sales are made and as articles are accepted at ezinesarticles.  So lets hope the numbers grow fast!

As I mentioned my the previous post I did hire a ghostwriter to write 100 articles.   I’ve just gotten them back and I’m working with my son to clean them up so I can get them posted.

My goal would be to have them all posted by the end of September at the latest.  Wish me luck!

You maybe wondering what programs I’m promoting.  Well the first one is Affiliate Article Writing.  This service is the core behind this last push.  The other two are Aquasana water purification and Xtendlife supplements.

Ok now for the facts, today I’ve submitted 4 articles, no sales, small amout of adsense.

Enjoy!

Just curious about the $1000 seed money: is that for outsourcing your article writing? Apart from that, will you also be writing the articles on your own?

First off the $1000 is partially for outsourcing article writing.   You see I don’t really like writing articles all that much, so outsourcing is very attractive to me.  Plus it provides a great time leverage.

The money that I don’t use for outsourcing I’ll be using to pay my 18 year old high school senior.  He’ll take the articles I’ve outsourced and clean them up,  add some additional relevant content and give them back to me to be published.  This will help my son continue to work on his writing skills that will become very valuable to him in college.

You maybe be wondering why I need my son to clean up articles that I paid to have written.   Well,  my past experience with ghostwriters is you need to paid a pretty good sum per article to get a good one,  like $10+ per article.   When I’ve paid less I’ve alway had to tweek them some to make them useable, to my standards anyhow.

So I’ve decided to go to the other end of the spectrum.  I’m paying $2 an article for around 350 words.   These articles are pretty good and only need a quick read, some small grammar fixes, and then an additional paragraph or two of specific information about the product its promoting.

So between paying the ghostwriter and my son I’m coming in around $4 an article.

I’m happy, my son is getting lots of good writing experience, and money to run with his friends.

Life is good and that’s why I’ve set aside some seed money for the venture.

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!