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!

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.