Zoe In The City

Motivation, such an aggravation

zoe — Sat, 31 May 2008 04:18:11 +0000

Yes, in the past week, I’ve made my first hubs and published my first articles…

I even managed to drive a bunch of traffic to this site.

Let me be honest here, I still have an issue with motivation…

I have now had 3 FULL weeks off work. I’m very disapointed that i havent made more happen. sorely dissapointed… But the excuse goes like this:

First week was recovering from my old job, aka. partying.

May 23st (8 days ago) was when I started making a serious effort… ie, this blog, creating my lenses, etc.

May 26th was my first sale… and since then I simply havent had the inclination to write more articles. I am unsure of what has happened. Maybe its because I have a new job starting in 2 days? I’m not sure. All I know is that I don’t feel the same level of desire right now.

Which is completely stupid. Continually trying to remind myself that with just 150 articles i could be making $150 a day which is seriously enough to fund most of my dreams. Which is basically to travel comfortably and then chill out on a tropical island with a drink served in a coconut.

I need to bust out of this rut. BADLY. I only have 1 day left before I go back to the rat race… and I so badly want to have completed the 30 articles of my first niche. Only 12 to go.

I can do 12 in a day.

Must continue my nice blog too… Thats one leg of the table for my niche.

Wish me luck!

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Step Two of Affiliate Marketing

zoe — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:42:20 +0000

Step 2 of Affiliate Marketing (BUM style)

Before you attempt step 2, ensure that you have completed step 1, your landing page or hub is up and running, and should be getting some hits from search engines (you can check this in your stats).

Have you socially bookmarked your page? try using social marker. This does take some time.

Now that you have your landing page and you know how to socially bookmark.. It’s time to write your articles. Using bum marketing techniques, you will need to search for low competition keywords or phrases. Search for these using google, and put your keywords in inverted commas, as so:

“internet marketing lifestyle”

This search returns 7200 competition sites. If you write a seriously good article with the keywords sprinkled liberally throughout, you will probably end up on the first or second page. Better yet is to find a phrase with less than 500 competing sites.

In fact, you will notice that This Very Blog is #7 thanks to social bookmarking with propellor. Woot!

Anyways… find a keyphrase that has low competition, and that people are actually searching for use Gtrends to find how many people search for your phrase. It doesnt matter if only 10 people search per day, so long as the competition is low, you will get hits.

The idea here is not to write 30 articles for the same phrase, but to write 30 articles for 30 different phrases, relating to your niche. That way, each article will get 5-10 hits per day x 30 articles. Some of the articles will get more, some less.

Why articles?

Articles are free! free to write and free to host. The article directories have good PR so you can get ranked easily in the search engines. Use your articles as a way to pre-sell the affiliate product you are marketing

Some directories will not allow you to put direct links to affiliates in your articles, and you will need to link to your landing page, with others you can link direct to the product. Use this to your advantage with review-articles and comparisons etc.
Posting the articles

So far i have been using ezinearticles.com, hubpages and goarticles.com

Ezine articles is the biggest, with the highest PR, but it takes alot of time, and i have had a couple of articles rejected to random reasons, its taken a week to get 9 articles on ezinearticles, but it was instant to get 9 on goarticles.com

The hub page that i created was ranked pretty much instantly and has gotten a bunch of hits very quickly.

Use all of them. post 5 here, 5 there, 5 at the other place.

TASK 1

Write your first article. It doesnt need to be amazing. Find inspiration from magazines, websites, other articles and gtrends.

TASK 2

Post your first article on goarticles or hubpages. Use these for now because your article will go live instantly. Use this to check your links, how it looks etc.

TASK 3

Socially bookmark your article.

TASK 4

Repeat, using different article directories.

Too easy! Don’t make it hard.

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First Sale - Less Than ONE WEEK after starting…

zoe — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:22:02 +0000

It’s been an interesting week here in Zoe Land.

Obviously, I haven’t updated this blog as often as I would like… AND I promise I will get around to step 2 TODAY (feel free to send me mean tweets if I don’t)

Now, for some reason, I have had zero motivation to get on and write articles, after the massively productive week last week.. I have only about 18 articles online now, and still haven’t gotten around to the blog. But the hub and Squidoo lens are both active and getting hits.

The law of attraction

On Thursday I was listening to the CD of “the secret” and it said “just believe that it will happen, don’t keep running back to your bank account to check how much money you have, just believe it will be there”..

So I stopped checking Clickbank and my affiliate links.. For a few days

I logged on this morning, went to the thirty day challenge links tracker, noticed I have had alot of referral hits and I thought hmmm… check Clickbank? Yes! First sale!!!

What did I do right?

I followed the procedure exactly as I wrote out on the first day.. But a bit slower than I would have liked.

Aka socially bookmarked articles linking to content rich Squidoo review page.

All of my articles link to my Squidoo page, and everything is socially bookmarked to within an inch of its life. Yes it takes AGES to do that to 18 articles. Hours. Probably why I got a bit bored of the whole thing this week.

Tell ya what though… A Sale is a GREAT motivator! Yet me!

What did I do wrong?

Aaah… yes, I made sooo many mistakes.

But only one majorly sticks out in my mind.

I know what product was sold with my affiliate link… But I have NO IDEA where it came from. The worst part? I don’t know how to find out where it came from….

Suggestions anyone? I’ll be posting the same question on the Wealthy Affiliate Forum in 2 minutes.

So there you go…

It truly does “work”. I just need it to work 10 times as often and I’ll be in business.

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Saturday was great.. but not productive

zoe — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:21:52 +0000

So yeah, i admit i didnt do a damn internet thing today..

2 of my first 3 submitted articles were accepted by ezinearticles.com

AND i made RANK!!! yes yes yes yes yesssssssssssssssss so exciting bring on the sales.

out of 2,800,000 sites, and just 6400 on the exact match, my site is ranked:

10th,(first page) , 11th and 14th

none of my articles have ranked yet, but its been less than 12 hours since they were approved.

Tomorrow i intend to get onto the things i was supposed to do today. it’s a focus issue.

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End of week - What did i achieve?

zoe — Fri, 23 May 2008 09:42:20 +0000

Okay, my first 5 days of internet marketing.

Obviously, this blog is going off like a frog in a sock. Still haven’t been ranked on any search engines.. .but that’s not what i’m looking for here.

My Niche project is kicking along now. 10 optimised, relevant articles are awaiting submission for ezinearticles *yay*

Today i created a hub page. its easier than using squidoo.. but alot less flexible. squidoo is definitely my preference.. but we’ll see what happens with the search engines and the traffic.

Tomorrow! Tomorrow i intend to:

Write 10 more articles (uhmmm yeah,..) I think that may be a tall order, i only actually wrote about 5 today and that took the majority of the day.

Create a blogger blog for my niche, with a few posts at least

Start hitting the forums and posting my links

Phew… it doesnt sound like a lot, but really thats going to be hours of work. lucky its a lot more fun that what i used to do!

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Step One of Affiliate Marketing

zoe — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:12:38 +0000

The truth is, it’s hard to get your head around where to start.

write articles, create a lens, create a web page, blog, social bookmark it, whaat??so here it is. How To Start an Affiliate Marketing EMPIRE step by step. In pictures. with words.

Step One:
Choose a niche and create a landing page

Forget everything you have read about choosing a niche. it’s not supposed to be hard. Choose something that either you enjoy doing yourself, or that you have some knowledge about..it could be something you are studying or want to learn more about.

For some reason everyone gets caught up choosing a niche. Don’t make it harder than it is! Just pick one, then pick another one.. pick 5 for goodness sake, more important than the niche is that you can find a product that sells.

For example, i have a website, it gets hits and i make money from adsense. For the life of me i can’t find a thing to sell. Does this mean i give it up? No! of course not. It still gets hits, i have affiliate product links on it, but at the moment that particular niche is boring me to tears… So i am working on my other 4 niches In the meantime, that website is still ranked well by google,its getting a consistent amount of hits… and when i feel the need i will write some more articles and increase my adsense revenue.

see what i’m getting at?

The bottom line is that if you have multiple niches, when one doesnt work, or fails to take off… another one will. Don’t give up, Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and for goodness sake, Don’t take a site down if it fails to convert on day 2!

Alright, back to the lesson.

Creating a landing page.

Your landing page is designed to a) get ranked in google and b) pre-sell the affiliate product.

You can set up a landing page for free with squidoo.com or blogger.com, i personally like squidoo for landing pages. The reason why we don’t use Wordpress is because WP doesnt allow affiliate links. In fact, you will end up getting your page banned. That would be a bummer.

So, with Squidoo.com you can set up a page, put it in a category, and see how well it gets ranked within squidoo. I like that i can see where my hits are coming from with a neat little pie graph, and can also see my ranking climb on squidoo.

go set up your landing page… ready…? NOW

Make your landing page content rich. Have loads of usefull information, links, pictures, lists, etc etc etc. Make sure the links go to your affiliate’s page (with your code, of course).

Once your landing page is active, use a program like socialmarker.com and list your landing page with as many social bookmarking programs as you can. This blog gets most of its hits from Stumble, Digg and Twitter (i love my friends & followers )

Thats it! step one complete. a landing page, socially bookmarked.

stay tuned for step two of affiliate marketing… later. And remember, it wont happen overnight, but it will happen.

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End of day results

zoe — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:03:24 +0000

Honestly? Internet Marketing is harder than I imagined. Much Much harder. Obviously, I am working from my couch, and have unlimited cups of tea.. BUT its no paradise… Well, okay, it beats working, but then… the money isn’t exactly rolling in.. yet.

So, as of today, my campaigns are thus:

2 optimised Squidoo Lens / Landing Pages with links to affiliates

3 uploaded and not yet accepted articles on ezinearticles

a few blog posts (here, obviously)

A ton of social bookmarking

Multiple articles written (yes, i know, Must Write More)

Obviously, from writing this, I can see that there is room for improvement in my productivity levels.

The good news is…My Lens… IS ranked! I had 21 visits on the first day it was up, of which 14 are from google searches. Possibly you don’t think this is brilliant.. But i think its a great start. remember,it’s not where you start, but where you finish that counts.

For my target keywords, lens A is ranked 11 out of 388,000 pages. Just imagine what will happen when my articles start kicking in….golly!

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How Bum Marketing Works…

zoe — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:25:14 +0000

You probably came here to learn a bit more about the Internet Marketing Business Plan.

This is the simplified version of how & why bum marketing works… The essence of why i use bum marketing techniques.

In order to get 1000 people coming to our site every day - so that we can send at least 250 people off to our affiliate / merchant site, and make the desired $100+ dollars per day, we need to market the landing page & therefore, our merchant.

What i did above was to show, simply, how you can use Ezinearticles, Usfreeads and a Squidoo lens to drive traffic through to your Merchant’s site.

put simply, if each of those inbound links brings you 5-10 hits per day, and you have 100 or so of them online, you’re going to be making the sales. Just ensure that each and every article or landing page you write is optimised for your key phrases.

Its almost too easy. Can you write 10 - 30 articles a day to get out of your day job? I’m pretty sure I can.

Stay tuned.

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Internet Marketing Phase 1, and what is happening in my Real Life

zoe — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:49:01 +0000

A killer week was to be had by all at Chez Moi, as far as work goes, my current theory is that I must be moving in the wrong direction because nothing is happening. I’m skilled, I’m highly employable, I have sales skillz (sic) but, for some reason I keep getting stuffed around by employers. So, in my downtime I’ve been working pretty much constantly on my websites. What I have learnt so far is that writing the article is the easy part! Optimizing for keywords is slightly harder, getting it posted to the article directories isn’t bad… but the killer for me has been Landing Pages.

When does it become time to just say “enough is enough”? Realistically, people quit their jobs or get fired all the time, and they start up perfectly good businesses. So, while i have no employment and still have an internet connection, i’m throwing everything i have at the Internet Marketing Business. What does it cost??

Well guys, the truth is, I’m not a true blue Bum Marketer. I’ve been using Wealthy Affiliate (which i love) and BlueHost for web hosting. I’ve even tried another “how to market ebooks” program, which is more expensive than Wealthy Affiliate , and truly not worth a dime. Which leads me to another point… Why do people pay so much to learn how to make money online?

Programs like Wealthy Affiliate offer so much more than their competition, that before you sign up you wonder if its all for real - and it is. I use the forums all the time, and i’m constantly going over the training modules to refresh whats in my mind.

So thats me, unemployed aka, unencumbered by boring job, using Wealthy Affiliate , Creating 10’s of articles and landing pages daily and looking forward to something interesting happening here soon!

The best news i’ve had all day, is that with my Landing Pages on Squidoo, even though i havent optimised or put links from articles or usfreeads, i’ve already had 10 uniques click through to my affiliate product sales page. yes, from 20 odd hits on the landing page. This could Really work people! stay tuned!

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Getting Started With Internet Marketing

zoe — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:16:56 +0000

The hardest part of getting started with internet marketing is just that. Starting. For weeks I have been procrastinating so that you don’t have to! There is a simple, step by step process for getting your Internet Marketing Lifestyle Goals to fruition, and most Internet Marketing gurus want you to pay for it! Well that’s just baloney. So here it is, a step by step business plan for Getting Started with Internet Marketing.

1. Find 5 Products to Promote - find these using an affiliate program, or by typing in the niche +affiliate in the search engine. I like Clickbank.com. I prefer products that have a high gravity (over 100) these have more competitors, but they are popular and proven sellers.

2. Find 30 Keywords for each product - use Keyword tracker, overture search engine, or good old Google. I like keywords that have about 100-200 hits per day, but with less than 30,000 competition sites.

3. Write 30 articles for EACH PRODUCT, that’s right, one article for each keyword. After you have written the article, proof it, and make sure you have your keyword as the title, within each paragraph and of course, in the closing line. Don’t get stressed about writing articles. Just write. 300 words will do, that’s 2-3 paragraphs! Nothing!

4. Create a landing page using Hubpages.com or Squidoo.com for each of your niches. This is where the link to your affiliate product goes! Make sure you use the correct link or you wont get paid! Use this landing page in the by line of the relevant articles.

5. Manually submit all of your articles to article directories, one directory per article.

6. Go back to your landing page and make this a content rich resource, with links out to all of your articles.

7. Go to each of your articles and social bookmark each of them (yes, this takes time. Don’t skip it!) also, socially bookmark your landing pages.

8. go to related forums / blogs, and start commenting, with your landing page address in the signature.

Finished! Phew! By now you should have 5 niches, each with 1 content rich landing page and 30 keyword relevant, socially bookmarked articles. After a few weeks, choose which product is selling the best

With this product, create a new identity (ooooh…) and do it all again, from the beginning. 30 new, relevant keywords, 30 new articles and 1 new landing page, all under a pseudonym.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? So go on! Live your dreams!!

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