Ok so I managed to get my 4 articles done as I promised yesterday but unfortunately that was the only task I completed. I was still meant to improve my squeeze page and add a OTO (meant to write it down) but got caught up with other things.

It’s time for me to step back now from writing articles as I find that this is the most time consuming task of my marketing adventure (I need to get better at it). My dissertation needs my attention now so I will be focusing on that. Saying that my dissertation requires me to write some articles which will be submitted to EZ for marketing purposes (opt in) but I won’t be ready to write them till nearer the time.

Ok so how do I feel these days? Tired, its 3am right now and I’ve been doing this for the past 2 months going sleep late. I don’t get much sleep cause the baby needs feeding every often.

I feel progress is real slow but it’s out of my control (EZ, baby, dissertation) when dissertation is out of the way, it will be replaced with (job) damn…BUT THE DREAM IS STILL THERE.

URL CTR is pathetic but I still have another 37 articles to perfect in terms of call to action. List is growing inch by inch.

Day: 24
Email List Today: 121
Articles Written Today: 4
Total Articles Written: 49 (done a recount due to delete articles)
Articles Approved: 13
Articles Views: 593
URL Clicks: 102
Money made: -$19.00

If I’m to re calculate money made then it should be -$19.00 (forget about hosting and domain).

How am I trying to make money ?

Well in my 7th follow up this is where I send out an email promoting an ebay product which I purchased back in 2006. This is the first promotion, I hope it goes well.

Does anyone think my business plan is flawed? Money and time is not an option here. The current business model is:

Squeeze page -> Free gift –> Free content for about a week, few days apart, –> Free digital gifts –> Blog post relating to the free gift (btw ebay related) –> First promo of an ebay product.

I’ve been doing work in the background and with other things in the way such as my dissertation is kinda holding me back. Yesterday I was setting up my followups with aweber.

Today is the first day where I’ve done nothing, was planning to do it after watching the final (Tottenham vs Man Utd) we loss so it made the day worse hence probably why I didn’t write any articles. I do feel slightly bad about it so will catch up tomorrow with 4 articles. My hand in date for the dissertation is 1st May so sooner or later I’m gonna have to put IM on hold (just for a sec).

I’ve been testing out many ways to get traffic. Articles writing has been consistent. I’ve played with stumbleupon but I can’t really see a squeeze page being that interesting for it to get lots of stumbles so I stopped, traffic exchanges have been useless, safelist I think works as it’s been getting me one or two opt ins everytime I blasted out that email so will still use for now. I made a youtube video but it ony has 43 views probably because its a moviemaker video (blue background) too boring to click?

One thing that I’ve noticed is my work rate. Yes 2 articles a day is nothing but when you got a dissertation to worry about, a 3 month baby bring up aswell, things get tough. I’ve accepted that article marketing for now will be the way forward but 2 a day is pants. I need something like 10 per day and it seems that outsourcing is the only option which I’m not ready for. Things are going slow for now as I plan to get into full time work in May which I can then spend on outsourcing those articles.

At times I feel drained. I mean my ezine stats are 514 views and only 99 URL clicks. Looking back I’m sure I don’t have a good enough “call to action”. This is for the first 13 approved articles. I still have 34 articles where I will l definitely improve the call to action.Adwords has definitely run out now and my list is growing ever so slowly. Since my last update, the list count is only 117 after 23 days.

Things to do tomorrow.

1. Improve my squeeze page with an exit pop up in case anyone decides not to opt in. Might as well have one last chance subscribing them.

2. 4 articles written

The passion is still there despite all this. I WILL get there even if it kills me. I’m going to watch some MasterListBuilder vides on youtube now!

Michael Nguyen

Day: 23
Email List Today: 117
Articles Written Today: 0
Total Articles Written: 47 (articles been written past few days)
Articles Approved: 13
Articles Views: 514
URL Clicks: 99
Money made: $0