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

It’s been a few days since I’ve recorded my journey but all is ok, I’ve still managed to maintain my 2 articles per day, 1 article needed to be deleted. My adwords ran out yesterday and I’ve noticed the opt ins have slowed down. Ezinearticles have approved 11 articles which means I’m close to BASIC PLUS membership. Today I had to change my follow ups and ramp it up a little by writing 3 decent follow ups. I would say If I was on my list myself I’d be happy with the content as I’m giving away a lot of free quality content as well as products. I’ve started recommending some products that I’ve had experience with so hopefully that will go well. I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or be happy with progress, it’s not as if I’ve made any money yet…Anyways here are some stats…

Day: 21
Email List Today: 111
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 44
Articles Approved: 11
Articles Views: 407
URL Clicks: 93
Money made: $0

I just managed to get the video camera so I should be pumping out some videos. Long over due!
What did you do today?

Michael Nguyen

Ezinearticle reinstated my account and have given me 10 more submission for Basic membership. 10 articles have been submitted with 7 of them near the final stages. List has grown to 95, near the 100 mark. Wrote 2 more articles today and I had to delete 1 article so my article count is 37. I wrote my 5th follow up where I aim to introduce the subscribers to Internet marketing and this is my first attempt at affiliate marketing via email. The product is a free membership to a video course and hopefully the OTO will convert. I’m really looking forward to the new articles being approved as this is where the real results happen. Remember some of the opt ins are from adwrods.

Date: 24/02/2009
Email List Today: 95
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 37
Money made: $0

I still got along journey ahead of me. I read that If i want to make $500 per month then I should aim to make $1000..I’ll do that instead.

Michael Nguyen

I didn’t update yesterday because I didn’t a change 2 so I’ll cover 2 days worth of posts. You might have remembered from my last post that 4 of my ezinearticles were declined. I got an email from ezinearticles and basically they explained that they no longer accepted articles on that topic anymore. Fair enough so I deleted them. I’m on basic membership which allows 8 article submission, 4 have been approved but the 4 that were submitted which now have been deleted have “taken” the remaining 4 submissions. Right now I can’t submit anything even though only 4 have been approved. I’ve just sent ezinearticles an email so they can reset the remaining 4 submissions. My drafts box is full with 30 articles so I’m writing on a word doc for now until I have space to submit drafts. I wrote 2 articles yesterday and today, so my total article count minus the 4 deleted ones is now 36 articles. I have £6.51 in my adwords account left which should be exhausted I say in about a week or so, hopefully my EZ account is functioning by then.

About my list, the 4th follow up has now been sent and they all have been gambling related (free proven profitable systems), I think it’s time to slowly talk about the make money online niche. Even though many may disagree that if it’s gambling then stick to gambling BUT gambling in my opinion is not as “safe” as starting an internet marketing business. For example selling info products on ebay is easier and safer than gambling. I dunno how I’ll do it but this is my aim. Possibly sending free gifts promoting IM products should balance the fact that it’s not gambling related.

BTW my main adwords campaign is :

• How To Gamble Risk Free

  Free Amazing Report Withdraw £1556 From The Bookmakers. Legal Loophole

  www.noriskbets.com

keywords would have been “free bets” “arbitrage bots” “system bets” etc

It’s a risk I’m willing to take because I’m not very keen promoting gambling systems I’ve never tried and I don’t think I want to try anymore as my interest is internet marketing. The ones I have tried have proven to work but are UK based and there’s only so much I can promote. At most I can only promote about 2 systems because that’s what I believe in…what next after? Might as well try and bring them into “make money online”.

I won’t be going for the hard sell cause I know it’s not a good idea. Instead I know a few butterflymarketing style websites that giveaway free products. One of them is an audio product and its excellent. These butterflymarketing style websites have OTO (one time offers) and according to the owner, he says it converts at around 7.3%. Im going to wait till I get 100 subscribers then shoot out that email as the 5th followup and see how this pans out. It can’t be bad right because they are getting free content.

I created another video for my traffic ebook and loaded it onto youtube, we’ll see

Date: 22/02/2009
Email List Today: 86
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 36
Money made: $0

Untill next time

Michael Nguyen

4 of my 8 submitted articles have been declined, again theres are “general problem” I have no idea why. It might be my crap writing but I don’t think it’s that bad. Anyways I’m not gonna let that stop me so I will keep on writing articles until its resolved. 2 more articles have been written today. Yesterday I created a quick YOUTUBE video using windows movie maker with “call to action” and link in description aswell as video. Stats say that I had 1 visitor to my website from Youtube. Looks promising. So instead of just writing my articles and waiting around for ezinearticles to get their butts together. I will be making youtube videos. If 1 video gets me 1 visitor per day then 100 videos will get me 100 visitors per day (in theory). Here goes.

Date: 19/02/2009
Email List Today: 77
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 36
Money made: $0

Michael Nguyen

Not much has happened today. I’ve still managed to write my 2 articles. I’ve had 4 email signups and I’m still waiting for ezinearticles to get back to me.

Date: 19/02/2009
Email List Today: 72
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 34
Money made: $0

Michael Nguyen

Woke up very early today and decided to get to work. I pumped out 4 more PLR rewrites. I’m targeting the IM niche, I have a ton of them collecting digital dust so thought might aswell start using them properly. 3 of my articles have been declined and I’m waiting for a reply. It says Problem: General Error – Please contact us to find out more. I feel slightly pissed off as they were original articles (not rewrite) but I guess they are looking for quality articles and quality articles get views. I put alot of effort into my articles and for them to just get rejected feels rubbish!

I don’t know whether I should just delete them and make way for new articles to be submitted. Gonna give it a few days, been reading around that ezinearticles take abit of time getting back to emails.

I purchased a domain from godaddy.com for $0.99 for squeeze page purposes (promo code: LOVE99) to add to my article marketing. My email list has grown by 10 today which is the highest. My dissertation dead line is slowly creeping up so I will be slowing down what I’m doing in terms of working on this business. The most I’ll do is probably write is 2 articles a day. The great thing about this is that I will be building my list based on this project, you’ll see nearer the time.

Date: 18/02/2009
Email List Today: 66
Articles Written Today: 4
Total Articles Written: 32
Money made: $0

Today I written 2 articles. 1 was original but the other was a re-write of a PLR article. I’ve got tons of them on my hard drive. I think I’m getting writers block hence I had to results to PLR. The thing is with PLR I didn’t have to think much, all I had to do was just re phrase it, how simple! You can imagine all the top guys doing with that have 10k articles to their name. If you look through ezinearticles I bet most of them are re-writes, I mean how many times can you say “The money is in the list” in different ways?

Don’t be surprised If I start re-writing alot of PLR articles…I mean at the end of the day I just want the visitors on my list right? PLR is probably the way forward for now in terms of keeping up with the 2 articles per day rule.

4 of the articles have been approved now and have been read a combined total of 104 times and only 28 url clicks. Pathetic I think, I was hoping for a minimum 50%. I had 1 subscriber unsubscribe, what can I do? He didn’t like my 3rd follow up even though it was free content…oh well. 1 of the articles had a “general problem” whatever that means, we’ll see tommorow.

I created another squeeze page aswell by simply editing ones that are free online.

Only 2 new subscribers today, bit slow but at least its growing.

Onwards and upwards

Date: 17/02/2009
Email List Today: 56 (only 2 today)
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 28
Money made: $0

For some reason today I decided to write 4 articles so really I could take the day off tommorow, but nahhh. So whats been happening in terms of traffic? Well the adwords account is still sending PPC visitors. I have about £14 left. That should last about another 3-4 days. My second article was approved but my third was declined due to grammer and spelling. Been correcting the rest today. CTR is a measly 30%. My email list has risen to 54 subscribers and the 3rd follow up has been sent. That should hopefully remind them of who I am. Things are abit slow for now because I still have my final year dissertation to finish. As of now I have 6500 words out of possible 20000 and the hand in date is 1st May so I have a feeling I might put this on hold soon, I hope not though. I’m very happy with my progress, as long as that email list is growing then its fine. Am playing around with safelists now and I’ve just sent my first bunch of email, all 1162 emails. I really really need to get them videos up, that would be instant traffic, I know it. Until next time.

Date: 16/02/2009
Email List Today: 54
Articles Written Today: 4
Total Articles Written: 26
Money made: $0