My Article Writing Experience In Detail

[Daveyz]

Hi guys, this is my first post and i want to say that this forum has really been very inspirational for me over the past few weeks. I have been quietly reading and applying all the techniques which have been posted on this forum and I would like to share with you what I have done, and it would be great if you guys could give me feedback on what I am doing wrong as it seems I am going no where after about 3 weeks of doing this and rather demoralized...

Anyways this is what I have done so far for the past 3 weeks:-

1) I chose a the money making niche as I though it was a highly lucrative place as I realize lots of people are looking to the internet to make money especially in this bad economy we're in right now.

2) I setup a landing page which does reviews for 3 products.

3) I chose 100 keywords that have at least 300 and above searches a month through Google Keyword Tool and have less than 50,000 competing pages with the keywords in phrases.

4) I then wrote 50 articles so far for the first 50 keywords and submitted to Ezine, Goarticles, Easyarticles, IdeaMarketers and also signed up to ArticleMarketers and posted all my articles to them. So far of the 50 articles which I posted on Ezine, only 20 articles have been approved and it is taking forever to get it approved. And because my Ezine account is only at basic level, i had to open 5 different Ezine accounts to post all my articles and they are all still taking forever to get approved. As for the other directories, they are mostly already live and are in circulation.

5) I proceeded to bookmark all my articles from the article directories which i manually submitted using Onlywire.

Results
My results thus far has been more than disappointing as I only seem to get only 30 visits a day to my landing page and when i check my clickbank analytics, it seem i only get about 5 - 10 hops a day. When i try to do on a search for my 50 keywords on Google, hardly any of my articles actually make the first page and those that did are only from Ezine. This make me thinks that my subscription to ArticleMarketers is completely useless and a waste of money. Oh btw till now i have 0 sales.

I have tried to do Squidoo lens but was rejected as they said this niche or topic of making money online is spam.

As of this point I am rather demoralized as I had read many other people who had only written like 5-10 articles are getting 100 hops per day and mine is really peanuts compared to them.

Kindly please advise on what i have done wrong and should be doing instead. I am even thinking of doing PPC for this but I have heard from many people that to do PPC on the make money online niche is too expensive and it isn't a good investment as there is just too many competitors. Should I go ahead with PPC?

I apologise for this lengthy post as i feel rather alone in this journey and everything seems very gloom so far... I guess i need help...

[JohnKnightCash]

Have you received any opt ins from your landing page?

You have developed the front end, but what about the back end?

Getting the "sale" is a process of creating 1.) Alignnment, 2.) Agreement, and 3.) Committment, but that doesn't happen from a first time meeting to a landing page.

What is your bonus give away to create an incentive for people to opt in?

Once they opt-in, are you developing a relationship with them through an auto-respoder series? Here is a resource with free video/audio that may give you extra ways to discover different product ideas that in turn you can offer to your clients.

When you write your auto-responder, make sure to include actual tips from the product you are selling to include as part of your auto-responder series.

Hope that helps....

[cashcow]

My results thus far has been more than disappointing as I only seem to get only 30 visits a day to my landing page and when i check my clickbank analytics, it seem i only get about 5 - 10 hops a day.

This is actually pretty good - that means for every 3-6 visitors you get to your page, your are getting a click through to your target product. That sounds like a very good conversion rate.

So, the problem is that your articles aren't getting enough visits. You might try picking out the articles with keywords that get the most searches per month (IMHO you should pick ones that get at least 1300 searches - anything below that won't get you much traffic) and focus on linking to those articles to get them higher in the search engines. Social bookmarking isn't going to do that - try writing other articles, make informative squidoo lenses, hub pages, blogger blogs etc... Or try one of the backlink packages that you see in the WSO forum.

Lee

[JAIDEEP2959]

Firstly you need to choose long tail keywords of the selected niche for writing articles.

You need to set opt-in form on your website giving free product and newsletters for capturing leads.You ca use aweber autoresponder for this.

Later on you can sell clickbank products to the leads.

This method is working currently for many internet marketers.

[Daveyz]

Hi guys, thanks a lot on your feedback. I think you might have hit the head of the nail on this one that the keyword i'm targeting ain't getting much traffic. I am currently using really long tail keywords and the searches on it per month is about 500 average.

But do i find the monthly target based on exact phrase or broad match? Because if i type a long tail keyword in the broad match, it will give me about more than 1000 searches per month, but if i put them in quotations, it becomes 300 or so. Which is the one i should use?

Also i have yet to put an opt-in at my LP as i wanted to get one sale first before committing to the auto responder as i wanted my sales to pay for it. Is this a wrong tactic?

Btw this niche im in is the "Make Money Online" niche which i was told its too competitive and expensive for me to use PPC in. Do you think i should go ahead with PPC? I did the traffic estimator for my keywords and they seem to have an avg cpc of $2. That seems rather costly to me...

[morry]

My advice if you want to get into the IM niche: Create a valuable free resource and start promoting it. Writing 5 articles is never going to get you 100 visitors a day on autopilot. It might give you spurts here and there, but if you want to build something that makes you a lot of cash, you'll need something that is getting traffic from all over the place.

So if I was you, I'd create a blog and start posting good content regularly. Create a free report to give away and start building a following. You can create articles that promote your blog as well.

Hope that helps,

Sean

[Alexa Smith]

I agree with Lee and Jaideep's comments above.

But if you'll excuse the observation, I think your key mistake here is in having chosen absolutely the worst possible "niche" for a beginner. It's entirely true that it's potentially a highly lucrative place as lots of people are looking to the internet to make money, especially in this economy. This is a reason to avoid it, in my opinion, because you're competing primarily with top, experienced professionals with huge Adwords budgets and so on. In my opinion you'd have incomparably more chances of turning a profit out of less popular, less competitive niches. I shudder to think how low must be the proportion of newbies starting off profitably with "make money online".

[cashcow]

You should use exact match. That's a big mistake I was making - I was using broad match and wondered why I didn't get as much traffic as I thought I should!

Of course, the only way to know for sure how much traffic a keyword phrase gets is to run an adwords campaign. The keyword research tools are pretty inaccurate.

Plus, judging the competition by the number of sites returned in a search is misleading. You need to look at the strength of the sites that come up when you do a search. Are they all PR6 authority sites? Then forget that keyword and move on. If you see other ezinearticles, lenses etc... on page 1 that that's probably a good keyword to go for.

Lee

P.S. Also, what alexa said is very wise. Might be better to go for a niche where the folks don't know how to do SEO and then when you are an expert dig into the IM niche if you still want to.

[Daveyz]

Thanks a million for the tips guys. I guess I made quite a few mistakes here:-

1) Chose a too highly competitive niche
2) Chose keywords that are not getting much search per month
3) Did not build an opt in list

I guess i will have to stop working on this niche and move on to other niches. Are there other better free keyword research tools which you guys would recommend? Because i noticed the search results keep changing rather drastically each time i type the keyword in.

[Mangozoom]

I use exact matching of my terms as well as broad is well ... too broad

I also target phrases with a lot less competitors say a maximum of 20,000.

Then take a peek at who is doing well i.e. the first few sites that rank. Check their PR and also take a look at their inbound links ... there are plenty of free tools

I normally use something like this

Webmasters tool (SEO) : Domain Backlinks Checker

Then see how backlinks you are up against ... if the amount is insanley high you are going to struggle to compete. However if not you have a chance ... also see if you can identify sites that you can put your own links on.

THE LONG HAUL
Listen if you identify quality keywords and do your research well it is just a case of sticking at it. Faithfully create and submit articles

List all your sites pages on all the social bookmarking sites ... quickest way that I use is Bookmark & Share - The Power of the Button | OnlyWire

Create good regular content.

Optimise your sites earning potential by using both affiliate links and Adsense

You seem to have a plan that needed modifying a bit .. you have asked everyone for advice which is good. Now tweak your activity and go and make some cash!

All the best and let us know how you get on

John