Estimated leanring curve and time commitment to make $100 a week?

You havn't told us a great deal about your goals and where you want to be.

$100 per week is your only goal?

If so, judging by your writing skills and education you could make that money pretty easily by offering an article writing service in the Warriors for hire forum.

You're going to have to invest $20 for a thread there, set up a paypal account and write a few example articles. That is it, no learning curve what so ever. You could start writing the sample articles now and have the thread up and running later today. Trust me, there is plenty of demand if you're a good writer. I ran an experiment there for an article service a few months back and couldn't keep up with the demand...

Of course though this only works if $100 per week is your goal. You have to work for what you earn - but if you have a couple hours spare each day $100 a week isn't difficult.

This method isn't going to work if you want to get 'rich' and it's not going to make you money on autopilot either. If you want to make $100 that way then you're going to have to do far more groundwork in advance.

It all depends on what you want to achieve.

Yes.

Here's a major secret about selling your services online...

Everyone who hires you is actually a mentor who pays you.

In order to get what they want, they have to explain to you what it is.

And what they want is the stuff that they know works for them.

So if you're having trouble figuring out how to do something right in IM, learn the basics, then charge excessively low rates for it.

Because you're cheap, people will expect that you aren't very good at it yet, and some of them will teach you how to do it better so they can get more value for their money.

This is how I evaluated the four major business models in IM: ad placement, CPA, affiliate marketing, and product creation. All of these depend on content, so I wrote content at low rates to find out who was doing what with the content, what kind of content was involved, and what kind of return they were expecting from it.

In my first six months, I took on about fifty clients. In the following year, I took on fifty more. And out of those hundred clients, I got a pretty read on between five and eight people in each of the major areas of IM, who were willing to answer a lot of questions about what they did and how they made their decisions.

Between a quarter and a third of my clients were willing to do this; the rest were split pretty evenly between people who didn't have the answers, and people who didn't want to give them.

When someone successful and organised won't pay more than $7.50 for an article, you know that what they're doing isn't generating enough profit over and above that.

So when you talk to them about profit margins, and they say they won't do anything that earns less than a 200% return within 90 days, you know they need to make back at least the cost of the article every 30 days. It's not exactly rocket science to figure out that what they're doing with the articles is making them an average of 25 cents per article per day.

Similarly, when you talk to someone who says he won't do anything that won't make him 500% profit within 30 days, and he's willing to spend $25 an article, that's $150 in 30 days - so what he's doing will make him $5 a day.

So if you're looking to make $100 a week, that's $20 a day, and you can either do what the first guy is doing eighty times... or what the second guy is doing four times. And there are different amounts of work involved, so it's not as simple as saying "well, $5 is better than 25 cents" - because the first guy is running a "set and forget" operation, while the second is actively promoting his stuff every day.

I am, however, very guilty of procrastination and "analysis paralysis." On a good week, I make $500, but I only have those every eight to ten weeks, and in the average week I make between $50 and $80. It's not that I don't know what to do or how to do it, I just spend way too much time sitting around thinking about it instead of doing it.

So researching the particular product would also be a part of it?

Yes.

Now that I'm knocking it just saying this is what bum marketing does isn't it, just taking random products and writing tons of articles on them.

No, it's not. If it's "random" at best you'll get "random results". When
I do bum marketing, it's VERY calculated and thought out well ahead
of time so I KNOW what results I can reasonably expect after execu-
tion of the plan.

Also, you don't need to write a TON of articles, only what you want
to write in relation to how much you want to earn.

Sometimes, if you get just one article in a buying keyword on the 1st
page of google, that might do it for you -- but it's dangerous to call
it a "good business" when you got lucky or worked hard to get 1st pg.
listings.

Am I right in assuming alot of the clients may be those very same bum marketers wanting to outsource to an article writer?

Like DarkLock, I too wrote a LOT of articles for those very types of
people. Unlike CarkLock, I did not ask questions -- I just kinda pulled
it all together myself after having worked with them for a period of
time.

They revealed a lot of information to me I never had to ask about
and it was very clear to me what worked, what didn't, and WHY it
worked.

Many times they would ask me to NEVER share information they gave
me to anyone and if I WANTED to, I could use it for MYSELF.

I've seen website review sites, niches I never thought of they told
me outright made them money, WHERE they were sending the traffic
and OTHER ways they would monetize their websites...

I mean, seriously confidential stuff I would never leak even after
having hung up my freelancing business for good since having step-
ed out and doing many of the things I learned from inside.

I thought at first it was the money I was working for...turns out it
was an education on marketing in disguise.