Looking for real advice-new here

by brit16

Posted: 13 years ago 16 replies

INTERNET MARKETING

I just started IM about a month and a half ago. I bought one ebook that got me started and now I am trying to do everything else on my own. Do not have any money to invest yet. Hoping to make some, then start investing.

What I have done so far:

1.Wrote about ten articles--submitted to articlesbase, ezine, and goarticles.
2.Posted a lot of comments in niche specific forums. (They all allow signatures with links in them.) I am very familiar with my niche and have a lot of personal experience with it.
3.Created review pages for each of the three products I am trying to promote. I used free blog pages for these because I do not have any websites yet.
4.Attempted to use a free autoresponder, but it is not really doing it's job. I am emailing everyone by hand who signs up. (This has only been a few people.)

Results:

1. I am getting anywhere from 1-20 hits on each of my "review" pages everyday.
2. In the last month I have had around 100 hops to the clickbank affiliate pages.
3. I have sold five books. Three of one, and two of the other. I just recently set up the third book.
4. Majority of the traffic coming to the review pages is from the forums, and only a limited amount from the articles.

Questions:

1. Should I continue to write articles, or should I put all my efforts into the forums?
2. With the limited efforts that I have made, does my plan seem to be working, or should I have sold more by now?
3. What would you suggest my next step be to take this plan to the next level? I am trying to make at least 500 a month to replace the paycut that I recently took.

I have a full time job, and a nine month old, so my time is precious. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance. If you would like to review my "review page", I would love to hear how I could improve it!
I am not trying to sell you anything, I am not in the internet marketing niche. I cannot post the link since I am new here. Please pm me if you are interested. Thanks again!

#advicenew #real

Tina Golden 13 years ago

I would be happy to give you any pointers on the review pages, if you want to send them to me. Either PM or add me to Skype.

Without more detail, it's hard to see where you can improve, beyond doing more of what you are already doing. Sounds like you've got quite a bit done which is excellent.

Good keyword research is key to article marketing in the way you are going about it. Are any of those articles ranking on the first page of Google? Otherwise, you won't get very much traffic just from those.

In the meantime, pat yourself on the back. 5 sales in 6 weeks is nothing to sneeze at when starting out. I know plenty of people who take far longer to make their first sale.

Tina
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JoshuaZamora 13 years ago

If you are making sales then what you are doing seems to be working...maybe just a little bit of tweeking to your articles will start getting you more traffic from them...something as simple as putting a strong keyword in the begining of the title
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JanG 13 years ago

Ten articles is a good start but increasing that number could also lead to many more sales. We can't tell you if the forums or the articles produce more conversions as this is very niche-specific. What I would do is to set up different tracking IDs for every article and every forum you post on within clickbank so that you can see what method works best for you.
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JHC81 13 years ago

If you're not getting much traffic from your articles double check the keywords, make sure they are in the right place and not to many other websites are trying to rank for them. Other then that I'm happy to see you're on your way, keep up the good work.
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- brit16 13 years ago
  
  Thanks for the replies! One of my articles is on the front page of google and the others are on the second or third page. I attempted to do keyword research, but I am brand new to all of this. I didn't even know what a keyword was 2 months ago . I just want to maximize my time and spending very much of it on articles that aren't producing does not seem very smart. But then again I have heard that articles can be very successful. The site that my free blogs reviews are on tells me where the traffic comes from, so I do know exactly where the hits are coming from. I also set up a few tracking id's on clickbank to help me know who is going to the affiliate page. Any other advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks again.
  
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  New to IM, any honest advice appreciated!
  
  My blog (first IM project!).....IVF Success Stories
  
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  brit16 13 years ago
  
  TMG- I tried to PM you but did not realize that I had to have 50 post to PM.
  
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  New to IM, any honest advice appreciated!
  
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  Tina Golden 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by brit16
  
  TMG- I tried to PM you but did not realize that I had to have 50 post to PM.
  
  Add me to Skype: tmgenterprises. If you don't have Skype yet, I recommend it highly. I couldn't live without it these days. It's free and has a lot more features than just being an IM client.
  
  Tina
  
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paulie888 13 years ago

I think you're making good progress with just 10 articles. Can you share how many posts you've made in the niche specific forums?

I have a feeling that a lot of your traffic is coming from the forum links; while this is good, this is definitely not passive traffic as you'll see it drop off the moment you stop posting.

I'd recommend continuing your forum posting, but put more effort into writing your articles and pump out more of them, as that is what will give you more of the long-term and passive traffic that you're seeking.

I'd also suggest going with a paid autoresponder now, as you've found out first hand how unreliable a free one can be. The autoresponder is what will bring you long-term and fairly passive income from your subscribers, so do not neglect it. Switch over now while you still don't have many visitors coming to your site, it's still not too late to do so.
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- packerfan 13 years ago
  
  Time to research for keywords. Use the google keyword tool, make sure you're doing exact matches, find a keyword with 3000 monthly searches, competition as low as possible. Shoot for ~75,000 or so.
  
  Take the profits from the sale of the books and buy a domain and pay for hosting. Create a proper review site using wordpress because it's SEO friendly and easy to use on that domain.
  
  Increase article marketing efforts linking to your new site.
  
  Work on building backlinks to the new site. Do this for a couple months, and you'll be on your way.
  
  Now do the same thing 100 times...
  
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hamzidosh 13 years ago

I think the reason you are not seeing any serious traffic yet is because you have not optimized your articles for success. I`d recommend you start working more on your article as I`ve had serious success with articles and clickbank in the past.
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stevenkuo 13 years ago

You may want to try and spin some of your articles and submit to more article directories and use that to build up the number of backlinks to your money website (the site hosting the link where you get paid). This will improve how Google views your site and increase it's page rank and SERP. Just my 2cents
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- morninjoi 13 years ago
  
  You have not done badly at all. But there are certain things you still need to do.
  You need to make sure that your articles are properly keyword optimised.
  You need to continue posting on forums
  You need to get a paid domain and host.
  You need a paid autoresponder.
  
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- brit16 13 years ago
  
  Thanks for all the great advice.
  
  TMG- I don't have a Skype account yet. Could you inform me on what you use it for? Not trying to sound ignorant, just don't know much yet.
  
  Paulie-I don't know exactly how many post I have made to the forums. There are three main forums I post on that get a lot of daily traffic. I probably post at least 3-4 post to each a day. Sometimes more. Posting on these forums is not hard for me considering I was a part of them even before I began trying to make money.
  
  It sounds to me like the forums will only get me short term traffic, where the articles can generate long term traffic. I did use google's keyword tool before writing my articles. Most of the keywords had about 2,000 searches a month and around 100 "all in title" results. Should I stop using "allintitle"? Is 2,000 not enough? The information I have been going off of suggest finding very specific keywords.
  
  Also, I do not actually own a website yet. I have just been using free landing pages and have started a free blog that is starting to get some traffic. I have paid for webhosting, but I really don't know where to begin on building the website. What kind of keywords do you target for your website name, domain name...? The same as an article, or less specific? Thanks for any advice!
  
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  New to IM, any honest advice appreciated!
  
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KevinTorrence 13 years ago

That's actually very, very similar to how I started. I used free blogger pages to promote my stuff & then just got the word out on the craft forums I was visiting.

The one thing I figured out pretty quickly is to find what the people on the forums I was hanging out on REALLY wanted ... & then find or make a product to match that. I ended up doing the best with some how to instructions I sold that everyone was looking for, but was near impossible to find except for mine. That how I fell on the "hungry" market idea. It works amazingly well.

I also got the best lasting traffic from some videos I made. They ranked in google for some good keywords and the traffic gates opened. Once I saw that, I wrote some targetted articles & blog commenting as well as kept up the forum posting.

Now, I only touch that site maybe once every few months (and it's been years now) and it still sells well although slightly backed off from when I was really promoting it.
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- brit16 13 years ago
  
  Just thought I would bump this up and try to get some more great advice. If anyone would be willing to copy and paste my url and check out my landing page I would appreciate it. I can't post links yet.
  
  improveivfsuccess-lowercost.blogspot.com/
  
  I made another clickbank sale, and this one was the upgraded version, worth $44!!! My goal is to be able to make $500 to $1000 a month. Can I do this just using the methods I am using now, and repeating them? I am not really interested in creating a product yet. Thanks again for all of the great advice.
  
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  Signature
  
  New to IM, any honest advice appreciated!
  
  My blog (first IM project!).....IVF Success Stories
  
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  SviegertmanLive 13 years ago
  
  Sviegert Says:
  
  "There are a million ways to make money online, you are just required to find a way to get a product into a customer's hands so they can give you money. The good news is that it is not required to be your product. Although, it's much better if you have your own product. It's the giving of value and receiving of value."
  
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