Down But Not Out And Will Come Back Stronger Than Ever

What did you do after your first two clients (who were related)? You went in immediately and increased your WSO prices.

Did the client ASK for humor? Did you argue/justify the work rather than simply start over?

How many clients have asked for rewrites? I know it gets mentioned often on this forum but in reality a rewrite is extremely rare in my experience.

I'll tell you one place to start: look at your "sample articles". What do they have in common? They are ALL in first person and ALL about Steven W. You need to have some examples of different styles (not just first-person-me) and about topics that are above and beyond your personal life/work schedule/goals/frustration/opinion.

You've gotten into the habit of writing articles almost like a journal - and that won't work when writing for clients.

There is a reason and if you asked nicely in an effort to "improve my writing" - perhaps they would offer some insight about the process. Don't know - but worth a shot.

You could go on freelance sites - submit 50 bids a day to the best job offers you see - and within 2-3 weeks you could have a good rating and testimonials. It's what I've done more than once - and I know other writers who've done the same successfully.

Before you do that - you need to identify WHAT is going wrong. You have the writing ability - that's not in question. You may not be able to separate yourself from the writing - and if you can't you need to focus on kindle books rather than writing clients.

Hi Tim - to simplify, article directory marketing was "putting your articles into article directories in an attempt to generate potential customer traffic from the article directory to your own site". This hasn't worked at all, for many years (I don't really think it worked much, even back in 2009, before the "Panda updates", but that's subjective), and was in any case only ever based on a fundamental misunderstanding of "how article directories work" and what benefits they can, and can't, provide to anyone's business.

It's easy to imagine that you're "getting traffic from an article directory" when in fact what you're doing is bringing about a situation in which potential customers go to an article directory (rather than to your own site) and you get, yourself, only the proportion of them who click through from the article directory to your site, rather than getting them all. In other words it's actually counterproductive and loss-making, to do this. (Fortunately it doesn't now happen any more, worth talking about.)

For all the reasons explained in this post, no article marketer wants to try to use an article directory in that way.

The irony of the often-seen "article marketing doesn't work so well these days, since all those Google updates" perspective (I don't, of course, suggest that that's HN's perspective) is that it was all those Google updates which actually enabled article marketers to submit our articles to EZA, effectively, and without running into that former potential problem, by using EZA for the purpose for which it's there (which is, in turn, explained in this post!) In other words, Google directly helped us (as so many of us have been pointing out here, so consistently, for so many years).

Ezine Articles (for those of us still using it and still benefitting a little from it, among whom I number myself, to be honest) represents perhaps "the last 1% of article marketing". The first 99% of it (described here) is, unsurprisingly, rather more significant and income-producing. EZA is an afterthought.

To claim (as people very occasionally do, and this is HN's perspective, or so he very openly and unambiguously says, anyway, though he may just be trolling yet again) that the fact that EZA's traffic has seriously declined (and that really is a "fact") illustrates that "article syndication doesn't really work" is barely any more logical, reasonable or perceptive than claiming that the fact that the principle conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra is retiring this year illustrates that CD's don't work any more as a way of playing music. In other words it's just a flatly ridiculous and readily disprovable assertion (albeit that there's arguably a tangentially relevant commonality apparently linking the two different contexts, and it might just be enough to fool a visitor from Mars who doesn't even know what day of the week it is).

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Thanks. Any idea as to how many tracks they would want and what they'd be willing to pay for that number of tracks. I have no problem doing this if it's going to be worth my time but if past WSOs here are any indication, the package would have to be at least 100 tracks which will take me some time to compile at 2 minutes per track, which I think was what you said they wanted.

** EDIT ** Stupid question time. Is there any possible way you could introduce me to these people so I could chat with them? I am on Facebook so it's not a problem if at all possible.