Skip to content

Article Marketing

I’ve been trying to avoid article marketing for quite some time now. Parts of internet marketing don’t require article marketing. But it seems to be quite necessary if I want to make some money online.

I went to Travis Sago’s website and started reading. He is, after all, the guy who coined Bum Marketing Method. Technically, his wife gave him the name for it. Believe it or not, Travis isn’t trying to sell you anything on his site. He has you sign up for his emails and you receive his free bum marketing ecourse.

I bookmarked his ecourse and have read every page. It’s quite simple really, hence the name bum marketing. The reason I think I’ve been avoiding bum marketing is my mind thinks it’s just too damn easy to make money this way. Technically, I haven’t made any money with yet. Or have I?

I went back to Ezine Articles to sign up the other day and realized that I had already signed up in 2007. Say what? So I checked out the articles (all 4 of them LOL) and indeed I did sign up and sent off my articles to the site back then. I had totally forgotten about that.

I checked the traffic and click stats and realized that much of the Adsense income had come from those articles. So bum marketing definitely worked and I didn’t even realize it until recently.

I wrote up 2 articles on ADHD and nervously sent them off to Ezine. I had already sent the same two GoArticles. But the rules are slightly different at Ezine as the articles are reviewed by actual human editors and you can’t put direct affiliate links in the article body or the resource box.

3 days later, I rechecked the status of my articles. I read somewhere that it takes up to 7 days for articles to get reviewed. One was accepted, the other wasn’t. The reason was that the author name did not match the name in the resource box. Fail. LOL. I am using a pen name for these new articles that I’m writing. So I went ahead and fixed that error and sent it back in again.

I went on Google and typed in the keyword phrase that I was aiming for with the article that had been accepted this morning. It falls in the 2nd the 3rd spots on the first page with 2 different variations of the keyword phrase! Wow! That’s friggin’ awesome! Organic search engine traffic is gold. I hope other webmasters will take my articles and put them on their websites. Even more traffic!

I’ll keep you posted on income that I start to get.

UPDATE: I got an email yesterday stating that Ezine Articles accepted my 2nd article after I made the quick and easy correction. I also received the status of Expert. Hmmm… Ok.

Related items

  • Share/Bookmark

Posted in Article Marketing, Simple Ways to Make Money. Tagged with , , , , .

By admin
February 19, 2010

No comments

Trying different things

There are a few things that have kept me from making decent money on the ‘net: procrastination, lack of money, fear of failure, and “dabbling” in too many things.

I’m still dealing with those issues. Today hubby sold his dump truck, tractor, attachments, and trailer which knocked our debt from $31k to $12k+. I think that’s awesome. It takes a huge weight off our shoulders. Granted, we still have some debt. But this is coming from having $91k+ in debt 5 years ago. We’ve come a long way. Our monthly expenses was almost $6k when we were living on our own.

But last month we lost pretty much everything and had to move back in with his parents. Yeah, it sucks. But we no longer had to pay rent or utilities (his parents are generous) which meant that $3k got removed from our monthly expenses. Then after hubby sold his stuff today, the expenses got reduced to maybe $800 a month.

I just need to make some steady money to help the family. I don’t want to live with my hubby’s parents forever. So while hubby is out looking for a job, I’m still at home homeschooling the kids. I just want to be able to have some spending money to help with the groceries and to take the kids places like the zoo and Chuck E. Cheese.

I found that writing decent articles for Associate Content means a few quick bucks. It takes about a week from start to finish for me to receive my couple bucks per article. It does take time to research the topic of choice.

I also listed 30 books on Half.com the other night. But as I was listing them, I realized that it wasn’t worth the time to do it. Each book would sell for 75 cents minus Half.com’s commission, shipping, cost to buy the envelopes, as well as the cost of gas to go to and from the Post Office. I may not be good at Math, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that I wouldn’t really make much.

I spent 8 years working in the adult business on the webmaster side of things. I built and submitted sites and lots of galleries to TGPs. And I made over $3k during my best month. But I walked away from it to focus on taking care of the kids.

I think it’s too late and too difficult to do that now. I have an adult blog in a particular niche that makes just a few bucks per month. I had the domain for over a year but only started building and promoting it in the last few months.

So I’m going to attempt E-whoring. I won’t go into detail here. And no, I won’t be in front of the camera or doing any nasty videos.

  • Share/Bookmark

Posted in Thoughts. Tagged with , , .

By admin
January 16, 2010

No comments

My Early Experiences with Associated Content

If given time and peace, I could type on the computer for hours on end, barely getting up to go to the bathroom and to eat. So I thought it was appropriate for me to sign up for free at Associated Content.

I submitted my first article, How to Reduce Your Energy Bill This Winter, on Nov. 24 for review. I was nervous. It had been a very long time since anyone has had to look at my work. The last time was when I in college so many years ago. I don’t really get nervous when people read my blogs.

Like an insane person, I refreshed the content page to see if the status had changed. And each time, it merely said “submitted”. I was getting frustrated and impatient. I had to keep reminding myself that I was a newbie and that it was my first submitted article.

About 5 days later, the status changed. I received a short welcome message from the staff. They offered $2 for the article. LOL. Ok so it was something, and I now had proof that Associated Content was willing to pay for my writing. So I accepted the payment. From the time I submitted the first article to the time I actually received payment via Paypal, it took 7 days. People with actual jobs get paid weekly or twice a month.

So on Dec. 1, I set out to write 5 more articles. I figured writing 5 articles a day to submit to Associated Content wouldn’t be too hard. Boy was I wrong. Since I’m a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom, I had a ton of distractions, mainly my kids. I was constantly interrupted for one thing or another.

I ended up finishing 4 articles at about 1 am in the morning. I gave up writing the 5th article and decided to submit the four. I was suffering from writer’s block and going crazy over what I had typed up. Apparently, I was “out of shape” when it came to writing.

I expected to wait another week before my articles were reviewed. Shockingly enough, someone reviewed my work the following day. Unfortunately, the reviewer rejected 2 of the articles. But the good news was that one article was offered $2.24 and the other was offered $3.45. That made me happy.

I looked at the comments the reviewer left behind for the rejected articles. One was because the topic was too common and the other was rejected because I didn’t cite my sources. I decided not to resubmit the first one. But I did add my sources and resubmitted the 2nd article. Hopefully it will get accepted this time around.

Related items

  • Share/Bookmark

Posted in Associated Content, Simple Ways to Make Money. Tagged with , , , .

By admin
December 3, 2009

No comments

Becoming an Associated Content Author

Desperate times call for desperate measures. This year I’ve been overloaded with information on “how to make money”. Some are plausible if given the time and money. Unfortunately, at this time, I have way more time and no money to spare.

The other day, I visited Associated Content. I signed up to be a publisher a month or so ago since it was free to join and I wanted to start writing articles. However, I suffered a massive computer crash and couldn’t write articles at the time.

Associated Content has 2 ways to pay you. The first way is Performance Payments, which pays a baseline of $1.50 for every 1000 views that your article receives. The 2nd one is the Upfront Payments, which pays you from $1 – $20 per article. Associated Content pays the writer exclusively through Paypal, so income earned is almost instantaneous once the article is approved.

I think this is a very viable way to make supplemental income. There are a few out there that are living off the income generated from articles at Associated Content. I’m not going to set my goal that high. Right now, I have a doable goal of making $500 per month steadily. Why $500? Because that’s how I need to make to pay some of the monthly expenses. Once I reach that goal, I’ll move it up to $1000 a month. Years ago I made $1,000-$3000 as an affiliate as well as being a graphics designer. So I think I have a reasonable goal to accomplish. We’ll see how it goes.

Related items

  • Share/Bookmark

Posted in Associated Content, Simple Ways to Make Money. Tagged with , , .

By admin
November 25, 2009

No comments

Blogging to the Bank 3.0 review

One of my major problems in trying to make money is taking action. I get overloaded with information. I get excited about the possibilities of making good money. Then I sit and do nothing. Fail.

Well today I was texting back and forth with my friend who just stepped into the world of blogging for the first time. She had set up a blog about her journey losing weight on Blogger. I was trying to explain to her how she would make money with Adsense but unfortunately, she wasn’t quite getting it.

I also texted her about a middle aged woman who created CooksRecipe.com. This woman makes between $10k-$40k off that one site. Fricken amazing! I’d be stoked making $1k a month LOL. I took a look at that site and it wasn’t a mind blowing website. It wasn’t ugly. It had pictures of meals and links to the categories. I checked out a few recipe pages and it only had the recipe, a few banners and good ole Adsense.

So it renewed my interest in the handful of sites that I have. The landscaping one has to wait until my husband gets his license. It’s pretty much going to be a portfolio with contact info. No adsense. The personalization is sort of on the back burner until I can get my lazy ass into gear and draw artwork that will be suitable for sale. The adult site isn’t acceptable to Adsense due to its adult content. The bay area site is also on the back burner until I’m ready to tackle a monstrous content site.

So that left me with my personal blog, this site, my mafia wars site, the unschooling site and that’s about it.

I opened up Blogging to the Bank 3.0 which is the latest ebook by Rob Benwell.

After the intro, he quickly talks about the 3 biggest changes in big money blogging. Funny to say, he only stated 2 out of 3. Oooops. Next he talked about the “5 blogging commandents of 2009“.

Next Rob talks about market research. This is usually where my eyes glaze over and I get real bored. Why? Because either I get bored or what they talk about is way over my head… or both. I did appreciate that he dropped a link to a website which allows you to make free keyword searches. You type in a keyword and it will list other keywords and phrases that are relevant.

Step 2 discusses hosting and domains. I pretty much skipped over this step because I’ve had domains and hosting of my own for many years. I also glazed over when Rob explained how to install a blog for the noobs. I already knew how to do that.

But I took that moment to go over to my active blogs and do basic SEO. Yes. Lazy. I know. Thanks for reminding me, Rob.

That’s where step 4 came in: Optimizing the blog. I learned something about permalinks which I implemented in almost all my blogs.

I’m not big on writing all kinds of informative articles. Which is why plr and free article directories are great for that. Unfortunately, 2 of my blogs focus on topics that are rarely if ever seen in the directories. Poop. More work for me.

Step 6 discusses promotion and backlinks. That requires a good amount of work and patience that I rarely have. Then Rob talks about using web 2.0 strategies to get your blog more traffic.

Overall good book.

Related items

  • Share/Bookmark

Posted in Blogs, Ebooks/Tools I Bought.

By admin
September 17, 2009

No comments