I thought I was done with the initial series, but not quite. I have been lazily oberving figures and observed something interesting. What seemed to have been the worst performing campaign by far – 2 articles on SEO combined have since made up for lost ground and caught up to my views on a niche article. Obviously the niche still wins hands down for achieving a greater number of views on its own merit, but when I last wrote I think the gap was at least 12 views, so it’s interesting to see the gap close down like that. Similarly, between the two SEO articles there have been 4 URL clicks as opposed to the 5 click on the niche article’s URL.

I also got a few views through the search engines. Literally only 1 or 2 views on some of the articles. Great for articles just over a week old? I don’t know. Maybe I had a poorly optimized title or maybe it takes time for the title to achieve a series ranking.

The searches that lead to article views weren’t very well targetted in all cases other than the SEO articles, interestingly enough! Also, all these search engine originated views happened the day after the article went live, and the second day after for those articles that achieved a second search engine click through. Looks like they got buried soon just as quickly as they appeared.

It will be interested though to see whether I do start receiving search engine traffic again and how long it takes before that starts happening.

Okay, my preliminary results have been enough to spur me on to complete my goal of submitting a further 8 articles to EzA by the 20th Feb has just been completd. I made it – whew! Now I just need to sit back, and wait for the articles to go live. Hopefully there won’t be any problems with any of them this time. I don’t think there should be but I don’t work for EzA either.

Anyway, the 2 articles I did on Link building SEO were the worst performing out of the currently live 4. The article I published in a saturated market did the best. Averaged about 12 visitors a day with a 14% clickthrough rate. Question for the traffic is whether this is due to the article being new or if people were actually searching for an article and mine came up in their results and caught their eye. Question for the click throughs is whether my resource box was appealing enough.

My niche article had almost half the views of the most popular one, but with 18% clickthrough rate. I also got a few adsense clicks in the process which brought a smile to my face as I haven’t achieved much with adsense so far. This was an encouraging and welcome development.

I actually need to start affiliate marketing with the niche site. However I need to add a few more pages to it first to help ensure I get approved. Right now though, with article writing being a new concept to me. And with the psychological writer’s block having been something to push through, getting those 10 articles done has been a bit taxing and I do have other things that I need to attend to. So I’m taking a little break from adding content for now.

Just need to sit back and wait for the next 6 articles to go live – that’s not how long my break is going to last btw!

Okay, I now have live an article live for a niche market and one for a saturated market. Surprisingly (or maybe not so) I have had 12 views on the first SEO article, and with the new articles only going live a matter of about 6 hours ago, they both have got 5 views.

Maybe there’s a greater ration of interest contrasted with number of articles for the non-SEO topics than the SEO one…

Anyway, I’m certainly much more excited by these two new articles with these great results in a matter of a few compared compared to the results gained by the article running a few days already!

Hmm, I have to admit, getting started is difficult. Does it work, is my effort justified, who am I to succeed in this business and all manner of self-defeating efforts.

I’m battling against those thoughts. I want to stay the course and prove it’s possible.

Oh, and I earned a little bit from AdSense today too. Nothing major, but I’m just getting started and it’s a great start as far as I’m concerned. Thank you and keep em coming in more quantities more quickly!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaa!

I just submitted my first 2 articles to EzineArticles – Finally! I’ve been way slow with this.

Submitting to article directories was one of the first things I learnt about Internet Marketing, but I never did it. For some reason I felt the same kind of block, how to write it, how much content?

Ironically, while I have a site and blog in a very competitive market where any methods of generating traffic outside of paid advertising like adwords are welcome and needed, I never managed to type up and submit a few articles.

Well, today I created and submitted 2. I’ve just got to wait about a week now to see whether EzineArticles have any issue with them. Hopefully not. Then soon after I will hopefully see for myself how powerful EzineArticles really is.

I will report on any success the articles bring with matching readers to product.

I’m going to try to bang out another 8 articles over the next 14 days just for the hell of it. If any get rejected, they can always become blog content, or submitted to an alternative article directory.

I can’t lose by creating new content!

Okay, I have decided to pull my little experiment, or rather I have paused it for several reasons.

1. I think the keywords I was riding this Google Adwords PPC campaign on weren’t necessarily closely correlated with the affiliate product. Although maybe I haven’t left the campaign running long enough to know for sure (paused at 67 clicks).

2. The campaign did really well in terms of receiving clicks, despite using price as a deterrent against clicking the link. However, what I don’t know is whether they clicked the link out of genuine interest or mere curiosity.

3. Cost Per Click was starting to creep up due to poor keyword quality score.

4. I didn’t have a squeeze page or autoresponder series, so I was wasting resources – a 2nd/3rd bite at the apple so to speak.

Initially I had content network set to 1c and search including partners set to 10c. After 20 clicks through search, I had 1 click on the content network. I then raised the max CPC on the content network to 10c and within the next 4 hours the content network impressions and clickthroughs went ballistic. Content Network impressions trebling the amount of search impressions and 41 clicks against 26.

However, the campaign site was only a single page created from the “Ninja Cloaker” Infomillionaire Tool from the first month’s CD, and I didn’t optimise it as well as I could have done.

I am impressed by the number of clickthroughs and I may try the campaign again with squeeze page to determine whether those clicks were a result of genuine interest rather than mere curiosity.

Sure, maybe if I would have left the campaign running someone may have bought before long. But so might some of the others that clicked the ad if I had a squeeze page set up for them to fill in, and if I then sent out a few follow up emails.

So the campaign is paused. I need to set up an optimised squeeze page, autoresponder sequence and a better optimised cloaked page before testing this campaign again.