9. A Refreshing Pick-Me-Up!

First of all:

Thank you, soldiers, for fighting and dying for my freedoms, and for the freedoms of those I love. Freedom is not free, and those that voluntarily choose to put their lives on the line for it deserve the utmost of our respect, love, and support. I’m thankful for my brother who continues to serve his country back home as a firefighter after being in the Coast Guard in New Jersey.

Where were you? I was in the eighth grade, just starting the day when our teacher got the news and turned on the TV in the classroom so we could see what was going on. A few minutes later, our principal got on the intercom and made the announcement. We spent the rest of the day watching news broadcasts. Understandably, no one was in the mood to teach or learn that day.

Psalm 33:12a – “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD;”

In other news, I’ve completed all the articles for this campaign. I ended up removing a few keywords because they either didn’t have enough monthly searches to warrant an article, or I could hit two keywords in one with an existing article. For example, one of my keywords was “Stop [problem]” and another was “Stop [problem] now,” so I just edited the title for the “Stop [problem]” article to include the “now,” and that will hit the keyword just as well.

Yesterday, I switched vendors for the current campaign. It was having struggles converting on the sales page, with the final numbers being 2 sales in 366 clicks, or 1 in 183. I’m no genius, but that doesn’t seem to be a great ratio to me. I was hesitant about this new vendor because, even though the gravity was much better, the bonuses they throw in are completely irrelevant to the problem this niche has, so I thought the visitors would be turned off and wouldn’t buy. How pleasantly wrong I was! In about 24 hours I’ve gotten TWO sales in 63 clicks, or a nice ratio of 1:32! The payout is less, at $18.34 instead of $24.92, but with these awesome conversion rates, it certainly makes up for it.

Ezines is still incredibly slow at approving my articles, and I still have 16 articles pending. That’s good though, because the sales will just go up once they’re through! While I’m waiting on them, I will be doing keyword research for the next campaign, which I’ve already researched. It’s a pretty high-competition niche, but the people are certainly hungry — even desperate — and I’m confident that I can find some keywords that haven’t been snatched up yet. But I’ll do all that later today, because I have class in ten minutes!

Brad

4:00pm

This new campaign is going to take awhile.

I’ve already found 40 keywords with a total monthly search number of about 134,000. My best keyword yet has 22,000 searches and only 5,400 competition! A veritable gold nugget I’d say. I still have many more keywords to find, and the reason I’m taking this small break is because Google booted me because my queries looked like an automated program! So I’m “cooling off” at the moment…The way that it works with Search Automator Force (which is not actually automated), I have to click the “search” button twice, because the first time it gives the filtered result page, and the second time it gives the regular page with the number. So each time I search for a keyword, I submit two queries…I guess Google sees this as fast enough to qualify as “automated,” so it booted me for a little while. If the estimations I’ve made with the numbers at this point are correct…this campaign is going to be a goldmine. I’m honestly surprised that there is such little competition as there is, because this is a huge market, and it’s not like some micro-niche that nobody knows about. But I’m not complaining!

Once I’m done with the keyword research, I’m going to do market research so I can write articles without having to spin other people’s content. I find that having the knowledge in my head and being able to write articles on my own is a lot easier (and more ethical, I think) than pulling other people’s articles and just spinning or re-writing them. I’m hoping to find at least 10 ways to solve this market’s problem, so I can switch up the content in my articles as I write them. In the last campaign, I basically only had 4 methods for solving the problem, so all of my articles were essentially the same. I’m looking to change that this time and make my articles have different content, not only to target different keywords, but so I appear more professional and knowledgeable. I also want to change and test different ways of writing my resource boxes. In the last campaign I hit the curiosity motivator really hard — I want to try other motivators to see if I can get the click-through rate even higher (currently around 24%).

Now to see if Google has let me cool off for long enough. If not, I might just begin my market research.

7:09pm

Well, Google finally freed me from time-out, so it was onward with more keywords. I’m finally done (it’s taken me almost four hours) and the results are in, hot off the press: 63 keywords that I’m confident I can get first-page rank on, if not second-page. These keywords have a combined monthly search number of approximately 241,500. The vendor I will be using pays $30/sale, has a steady gravity of about 20, and has been on Clickbank for about two years now. Oddly enough, the competition doesn’t seem to be promoting this vendor much, but instead, most of the article marketers were using a different vendor that only pays about $15, has a gravity of 7, and has only been around for a few months. This is puzzling to me, but I’m going to stick with the one I’ve chosen. The sales page is good, and the website is on a network of high-converting products, for what it’s worth. Even with very generous numbers, I’ve deduced that I should net about 3 sales a day from this campaign. For you numbers geeks like me, this is my figuring:

241,500 / 30 = 8,050 searches/day
Assuming I get first-page on all keywords, and compensating for the ones that I might not, let’s say 1 in 5 searchers will view one of my articles. 8,050 / 5 = 1,610
Going with my current article click-through rate, 1,610 x 0.23 = 370
Even with a pretty bad conversion rate, let’s say 1 in 125, 370 / 125 = 2.96
2.96 x $30 = $89/day

Not too bad, I don’t think. But now the monstrous task is to write all 63 articles. That’s twice as much as the last campaign, and it took me a week and a couple days to write all of those. To pick up the pace, I’m going to set a new goal of 7 articles a day effective on Monday. I considered the 10/day goal I mentioned before, and I’m not sure I’d be able to make it at this time. I hope to reach that goal in the near future, but for now I am setting it at 7 a day. This works out to be 9 days to finish the campaign, if I make goal every day. Taking out Sundays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the days on which I can’t or won’t work, I therefore aim to be done with this campaign in exactly two weeks from today, September 25. Of course, I hope to be done before that, but that is the goal.

One of my biggest problems is self-discipline and motivation, and the 5/day goal has been effective in getting me to write. Hopefully this new goal will be the same. I am more passionate about this campaign since someone very close to me struggles with this problem, so that ought to motivate me as well. I did some research and was surprised at the methods of solving this problem that I already knew about — it seems personal experience has helped me out on this one.

I’ve noticed that some traffic has started coming from the 4DMMB forum to this blog. Greetings to everybody! I hope this post finds you successful and hard at work. Feel free to leave comments! I’m a marketer, but this blog will be for my personal experiences only, and will never be used to pitch or sell you anything.

For now, I’m going to sign off and maybe waste some time on the internet before tackling some homework. Ah, college…