It’s time for me to step back now from writing articles as I find that this is the most time consuming task of my marketing adventure (I need to get better at it). My dissertation needs my attention now so I will be focusing on that. Saying that my dissertation requires me to write some articles which will be submitted to EZ for marketing purposes (opt in) but I won’t be ready to write them till nearer the time.

Ok so how do I feel these days? Tired, its 3am right now and I’ve been doing this for the past 2 months going sleep late. I don’t get much sleep cause the baby needs feeding every often.

I feel progress is real slow but it’s out of my control (EZ, baby, dissertation) when dissertation is out of the way, it will be replaced with (job) damn…BUT THE DREAM IS STILL THERE.

URL CTR is pathetic but I still have another 37 articles to perfect in terms of call to action. List is growing inch by inch.

Day: 24
Email List Today: 121
Articles Written Today: 4
Total Articles Written: 49 (done a recount due to delete articles)
Articles Approved: 13
Articles Views: 593
URL Clicks: 102
Money made: -$19.00

If I’m to re calculate money made then it should be -$19.00 (forget about hosting and domain).

How am I trying to make money ?

Well in my 7th follow up this is where I send out an email promoting an ebay product which I purchased back in 2006. This is the first promotion, I hope it goes well.

Does anyone think my business plan is flawed? Money and time is not an option here. The current business model is:

Squeeze page -> Free gift –> Free content for about a week, few days apart, –> Free digital gifts –> Blog post relating to the free gift (btw ebay related) –> First promo of an ebay product.

Today is the first day where I’ve done nothing, was planning to do it after watching the final (Tottenham vs Man Utd) we loss so it made the day worse hence probably why I didn’t write any articles. I do feel slightly bad about it so will catch up tomorrow with 4 articles. My hand in date for the dissertation is 1st May so sooner or later I’m gonna have to put IM on hold (just for a sec).

I’ve been testing out many ways to get traffic. Articles writing has been consistent. I’ve played with stumbleupon but I can’t really see a squeeze page being that interesting for it to get lots of stumbles so I stopped, traffic exchanges have been useless, safelist I think works as it’s been getting me one or two opt ins everytime I blasted out that email so will still use for now. I made a youtube video but it ony has 43 views probably because its a moviemaker video (blue background) too boring to click?

One thing that I’ve noticed is my work rate. Yes 2 articles a day is nothing but when you got a dissertation to worry about, a 3 month baby bring up aswell, things get tough. I’ve accepted that article marketing for now will be the way forward but 2 a day is pants. I need something like 10 per day and it seems that outsourcing is the only option which I’m not ready for. Things are going slow for now as I plan to get into full time work in May which I can then spend on outsourcing those articles.

At times I feel drained. I mean my ezine stats are 514 views and only 99 URL clicks. Looking back I’m sure I don’t have a good enough “call to action”. This is for the first 13 approved articles. I still have 34 articles where I will l definitely improve the call to action.Adwords has definitely run out now and my list is growing ever so slowly. Since my last update, the list count is only 117 after 23 days.

Things to do tomorrow.

1. Improve my squeeze page with an exit pop up in case anyone decides not to opt in. Might as well have one last chance subscribing them.

2. 4 articles written

The passion is still there despite all this. I WILL get there even if it kills me. I’m going to watch some MasterListBuilder vides on youtube now!

Michael Nguyen

Day: 23
Email List Today: 117
Articles Written Today: 0
Total Articles Written: 47 (articles been written past few days)
Articles Approved: 13
Articles Views: 514
URL Clicks: 99
Money made: $0

Day: 21
Email List Today: 111
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 44
Articles Approved: 11
Articles Views: 407
URL Clicks: 93
Money made: $0

I just managed to get the video camera so I should be pumping out some videos. Long over due!
What did you do today?

Michael Nguyen

Your business would’ve been set up on autopilot, your listing would re list at a pre determined date and your digital products would be sent automatically. As soon as the buyer left feedback the system would automatically reply. All you had to do was just literally sit back and watch the money roll in. If you wanted to increase your income then you would add more products to your eBay shop. Setting up the system needed time and effort but after that it would’ve been easy to maintain by checking email, websites etc. eBay has now changed the rules and has stopped the sale of digital goods to prevent sellers from abusing the feedback system. There were many sellers selling items for $0.01 at a time just to build up feedback. Can you really take a seller seriously if he’s selling $0.01 digital items?

It’s a good thing eBay changed the rules because it changes a few things: 1. You can charge higher prices for physical items ie a CD. 2. It paves the way for honest sellers. eBay wants honest sellers apart from than those that manipulate the feedback system.

Part 2
No one said you can’t carry on selling digital goods, all you have to do now is just sell it as a physical item. What you need to do is put up a listing as normal but this time burn the digital item to a blank CD. Now that eBay has gotten rid of the fake eBay sellers that only do it for feedback it gives the honest sellers more space and potentially more room to make money.

This can be done in two ways. You either deliver the items yourself ie you have to supply the materials, burn it, decorate it, package it, deliver it or you can use a fulfillment company that does all of the above for you (you just have to supply the item and graphics etc).

Here are the pro and cons of each:

Yourself
Pros: You have full control of your business, the cost may be cheaper, you’re able to communicate with your customers easier.

Cons: Manual labour, repetitive, imagine your business when you got to burn 100 CD’s per day or more!

Fulfillment Company
Pros: Business on autopilot

Cons: It is out of your control, what if a worker doesn’t turn up, your items might get delivered late, and your feedback is at risk. Both of these methods have their pros and cons, you have to decide which one is best for you. If you ask me I would choose to control the business myself, that way you can’t blame anyone else but yourself which should get you working on your business.

Part 3
The advantage of selling a physical product is the perceived value is greater than if it was a digital download. For this part I’m going to talk about how you can increase multiple sales from the same buyer. Now that you’re selling digital information products via a CD you have much more opportunities to sell to you customers. There is a process behind this and if done right you will be able to market more products to the same buyer. It is much easier to sell to an existing customer or someone that trusts you than to find a new customer.

When burning the digital information to the CD instead of just burning the digital product they have purchased you should also recommend other products in the CD. For example if the person purchased a “how to improve your golf swing” ebook, you could also recommend a “how to choose the best golf club” ebook. A CD will hold up to 800 MB of data so you have more than enough space to add more products to promote. This is just one of the ways to increase sales. Another way to increase sales is to list in your eBay listing that if the buyer buys e.g. 3 or more products, you will post them the item free of charge.

A CD’s weight will stay the same whether you have 1 product or 100 products on it as it cost nothing extra to burn. So there you have it, just these simple tips will increase your sale.

Part  4
In this final and probably the most important, we will talk about how you’re going to keep your customers without losing them. When the buyer opens the CD for the first time, you should have a page where you give the buyer the opportunity to opt in to your mailing list. To do so you can do it by offering a free ebook, newsletter etc. The reason you do this is because if you had the contact details of your buyers it would be much easier to sell to them later on as you already have a previous customer. Again it is easier to sell to someone when they trust you and know that they’ve done business with you. The best email delivery service in my opinion is Aweber, they are the best in the business and crucial to your success.

They say “The money is in the list”, what this means is that if you have a bunch of customers / prospect that already have an interest in your products. Not only will you be able to promote your products but you will also be able to do it with other peoples products and earn a commission for each sale. The more people you get signing up to your mailing list the more money you will potentially make. This is also known as affiliate marketing.

To be able to do this you will need to sign up to a email delivery service so that you can’t be accused of spam as the customer/prospect “opted in”. As you keep selling your eBay goods and collecting email address, you’re taking the customers of eBay. Who knows how long eBay will be around.

All of this information is good but if you don’t have products to sell then how is this useful? John Thornhill is probably one of the best internet marketers on ebay. He sells ebooks all day long on there and has a package full of ebooks for resale so you too can make money on ebay. The package is called 90 Day Powerseller, his feedback count is 16430 and still counting! This guy knows his stuff.

I hope this is useful to you.
Michael Nguyen

Date: 24/02/2009
Email List Today: 95
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 37
Money made: $0

I still got along journey ahead of me. I read that If i want to make $500 per month then I should aim to make $1000..I’ll do that instead.

Michael Nguyen

About my list, the 4th follow up has now been sent and they all have been gambling related (free proven profitable systems), I think it’s time to slowly talk about the make money online niche. Even though many may disagree that if it’s gambling then stick to gambling BUT gambling in my opinion is not as “safe” as starting an internet marketing business. For example selling info products on ebay is easier and safer than gambling. I dunno how I’ll do it but this is my aim. Possibly sending free gifts promoting IM products should balance the fact that it’s not gambling related.

BTW my main adwords campaign is :

• How To Gamble Risk Free

  Free Amazing Report Withdraw £1556 From The Bookmakers. Legal Loophole

  www.noriskbets.com

keywords would have been “free bets” “arbitrage bots” “system bets” etc

It’s a risk I’m willing to take because I’m not very keen promoting gambling systems I’ve never tried and I don’t think I want to try anymore as my interest is internet marketing. The ones I have tried have proven to work but are UK based and there’s only so much I can promote. At most I can only promote about 2 systems because that’s what I believe in…what next after? Might as well try and bring them into “make money online”.

I won’t be going for the hard sell cause I know it’s not a good idea. Instead I know a few butterflymarketing style websites that giveaway free products. One of them is an audio product and its excellent. These butterflymarketing style websites have OTO (one time offers) and according to the owner, he says it converts at around 7.3%. Im going to wait till I get 100 subscribers then shoot out that email as the 5th followup and see how this pans out. It can’t be bad right because they are getting free content.

I created another video for my traffic ebook and loaded it onto youtube, we’ll see

Date: 22/02/2009
Email List Today: 86
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 36
Money made: $0

Untill next time

Michael Nguyen

Date: 19/02/2009
Email List Today: 77
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 36
Money made: $0

Michael Nguyen

Date: 19/02/2009
Email List Today: 72
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 34
Money made: $0

Michael Nguyen

I don’t know whether I should just delete them and make way for new articles to be submitted. Gonna give it a few days, been reading around that ezinearticles take abit of time getting back to emails.

I purchased a domain from godaddy.com for $0.99 for squeeze page purposes (promo code: LOVE99) to add to my article marketing. My email list has grown by 10 today which is the highest. My dissertation dead line is slowly creeping up so I will be slowing down what I’m doing in terms of working on this business. The most I’ll do is probably write is 2 articles a day. The great thing about this is that I will be building my list based on this project, you’ll see nearer the time.

Date: 18/02/2009
Email List Today: 66
Articles Written Today: 4
Total Articles Written: 32
Money made: $0

Don’t be surprised If I start re-writing alot of PLR articles…I mean at the end of the day I just want the visitors on my list right? PLR is probably the way forward for now in terms of keeping up with the 2 articles per day rule.

4 of the articles have been approved now and have been read a combined total of 104 times and only 28 url clicks. Pathetic I think, I was hoping for a minimum 50%. I had 1 subscriber unsubscribe, what can I do? He didn’t like my 3rd follow up even though it was free content…oh well. 1 of the articles had a “general problem” whatever that means, we’ll see tommorow.

I created another squeeze page aswell by simply editing ones that are free online.

Only 2 new subscribers today, bit slow but at least its growing.

Onwards and upwards

Date: 17/02/2009
Email List Today: 56 (only 2 today)
Articles Written Today: 2
Total Articles Written: 28
Money made: $0