The Challenge and More Automation For My Business

As my business has grown lack of time time has become an issue. Maybe I do things the long way round, maybe I spend too much time experimenting or getting sidetracked. Whatever, I feel every day that there are so many more things that I can do to help build my business, but I never get everything done.

Outsourcing helps. I regularly outsource article writing, but not every outsourcing experience has been good for me. However after 2 duds in a row I found a delightful lady in South Africa to help me with some articles. I can write my own, but after a couple of articles on most subjects I run out of steam and boredom sets in.

Instant Article Factory

Writing on demand is not for me, but last week I found a tool that is helping me to churn out more articles. The tool is called Instant Article Factory and so far I've got mixed feelings about it. You basically write your articles into a variety of templates with pre written text which can be spun prompting your text. It's hard to explain but you can write basic articles within 5 minutes if you wish.

Why I've got mixed feelings is that unless you rewrite the pre written text in your own words there are going to be a lot of articles around with the same basic formats and sentences and they won't pass copyscape. So it took me more than 5 minutes to write an article because of the changes that I made, but it was still quick and the templates help me to focus on articles that otherwise might not be written. I've written 3 so far, 2 from the same basic template they are at:

5 Things To Avoid When Article Marketing
Giving Up Smoking – 5 Things That You Should Avoid When Stopping Smoking

I think that they are different enough, what do you think? Maybe I will write a proper review for Instant Article Factory using one of their templates!

Article Submission

Writing my own articles and getting them outsourced is all well and good but then there is submission. I have always hand submitted to a handful of directories and then used a submission service to send out slightly altered versions. That submission service did well for me but it came to a standstill a couple of months back and not for the first time. I have a stash of articles waiting to be submitted with nobody submitting them except for my hand submissions.

I've looked at other services but I guess that I'm still hoping that my old submission service will start up again. In the meantime I decided to try out the product 'My Article Submitter' which has been sitting on my hard drive for a few years. It looked good but half of the listed directories were either not founds or changed to another use so I checked and deleted those and started adding more directories that I had signed up to. The whole process was taking far too long so I decided to search for current submission software with preloaded directories.

Article Marketing Robot

Is what I found and I am still reeling from using it! No it isn't that bad but my sense of humour is starting to kick in. The product at this moment has 1133 directories loaded on to it. It's blooming marvellous how quickly you can sign up to directories and get the sign ups confirmed, but I did it wrong and only have 175 directories to submit to - it's a long story and it's my own fault. I'm hoping that the developer of Article Marketing Robot will come to the rescue soon.

Straight away when I opened the product and saw the directory list I contacted the developer and asked him to take my travel article directory off there. Only a small percentage of those using the software will be submitting travel articles so that means an awful lot of wasted time for travel or niche directory owners like myself. He took Articles Abroad off the list but I have misgivings about just how many niche directories are on there. One is 'Guitar Playing Tips' and another is 'Free Sex Stories', I really don't think that my dolls house articles will suit them somehow.

Watching one of the training videos was vastly entertaining. Articles Abroad is being used as an example of a site that isn't working properly. The thing is that it is working properly but he is obviously using a free email address to try to sign up and free email addresses are blocked on the site and many other directories because a vast amount of spam comes from free emails. At least as my contact Nick says my site will be getting some exposure!

Anyway I submitted my first article with it last night and so far it has been published on 101 sites. That's still really good and far quicker than I could hand submit. Article Marketing Robot also has an article spinner but I'm not interested in spinning articles. Even though I'm not happy with the amount of niche directories that are on there and I have messed up with the amount of directories and  I can submit to I still think that this product is going to save and make me a lot of money not to mention time.

Note: Once I have gone through the articles I have waiting for submission I can always go through the process again properly using a different penname and get more directories to submit to.

Automated Blogs

I've also automated some of my blogs and have been trying out several different plug ins but I'm still not certain which I prefer so I will review them all more fully later.

The Challenge

I did what was called the 30 day challenge 3 years ago and learned a lot and especially how to get targeted traffic to my sites. Being aware that things constantly change on the Internet I decided to join up again this year and formed a UK group on Facebook. There are 7 of us and what a great bunch they are. We are supporting and helping each other and our first conference call on Tuesday went down really well.

Instead of it being a 30 day challenge this year the training modules are shorter and we have 7 days on and 7 days off, there are 7 pre season training videos and 49 full on training video days which makes it 15 weeks instead of 30 days.

I've completed the first week of training and although I haven't learned anything new yet the training has reminded me that I must research more and has introduced me to 6 great people and reintroduced me to a fantastic tool.

Market Samurai

I tried the free trial last year and thought that it was quite good but this year it has added features and I've used it more and it's completely blown me away. With Market Samurai you search for niches and micro niches and it uses data from the internet to help you find niches that have good amounts of daily searches and not too high competition, also if they are money making niches and there is an affiliate ad search feature. I could and have spent hours on there searching and finding!

One of the features that I like is being able to search for free content and post it to my blogs from within Market Samurai. I have a habit of building several blogs at once but not enough time to write enough content for them all so being able to add quick content to a new blog before google indexes it is invaluable.

I could go on forever praising this product but I gotta go shopping now and back to the real world.

5 Things To Avoid When Article Marketing | BB Articles

There is lots of information and advice on the Internet about article marketing. That’s great for those who are learning who need the advice – and for those of us who never stop learning! However for all of the good advice floating around it’s also good to discover the things that you ought not to do and what you should steer clear of.

The idea behind this article is to assist you to get the best out of your article marketing campaigns by showing you 5 things that you need to avoid, why you should avoid them and what you should do as an alternative if you want to make the most out of your article marketing campaigns.

O.K. then, here are the 5 things that you should avoid:


read more at: 5 Things To Avoid When Article Marketing BB Articles

Earning Money As An Amazon Affiliate - At Last!!

Today I checked my Amazon account and found that I had made 13 sales from one blog alone yesterday. One of the sales was an item costing £90 and 11 of the sales were accessories for that larger item and all costing between £10 and £15. I was pretty pleased with that even though those sales from that blog wouldn't have netted me much more than £13 commission altogether.

Why was I pleased?

This time last year I would have been lucky to make one sale a month with Amazon never mind 13 from one blog, now it's a bad day if I don't make any sales.

Why the difference?

I stopped just adding banners and links to my sites willy nilly and built blogs or converted blogs especially for Amazon products. Adding banners and links to thousands of pages of my websites just didn't work, they didn't get clicked on so obviously there were no sales. I began to think that it was virtually impossible to make money as an Amazon affiliate but then I read posts on the Warrier forum from those who are making large amounts and decided that either they were lying or I was doing something wrong.

Last November I bought an Amazon training course and following the advice built two keyword researched blogs. Basically I found out what people were searching for and buying and bought domains that included those keywords and built the 2 blogs.

They both started to get traffic almost straight away from the search engines and that was because of the keywords and search engine optimisation. This was good targeted traffic of people interested in buying the products displayed on my blogs. I also submitted articles to directories and added the feeds to RSS directories.

I didn't just have products on them. I added relevant articles of my own and from article directories making sure that I included the author details of course. I used a free wordpress plug in called Amazon Autoposter and my content rich niche blogs started to make commission from Amazon. I used some of that that commission to upgrade to WP Robot, the paid version of Amazon autoposter with more features which includes customer reviews.

December was pretty spectacular from those two blogs, both niches were great for the Christmas market but are also pretty steady all year round. I'm just wondering now how well those 2 original niche blogs will do in the run up to next Christmas when they will be more established and have more traffic.

Since then I have built some more blogs in different niches using the same methods and converted some of my other blogs. My earnings are steadily growing and a lot of that is passive income because I don't spend much time on those blogs now.

Why am I writing this?

Every day I see posts on forums from people wanting to know how to make money fast and often without spending anything. Most replies come from people with common sense who tell them it takes time to build up an online business and that many do not succeeed. You always get the odd one out who tells them that they can make money online fast.... but there is usually some money making scheme to click on in their signature.

Some people do make money online fast but they are rare and an exception to the rule. Less rare are those who have worked hard to build up their online businesses and their lists and because of that hard work in time they can make money online fast from product launches etc.

That's the way it is. Personally I don't want to go into list marketing so my way is to build content rich niche sites and watch my business and earnings steadily grow. I know that I could do things quicker but I want a solid online business that I enjoy and I don't want to sell overpriced overhyped internet marketing products. That is unless I use them and can recommend them.

Why choose Amazon?

Because they are real world products with a much bigger market than internet marketing products. There are thousands of different products to choose from in many different niches. Amazon have grown to be the most trusted retailer on the Internet which helps if you can get people to click on your links.

There is also the upsell factor of Amazon including links to other products on their product pages saying 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought' and another list saying 'What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?' and yet another list saying 'Frequently Bought Together' with an add to basket button. All of these features help to procure more sales and it's all done for you.

Downside of Amazon

Nothing in life is all good unless you are a chocolate addict. Cookies expire after 24 hours so if somebody who has originally clicked on your link goes back more than 24 hours later and buys you don't get credited with the sales. Commission is also low, starting at a mere 4% and rising to a maximum of 8.5% depending upon how many sales that you make.

Also there is the different area thing. I live in the UK and my traffic is UK targeted so I am a amazon.co.uk affiliate. However, a large amount of my traffic is from the US and other countries so I lose sales if they click on my links because they get automatically redirected to an Amazon site appropriate to where they are located and where I am not an affiliate. I have seen a way where I can affiliate to the UK and US sites on Squidoo and will be checking this out soon. I am also trying out a blog plug in called Apture that may help make more sales ... we'll see.

JS/Wonka - Kicking It's Butt | Best Blogging Space

I was making the rounds of my blogs and clicked on one and my IE browser froze and stopped working. The same happened 3 times so I swapped over to Firefox. When the home page appeared so did a McAfee security warning which told me that it had detected and deleted the JS/Wonka trojan.

Obviously I was not happy at this threat and especially as my laptop is quite new and was not cheap. It was chance really that led me to the quick conclusion that the problem was with this blog and not my lap top. That was because of IE freezing and then switching to Firefox. If I had been browsing with Firefox to start with I would probably have assumed it was from an email or download.
JS/Wonka - Kicking It's Butt | Best Blogging Space

Giving Up Smoking: Battling Withdrawal Symptoms | BB Articles

The first two weeks after giving up smoking are very taxing and demanding but it is the most crucial period in smoking cessation. Quitters are known and expected to be extremely irritable, frustrated and experience a lot of mood swings at this stage. This is caused by tension brought from the inability to maintain the body’s nicotine levels. Smokers may also undergo a series of anxiety and depression attacks, restlessness, insomnia, lack of concentration and boredom since the body is still adjusting to the lack of constant stimulation that nicotine brings.Giving Up Smoking: Battling Withdrawal Symptoms | BB Articles