Adventures in Lifestyle Design from a Path Less Traveled
Website Building Update – Week 28
I hung out with some architecture friends this past weekend. One of them got cut back to 20 hours a week since there isn’t any work in the office. The other one is expecting to get laid off in April when the project she is working on finishes up (there are no new projects coming into the office). The job market still sucks no matter how much all the “experts” out there are swooning over the fact that we’re not losing jobs as fast as we were before (I’ll wait till there’s actual job growth before I start celebrating the end of the recession).
I’m glad I never turned into one of those unemployed people out there with a LinkdIn page begging and pleading for a job every chance they can get and collecting business cards from recruiters like they’re valuable autographed baseball cards.
I may have only made $1400 in the past six months, but that’s $1400 more than I would have made from “networking” (ie. desperately begging and pleading for jobs that don’t exist)… and I get to keep my dignity to boot!
Anyway, this week I finished article marketing for the men’s dating advice site. I took some of Mark Ling’s auto responder messages for Meet Your Sweet and dumped them into Aweber to supplement my 6-part mini-course.
I crossed the 100 article mark on Ezine Articles too (for those keeping score at home, yes, I submitted 50 articles in the past month!).
I just need to polish up website #1 and #6 then I’ll finally be done with all this heavy-duty article spinning and directory submissions. Almost there!
So far, March is turning out to be a pretty good month. If things keep going like this, I may well break the $500 barrier this month!
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Ah yes. My weekly motivational fix! Reading your updates and Mark’s forum are the only distractions that I don’t feel bad about hehehe.
Hey Clayton, nice work on all those submissions. I just spun my first article and WHOAH. What a drawn out process that is. You must be a machine.
Gratz on the 100th submission. That’s a nice milestone. Keep it up brother!
Great success!
Chris
@Chris, hey man. How’s it going with all the articles you’re getting written in exchange for WoW gold?
Yeah, spinning articles made me want to cry when I was doing it all myself (using a software program called Microsoft Word). It seriously took me like 3 or 4 hours just to spin one article with all the breaks I took. Then all those “parse errors” that showed up as soon as I tried to submit it to AMA…
If you can afford it, I really suggest getting The Best Spinner (thebestspinner.com). It makes things so much easier. I think there’s something called JetSpinner too that’s free. I’m not sure how good it is though.
But, yeah, I’ve been working at this really intensely for the past 6 weeks or so. Honestly the only thing that really keeps me going is the thought that a backlink tsunami is going to hit all of my sites any time now and (hopefully) get me to start earning more money than I spend on rent and food.
I’ve gotten a few of the articles back in exchange for the WoW gold and they were written very nicely.
I was looking at The Best Spinner and really want to get it. I know that I need to sign up with AMA soon as well. The money just isn’t there right now but as soon as I get enough cash, I am definitely spending it on those.
I wanted to ask you how many article directories you submit your spun articles to. I used 9 or 10 for my first article and didn’t know if that’s a decent start or if I should do a lot more.
Take care,
Chris
*Chris*
HAHA so I’m not the only one who is paying my writers in WoW gold? I’ve found the more and more I work on this stuff the less and less I play WoW so I have no need for the gold … I just wish I was good enough at article marketing as I was at making gold in WoW I seem to have strange nack for it.
*Clayton*
I’ve got my fingers crossed for this month for you. I unfortunately prolly won’t pass the $200 mark this month…. but all is good. I’ve gotten a lot of work done on new sites and hopefully I will start seeing some more sales.
@Chris, While you’re saving up for AMA, use Free Traffic System. It will only submit your articles 30 times, but that’s better than nothing. Also download Article Submission Helper. You can dump spun articles in there and it will automatically submit to like 100 or so directories. You kind of have to keep an eye on ASH though. Sometimes it gets a little glitchy and will switch over to a different article or restart at the beginning of the directory list.
Other than that I submit manually to about 17 directories. I would probably submit to more, but I just write them all down on a sheet of paper and 17 is all I can fit on one sheet of paper LOL. Use this list as a guide. Go for high PR, dofollow directories:
http://www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php
@Amanda, Thanks for the encouragement. It would be really awesome if I could pay rent with affiliate earnings ($500). Don’t write yourself off yet. Maybe it’s just me, but for some reason about once a month or so I’ve gotten a sharp increase in sales for a few days. $200 could still be very possible.
Clayton
Thank you so much for the article submission software referral. That thing is a godsend! I need to find a new software spinning tool that matches the format for it though. I’m using one that I saw Mark using on one of his webinars. Its a free online spinner but doesn’t seem to work with ASH or Free Traffic System.
Amanda
Isn’t is great having people write for you with gold? The same thing happened to me with cutting back on WoW time and focusing on marketing. Good luck to you!
@Chris, yeah, that site Mark uses formats articles for AMA.
Just open up the spun article in Word or notepad or something and just do a “replace all” command to change the deliminators.
Here’s a reference for deliminators (I’m not really sure why these guys need to use different syntax…):
AMA – {sentence [1|one]~sentence [2|two]~sentence [3|three]}
ASH – {sentence {1|one}|sentence {2|two}|sentence {3|three}}
FTS (does not support nested spins) – [spin]sentence 1|sentence 2|sentence 3|[/spin]
Hope this helps.
I wanted to ask you, Clayton, why you are still a premium member of Affilorama… I signed up for the blog webinar which I was disappointed to find was almost an exact copy of affiloblueprint :( other then that I couldn’t find a reason to stay a member… I figured my money would be better off used to buy premium membership to traffic travis… what am I missing here? … sorry to post this on your blog but I thought it would be a bit rude to post it on the affilorama forum :P
@Amanda, yeah, I’m actually about to cancel it. I was using it mostly for the market strength tool and the trusted site tool. The market strength tool has been giving pretty crappy non-results since the update, and after using the trusted site tool a few times, I’ve noticed that most of the results aren’t really that good.
I think I’m going to cancel after the new issue of the PDF magazine thing comes out in a few days. and save up for one of those Philippine workers.
Looks great. Glad to see another AB member having some success. I have seen too many people not follow through and blame the course for their lack of success. Good Luck, and keep it up. it is all worth it in the end. I can say, once you know how to do it, the rest go faster, especially once you start paying others to work for you.
@James, Hey man, thanks for checking out my blog. I’m actually thinking about hiring someone in the Philippines right now, but I need to take a closer look at m financial situation first to make sure I can afford it.