There’s been a big stretch of time between my last post and this one. This is due to a situation at home that caused me not to be online very much.

But now I’m back.

In my last post, I said I was skipping right to PPC instead of following the exact order of ABP. But I’ve changed my mind. So what I did was sign up for Article Marketing Automation and submit one of my articles. AMA is a tool that lets you submit articles which are then carried on related blogs. This way you get back links.

You may be wondering if so many blogs are carrying your article, won’t Google see them as duplicate content?

Not if you ’spin’ them. AMA allows you to create multiple versions of every sentence. Then they randomly pick and choose these sentences to create unique versions of your article, which they submit to blogs.

So I signed up for an account ($47.00 but it comes with a 30-day guarantee) and tried it.

I used their tagging system to come up with different sentences. Then I submitted the article for publication.

Up until now, I have not been indexed by Google for anything but my privacy policy (I could have sworn I also saw my homepage there a month ago, but it isn’t now).

A day later, I had 2 blog sites publishing my article. That’s 2 back links to my site.

One other thing I’m going to do is a little trick I learned. Since I’m using posts instead of pages, I’m going to subscribe to the RSS of my blog via Google’s custom home page.

Posted by susb8383 under Affiloblueprint | No Comments »

So far I’ve been following the AffiloBlueprint instructions pretty closely. The only thing I did differently was making my content be posts instead of page in Wordpress. I’ve been watching the videos in order and trying to do at least some of the homework assignments.

Weeks 1 – 5 were all about setting up your website; picking a niche and keywords, putting content up, and optimizing your pages to convert. Done that.

Week 7 is about newsletters and I’ll have to put this off until I can afford an AWeber account. (By the way, again he’s right on the money with his recommendations. I did a very thorough review of some of the more popular auto responders and AWeber came out the clear winner).

Weeks 6 and 8 are about getting organic traffic via backlinks and web 2.0 techniques. I’ve decided to skip this for now and jump right ahead to week 9: advanced tweaking of your website and week 10 – 12: PPC.

Why am I doing this instead of following the order of the lessons exactly?

One of the marketing experts I’ve followed pretty closely is Perry Marshall. If you ever get on his email list, try to attend any free teleseminar he offers; they’re great.

One story he tells is an excellent analogy to building a website. I’ll summarize:

At the same time the Wright brothers were trying to be the first men to fly, Samuel Pierpont Langley was attempting the same. He was in the limelight with tons of funding and press coverage while they were lowly bicycle mechanics operating on a shoestring budget.

Langley was convinced he had finally done it and he invited all the papers to witness the historic event. As they watched, his magnificent contraption rose majestically up in the air and…crashed into the Potomac River. It was a major embarrassment.

Meanwhile the Wright brothers did successfully build the first flying machine that could hold a person, as we all know.

Langley’s approach which resulted in failure and Orville and Wilbur’s that achieved success had a very, very important difference that can be related to creating a website.

Langley thought that if he built a big enough engine, he could make anything fly. He spent a lot of money to have an enormous engine constructed.

The Wright brothers instead concentrated on the plane, not the engine. They studied birds and even built the first wind tunnel. After creating a glider that would fly just by running down a hill with it, popping on a relatively small engine easily gave it enough power to carry a man.

So how does this relate to website development?

The website is the plane and traffic is the engine.

Perry states (and I totally agree) that the first thing you should do is build a website that can fly, i.e. convert. You tweak and test and tweak and test so that your website converts with a small amount of traffic. Then you add on the engine (traffic) after you’ve already got a big conversion rate, resulting in larger and larger profits.

If you do it the other way around and concentrate on getting traffic before you have a converting website, you’ll get lots of people who come to your site and then leave without buying anything. I’d rather get 10 visitors a day where 1 visitor buys than get 1,000 visitors a day where nobody buys.

So based on this approach, I’m going to concentrate on getting my website to convert with a small amount of traffic first from PPC. Then once I hone that, I’ll add on the backlinks and the web 2.0 to get more people to it.

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Well, I’ve sort of hit a wall in my homework assignments.

I was cruising right along until I got to the part about creating content. Writing has always been my least favorite thing (except in elementary school, when all my teachers said I was a great writer. Go figure!)

I had been very diligent in writing a new article every day and setting up the pages as was outlined in the Affiloblueprint videos.

I got through about eight articles that way. But they were all either product reviews that I could write based on the sales page and other review sites, or articles for beginners in the niche.

So now I’m faced with coming up with content that is neither.

Mark recommends hiring an elancer to ghost write, but I’ve been reluctant to do this because, well, I’m pretty broke.

So as a result, my adding content has ceased.

I jumped ahead to the PPC videos (skipped the homework for weeks 6, 7, 8, and 9) but he starts out that lesson by saying why he waited until the end to talk about PPC. Why it’s much better to have your site all set up first. Sigh…

Well, I guess if I’m really going to give this a fair review, I should follow the steps and do the homework in order.

So I guess I’m off to elancer for the first time.

Incidentally, elancer is probably a good place to find niches in the first place. Just look at the other jobs that people are outsourcing in the Ghost Writing category.

Later….

Well I bit the bullet and posted a job on elance.com for someone to write me 5 articles in my niche. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be; they really walk you through every step.

But after I did this, I found an easier way.

In Mark’s training video he mentioned what elancer he selected when he was looking for someone to write his articles. So even though I had already posted my job on elance, I found their website.

The website itself was good, I though. A lot of big, clear graphics and good use of white space. And their per-article price for ghost writing was probably cheaper than I’d end up paying at elancer.

But their ecommerce piece was a little poor. Instead of having their own merchant account, their Add to Cart button goes right to Paypal. So there’s nowhere to put in details of what you want to hire them for before you give them money.

Also most of their services had no price listed. The only way to see the price was to add it to the cart and see what Paypal was charging.

So I sent them an email asking them a couple of things, half expecting to never hear from them (another post I found online said that someone had been trying to email them for months, but that was written in February).

Lo and behold, the owner emailed me back within minutes.

I decided to give them a try and I paid for them to write me 5 articles. According to the owner, the turnaround should be 2 days. And their price is $12.00 per 500-word article.

I’ll post the website of the company a little later…

I’ll also mention that I decided to go with my original instincts and jump right to PPC before completing the other lessons (getting backlinks, Web 2.0, newsletter, etc.).

Why? Because of Perry Marshall’s Wright Brothers story.

But this post is already too long….

Posted by susb8383 under Affiloblueprint | No Comments »