I am quitting IM, 33 live Articles & No Single Sale

you have a clickbank link every two secs, and maybe you should cloak those , and it doesn't matter if you write articles if barelly anyone sees them. We need stats.

Before I say anything. You have SUCCEEDED past the first obstacle of internet marketing...you took action! Give yourself a huge 'pat on the back' for that. You've done more than probably 60% of wannabee marketers out there.

Remember that quitting is a guarantee that you'll fail.

If you keep trying, you can still find success.

To me, it sounds like you are trying to do the approach of 1+1=2, or in other words, "If I submit articles and make a blogger landing page, I will make sales". That's not true at all, unfortunately.

Did you research your keywords for every single article? That's often a huge step that is skipped by many new article marketers. I know I skipped it for my first 40 articles. Some articles ranked (By some I mean 2....out of 40). The ones that are ranked get consistent daily views and clicks. Unfortunately, the Keywords they rank for are not buying keywords, so my sales are rare.

If I were you, I would take a step back, rethink what I'm doing, and come up with a PLAN of attack. Don't go through the motions. Create a plan that you can stick to.

And as far as your current articles.....are they getting views, and on top of that, are they getting clicks? What is your CTR in that case? What is your landing page's CTR? There are a ton of reasons that you might not be getting sales, and you need a way to track it down by using many of the available and free tracking resources, like Statscounter and Tracking202.

Do yourself a huge favor, and DO NOT quit. Just rethink your strategy.

I applaud your focus. That is one of the first steps to making things happen. However, I question your niche. Let me explain. Great niche with lots of potential but also FLOODED with competition. So this begs two questions:

1. How are you differentiating yourself from the competition?
2. How are you winning traffic over the competition?

One way you can differentiate yourself is to offer a free ebook, free bootcamp or something like that. How about a BONUS if they purchase the product through your link. How about giving them OVER THE TOP information they can use today, right here... right now... as a tease of what is to come if they pick up the product. Or instead of creating "sniping sites" how about focusing on the building out of ONE main site with guest writers, bloggers, interviews and offer a multitude of products. In other words, become the AUTHORITY within your niche.

And what about keyword research? Are you targeting the keyword you have a chance of RANKING on the search engines for? Are both your article and blogs designed specifically to rank for a specific keyword phrase? If not and you are just doing a "get your ex back" type phrase - good luck getting any traffic because everyone and their ex is going after the same keywords.

I think you are on the right track - you just need to refine things abit.

That little blogspot right before your dot com is not helping you any .

I haven't been to your site but I can promise you article marketing alone is not Internet marketing .

While you are trying to sell, a lot of people are just collecting emails and establishing relationships .

This is called list building . This model alone , although my favorite , is not Internet marketing .

You are wanting to give up on internet marketing and you are not really even in yet.

Sorry my friend... you are taking a dull knife to a gun fight .

I am not an expert by any stretch of imagination... but after reading your posts and looking at the 3 sites you posted, I was thinking:

- if he misunderstands everything in this business in the same way as he misunderstood what a "niche" is, then we might have a problem
- "affiliate marketing" is NOT your niche, at least based on the websites/blogs presented
- your niche is something about relations, lovemaking and exback...
- your method (or business model) may be affiliate marketing = i.e. you are marketing other people's product as an affiliate

Another thing that got me thinking: 7 months full time and 33 articles? That's what? - One article per week? For a steady traffic in such a competitive niche you would need some more, I guess. And writing one article in every 6-7 day... I wouldn't really call "full time" working.

Do your articles generate any traffic? Are you tracking/measuring the traffic? Do you know the CTR of your articles?

These are just a few questions to think about.

Hope this helps (a bit).

Don't give up!!!

Quitters never win and winners never quit. If you want to quit then do it but know it that you will still fail if you quit.

One of the people I respect most in life is Ben Carson, he has this believe that I like. He takes every 50/50 chance. I have read so many of his books where he said he had to carry out certain operations when he knew that there is a good chance of losing the patient but he had to do so many operations because the chances of some of the patient dying if they don't perform the operation is very high.

You have a 50% chance of succeeding online and that 50% can go up as high as 85% or even more if you take the time to learn what it takes to make money online.

It is good that you a member of this forum. This place presents an opportunity of making money without having to dig deep into your pocket.

Giving up is not the solution. The solution lies in keeping your head. See, I am a NIGERIAN and if you have been reading the papers for some time now, you will know that something is seriously wrong with this country and making money online from this part of world is almost impossible but here I am, making money online.

We have power supply for no more than 4 hours per day. My extremely slow dial up ( thank God I am now on broadband ) costs over $100 per month, clickbank does not accept us, paypal hates our face, people are curious and very scared to deal with any one from here.

All of the above are enough to make you want to quit but I never did and the story is now changing.

I understand your frustration. I have been there, I have seen it all but keeping my head made me what I am today. The best way to solve the problem is to take a look at what you have done so far and let warriors advice you on what and what you have done wrong or not too rightly.

First of all, good job taking action and sticking with it so far. You're a lot further ahead than most.

Here's my advice to you:

Take everything in the replies so far in this thread to heart and follow their advice. It is all good advice and they know what they are talking about.

For the articles that you submitted to directories: are you getting many views? have you chosen good keywords that you can rank for? Have you SEO'd your articles properly? One of the biggest things - is your resource box any good? Does it have a clear and strong call to action? Something like "If you want to {insert hyperlinked anchor text keyword here} click here." or something like that. What about backlinks? Have you built any backlinks to your articles?

As for the blogger blog, well, I guess most of the things I just mentioned apply there too.

Do yourself a favor and really work on your keyword research first to make sure you have good keywords with good traffic that you know you can rank well for.

And spend a little time each day building good backlinks.

If, after all that, you are getting good traffic but no sales, then maybe the product(s) you are promoting are no good or do not convert well.

I am a newbie but made sales hardly working at all last year. I did no SEO marketing of any kind or any real keyword and made sale working about an hour a day. i never had one backlink either. I can tell you exactly what you are doing wrong! I viewed your article on ezinearticles titled Christian-Marriage-Counseling-Getting-Solution-Through-God-Inspired-Guidance
The article is good but your product does not match the reader.

First off are you a Christian or not? Why because you are marketing to Christians in your article then you have a book about how to make love and have better sex.

This is not the Christian counseling that Christians are looking for. The christian market is huge! but Christians want spiritual advice. You need to write a real christian ebook that will help people(if you are a real Christian) From your ezine article people are expecting good christian counseling and are willing to pay for it but a book title 500 love making tips is not the christian counseling people are looking for. You also do not quote bible scriptures and you are selling a worldly non-christian book. Also you quote Oprah on your sales page and most christians see here as a new age freak. Not to beat you up but please take my advice, the internet user today is very smart.They

Um, I hate to get down on you, but 33 articles in 7 months is not trying IMHO. If you did an article only every other day you would have 4 times the articles you have now and possibly a sale. IM is not something you can do once and get rich on (for most) it's something you do a little (or lot of if you have the time) and build on it. Also, Article marketing is not your only avenue of advertising. Have you tried video marketing or any other?

Once again, sorry to come down on you so hard, its just that this is exactly why so many IM do not see the green at the end of the tunnel!

Good luck with your new venture.

For one thing, it appears as though English is not your first language. Did you have someone help you with the articles and the blog posts? If not, you might want to have someone help you with punctuation, spelling and grammar. It doesn't have to be perfect, but if you really want to makes sales, it needs to be a bit better than it is in this post.

Also, if you're serious about making a go of this business, you need to treat it like a business. A domain is only about $10, and you can get decent hosting for landing pages for $5-10 per month. I don't know what your finances are like, but if you can manage $20, I suggest getting a domain and some hosting as soon as possible. If you have to, you can try outsourcing to earn the money to buy a domain and some hosting.

You are making the same mistake of many marketers, including me, in thinking that posting articles to directories is sufficient to make sales.

Others have already pointed out the importance of finding great keywords with lots of searches and little competition. Find a LOT of those, rather than going after high-competition keywords. Once you find them, add up the search volume and it'll probably closely match one high comp. keyword - only you'll have a much better chance of getting attention with yours.

After posting your articles, drive traffic to those articles. Unless you do, your articles will slip into the depths of the archives, never to be seen again - except on the occasion when someone searches the database for your keywords. The more sites that come up, the deeper down the results you will appear.

Are you sending people from the articles direct to the affiliate sales page? They should be going to your own squeeze page so you can grab their contact info and pitch to them repeatedly, rather than putting in all that work for the affiliate product owner who most assuredly IS building a list on your traffic.

Does your landing page hold the visitor's interest? Even squeeze pages must entice your visitor to take action... sign up for your freebie. Does the freebie have perceived value that they cannot refuse? Is it something they just "have to have"? How you present it (sell them on the offer) and what you offer can have a drastic impact on your sign-up success.

Does your article take the reader right to the resource box and make them want to click for more info? If the article doesn't grab and keep their interest and leave them begging for more, you'll lose them. Remember... people scan articles online rather than read every word. Pepper your article with several subheads and bulleted lists to make it easy for the reader and keep them moving through the article.

These are just some of the elements that must be included to find success.

Others include how many others are promoting the same affiliate products? Is the market saturated with affiliates? Are you seeing their ads everywhere you turn?

This is what's happened to me. When I began marketing one product, not too many others were, so I was able to get sales. Recently, I see that many people are promoting it - their ads are everywhere - even the article directories are sticking their ads in and around my article promoting the same product. What chance does that leave me to make the sale? Apparently, not much, because my sales have stopped for one particular product. Way too many other people marketing it with AdWords.

Always remember that it's all about DRIVING TRAFFIC. Focus on that, and you will succeed. Drive traffic to your articles, to your squeeze page, to your affiliate sales page using every technique that works for you. Don't just stop at one.

Hope this helps.

Sylvia

33 Articles in 7 months? If your model is mass article marketing, I would think you'd want 30 articles per WEEK (or preferably more) to see any real results.

Ikepeace,
You've been given some good advice here; please think about what's been said, try to come up with a basic plan of action with very specific steps, and start over.

I don't know what your financial situation is, but Steve's suggestion to find a mentor seems very appropriate in this case. If that is not a viable option, then start reading through this forum as much as you can. Also search the WSO section for article marketing info. I just purchased Sara Young's Article Income Blueprint for someone totally new to IM, and it is very good. She also uses Blogger, by the way. Good luck.

Well, someone here needs to be Simon Cowell.

OP, your English skills are terrible. If you're writing the articles yourself, then likely people are put off by your grammar and spelling. In fact, your post here is so awful I can barely make sense of it.

Quitters never win but that doesn't mean you're meant to be a winner in this particular business. Practice doesn't make perfect - perfect practice makes perfect.

I 2nd the "Quittters Never Win, And Winners NEVER Quit".

However, I will take the fact your in the Warrior Forum
as you NOT being a quitter and are just venting.

You are surrounded by 1000's of us who felt the same way
and went through the same learning curve.

Try submitting 1000's of articles and getting traffic but
no conversions... Which just mean YOU NEED TO TEST
& FIGURE OUT WHAT IS WRONG!


I went over 1 year without much success.

If this was EZ everyone would be doing it and then
none of us would have the chance at being suuccessful.

I LOVE THE CHALLENGE!

It takes time to become an expert OR at least really good
at something... And I am so proud I have now been doing
something for 3 years that most would quit within 1st few months.

Here is what i would suggest for EZ MONEY...

1. Pick a market you are PASSIONATE
about and that info flows through you with excitement
and enthusiam.

2. I would start a REAL BLOG on YOURDOMAIN.com!

3. Giveaway Videos or Audios or Reports in exchange for
email address! BUILD YOUR PERSONAL BRAND!

4. I would get into some "Social Networks" like
Twitter & Facebook.

5. Create some free reports, videos , or audios
and give them away.

6. THEN send people from your list & social
networks to your blog and get them on a list!

7. Create Video or Blog Post about Product you
recommend and BOOM...

You Are Making Money & MOST IMPORTANTLY Have
A List Of People That Know ,Like & Trust you!

Everyone is trying to sell someone.

WHY NOT GIVE VALUE FIRST?

Build relationships first and THEN direct people
towards products your recommend and get PAID!


I hope this helps...

Your Friend,
Kevin DaSilva

you will need to do better, build your own list and follow up them so that you will make some sales.

By the way are you good at writing articles? Perhaps you can get a decent income by writing articles alone since most warriors need article writers. So you open another stream of income and at the mean time you can try your way to find your sweet spot in these niches.

I second Kevin's post, though without the "EZ Money" label. What he is suggesting is not easy, and even following the steps would leave many people frustrated! However, I do think it's a sound foundation for deeper exploration.

As a side note, producing 33 articles in 7 months, even with difficulty in English grammar and spelling might just be enough to produce a single sale, and I wonder what your expectations were with this level of effort?

Article marketing can work, but additional effort may be required. Alternatively, I would suggest that you can succeed producing (better) articles on a TLD (with a decent site design) with an eye to flipping the resulting websites. This produces income where the personal effort to generate affiliate sales just isn't there.

You must press on instead of giving up, it may takes some times to see the results from your articles, so instead of giving up, go submit more articles until you got a sale, good luck!

DCB

Maybe you should quit.

In 7 months, you could have created 30 blogs, over 1000 articles, social bookmarked all of them, pinged all of them, and probably be making some decent money.

That is only 1 blog per week, 5 articles per day. Even if you work a 40 hour work week at a full time job you could have accomplished this.

During those 7 months of working this hard, you would have learned a lot. You would have discovered many things which did not work, and found a few which did.

Since you appear to be doing everything on the free path, have you actually taken time to learn the right way to do it? Travis Sago's BUM Marketing course is free, and will at least get you on the right foot.

But, if you are not willing to work hard enough to pump out a blog a week, and 5 articles per day, your decision is sound. You should quit.

In a nutshell you have no plan. Article marketing is a part of a plan - not the whole plan. Gone are the days of relying just on article marketing to succeed.

Ultimately you need to seek further training and if I could give you one piece of advice that I'm sure everyone here will agree with:

Get an autoresponder service and start building a list.

I wish you the best of luck.

Go get some good ebooks on article writing and affiliate marketing, learn from the ebooks and try again. Never quit!! If you try hard enough you'll eventually succeed!!

DCB

#1. Find a niche that you know sells, or should be easy to sell.
#2. Find keywords that are not too competitive (using micro niche finder)
#3. Put up domain/blogger for the keyword phrase.
#4. Create content on your site.
#5. USE BACK-LINKING PACKAGES IN WSO's to build up PR and wait.

Isn't that pretty much it?

well good luck in what you choose. I.Ming isn't for everyone and despite what many say. there's easier money elsewhere.

There is a lot of good advice above so I'll only cover one thing. That is the names of your blogs and sites.

They are probably as bad as any I have come across who has sought my help. They are REALLY horrible.

Get yourself some decent domain names in your niche, re work your articles and post them onto your sites.

Generate some traffic using your original articles.

I haven't even visited the sites as I probably know what to expect when I get there.

So get some much shorter and better domain names.

At the moment they are extremely spammy and are next to hopeless.

Sam

I think it is not so related to the topic you are discussing because your content is about how to get your ex back while the ads is about sex tips. How can you make sex to your ex if she don't like or love you anymore? See more focus on your dmakingupmagic.blogspot.com

Why is it that people have to cry i am quitting when really they asking for help ? should they just not leave quietly.

Dont give up bro, just keeping on pushing and doing what works and dumping the one thats not working.

Wow, seriously, this is an amazing thread.

How often do you see people telling you not
to quit to pursue success? More often
than not, people tell you to give up.

This thread reveals so many people who
believe in someone... they've NEVER seen.

Heck, the OP doesn't even have an image
avatar.

I applaud everyone who gave deep insights
to the OP... and OP, please pay attention
to the responses given to you.

Asher

Have you tried Constantcontent.com ?, It is a great site which offers excellent pay for proficient writer on many topics. It is surprising that in spite of your efforts, you are unable to sell. I know someone who waited for sometime and got the results he wanted as an article and content writer.

Don't quit this is not an option. "Keep chiseling the stone with your chisel one day the stone will get broken."

I guess the main problem here is that this is a hugely saturated niche where there is plenty of free content so the eBook doesn't add any value.

I do wonder why people bother with such niches. Things like RegNow and Clickbank have 1000's of products, but 95% of them are junk. I have made a bit of cash selling software through affilate schemes. Articles that tell people how to buy X to solve Y are successful, as are product reviews. I mainly stick to boring niches. People read about relationships, but they mostly BUY boring things like lawnmowers and saucepans.

Don't Quit. I didn't make any money for almost the first year. If I quit, then I wouldn't be earning as much as I am now.

Here's what I did!

1. I didn't quit
2. I tried different niches
3. I didn't quit
4. Once I found a niche that worked, I built a list
5. I didn't quit
6. I wrote articles to drive traffic to my squeeze page
7. I referred back to step one.

Threads asking how to do Article Marketing come up quite often here - so I have a standard reply - I hope this helps:

Two brilliant threads to read about article marketing are these:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...marketing.html

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...eza-first.html

Read them both - all the way through - and take notes.

For further information I recommend the following directory - It is education in article marketing - a guide book and monthly newsletters - with a directory thrown in! You can read what Warriors think about it here: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...alks-walk.html

Article Directory - Article Marketing Community

I can also recommend the WSO's from this guy:

http://www.warriorforum.com/members/zeus66.html

This guy also has some good stuff - some article marketing some on other things

http://www.warriorforum.com/members/...wagenheim.html

Hope this helps.

I also think you should get a personal mentor if you are serious about it. Unfortunately, just slapping up some articles is not good enough to get sales.

Because you have been following all of the "reductionists gurus" that take complex marketing strategies and "reduce" them down to single catch phrases like "just do it".

"Just write an article a day" without telling you that some niches are so popular that your article will only stay on EzineArticles Recent category for a day.

"Just create some backlinks" without showing you how to find out how many backlinks you have to create to beat out the other guys.

"Just write a compelling resource box" without letting you know that copywriters get paid thousands of dollars to write "compelling" and "responsive" copy.

So yeah, "just do it" and lose 7 months of your life becuase no one here is going to assume any kind of responsibility for your wasted time.

Why should they? You came to a forum and asked a bunch of avatars how to make your life better.

If you do what Steven suggested and hire someone to be responsible for their advice then at least you can get your money back if they waste your time with uneducated and ignorant utter nonsense.

I agree with the advice above. Get a mentor.

PM me if you want a specific one. Can be very low cost.

7 months full time...

2 weeks done right should have landed you at least a sale or two, but likely more than 33 articles.

Regards,
PCRoger.

Well I've seen many native English speakers who sound like they barely have a grasp on it

Most people want to market to the English speaking market cause that's where most of the net sales come from. Some areas in next to impossible to make sales for many reasons.

First of all, if you gonna keep on blogging, buy a domain a hosting and start a wordpress blog.
You can still use the other blogpost to link at your main blog.

Do a keyword research, make a list of all keywords related to your niche, with traffic stats, CPC.

Take your best keywords and write an article based on them.

Use it in the title, and in the body about 3 - 4 times.

You can check the keyword density of your article with live-keyword-analysis.com

Take your main article and rewrite it, create 10 copys of it, you can use crewriter.com

Put your main article at your blog

submit your copys to article directories ( there are hundreds of them besides ezine and goarticle). Make sure to drive your traffic to your main blog.

Make some keyword density post on your blogpost linking to your main blog.

Submit a press release on free sites

Be an active member in forums related to your niche and put your main blog adress on your signature.

You have videos, upload it to video sites like youtube.

Create a twitter account with a niche related username, and put your adress site on your profile.

Do the same with facebook and myspace.

Put and opt in on your site and start listbuilding

Cloack your affiliate links

Try PPC, ezine ads, paid press release and other paid traffic methods.

All this should take you about 1 or 2 hours a day. The niche you choose is highly competitive but if you do the things right you will see results.

Quit is not an option, if you ask successful people what it takes for them to quit, they will say absolutly nothing!

I'm not succesful yet, I fall and rise so many times that I consider myself as a rebound guy.

As anybody can notice English is not my first language (not even my third!) but I manage to make some money on english products (and in other languages as well), so this can't be an issue.

There is a lot that is wrong here.

First, what is your system? Your strategy? From what I can see, it is to pick 2 products on click bank that you think there is a big market for, write some articles and hope people read them, click thru to your blog, read more articles and/or click thru and buy the product.

There is a lot wrong with this system.

Here is my take on it - and this may be quite a long post...

First:

Let's take the lead building aspect of this model.

From what you write, you rely only on the articles to bring you traffic. That would mean free search engine listings and whoever else has picked up the articles and posted them.

33 articles in seven months is not a lot.

Some points about this

1) Are these strategic articles? Are they articles created to rank for certain searches that people are typing into search engines? If not, you are probably wasting your time.

2) Are you tracking results? This would let you see which articles are bringing traffic and which are not. This is important information to know.

3) Are these articles written by you to provide some useful content? Or are they made only to try and get someone to click a link?

So, to sum up - you must use more ways to get traffic than 33 articles. And, you must refine the way you are using articles to get your traffic.

You test, you see the results, you change and re-test.

Second:

This continues with the first point. Are you building a list?
You should be. You never mentioned this. You have no way to re-contact your leads
if you are not building a list.

If you built a list, you could notify your list of other articles they may be interested in.
You could also notify them of other products that may interest them.

You must always build a list based around an interest or theme.

If you just hope people will pop over to your blog, then go to the site that is selling a product and purchase, you'll never get anywhere doing that.

Third:

You don't mention anything about keeping stats. You must always keep stats so you know what's going on and how to adjust things. You may be keeping stats, but since it was never mentioned, it seems like you are not and just "hoping for the best"

Fourth:

Why the focus on just trying to sell 2 clickbank products? You are making the classic mistake of picking a product instead of picking a market, and a market with a problem at that.

Obviously what you are doing is not working and it is time for a change. Not giving up trying to make money online is great. Not giving up using a "system" that doesn't work is ridiculous, especially without making changes to it.

Some good advice was given and some people put a lot of thought into their posts. Wonder if he's gonna come back and read the advice or if he's gone for good.

Ps. I would never recommend PPC for a newbie unless they are risky and have money to lose. I doubt someone who can't afford a domain name, hosting, etc. would have to worry about that anyway.

Don't give up... IM is one of the best things in this world if not the best. I am not an expert on IM and still learning how to discover the million earnings but after I lost my job and months of trying in IM, I was able to make some sales to feed my family. I follow every detail in bummarketing method by Travis and read everything I can learn here at WF. My motivation is ..if i stop we will not eat and I cannot provide for my old and sick parents who are under my care.

- 33 articles in 7 months is not enough (just speaking from my experience). I wrote minimum of 3 and maximum of 5 articles a day. And I am not not a writer by profession, I just learned it from WF. If there are days that there are personal things that I need to accomplish, like attend to the needs of my parents and my IM work/writing is affected, I will work double time the next day and push myself to write 10 or at least 6 or 7 articles to cover the previous day that I wasn't able to write. It is not easy and my head is like spinning at the end of the day BUT it is doable and not impossible. You can outsource it if you have the funds. In my case I have to write it myself.

-At night before going to bed I research for 10-15 keywords and make my to-do-list for the next day.

- I check the approved articles if they made it at goo.gle page 1 and ranking number 1-5th place. If the article is not indexed at 1st page, there must be something wrong and so I will try other keywords, look at my title (try different styles and variations and see what will work, improve the content of the article, etc)

- Combined blogs and websites I have more than 100, so if I am not making money with others I can make money with some of them. I try and test different niches in Clickbank and other affiliate programs. In your case please try other niche aside from love and relationship.

- I work from sunrise till the wee hours of the night. I'm just 2 yrs in IM and all I am doing is affiliate marketing and no list and no product of my own. I know I need to learn more and work more than what I am doing to earn more.

- I continue reading and learning and since I have more than a thousand articles out there and some are doing good, I want to learn this year to have my list and own products.

- If there are days that I have no earnings, I always tell myself " If they can make money here in the net, then I can make money too".. Although I know there are days that I really feel down and do not know what to do...I still keep trying because when I found IM, I made a decision that this is the thing I want to do for the rest of my life.

- From my experience, a lot of hard work is needed to earn money here and it is true that there are times that you want to quit because sometimes you do not know what to do....In times like that ..go to Warrior Forum and ask advice from people here. If you are burned out, take a rest. I found John Reese "reboot your brain" a good relaxation technique and brings me back in focus.

Do not quit, research on other niches and track the performance of your articles.

This thing works for me. I pray in front of my laptop EVERYDAY before work to have a nice blessed day and pray before going to bed to thank God.

I hope you will continue to be an IM'er.

about this site... 500lovemakingtips4dmarried.blogspot.com it reads like it is from someone has little understanding of marriage crisis... have you been through one? it does not connect to your audience at the emotional level... it is not exciting.. like scientific reading.. it does not help your sale..

about quitting... I was watching "Shark Tank" show the other day.. (Dragon Den in UK).. one of the angels said.. a good salesman is the one knows when to quit and not waste time...

quitting is not all shame and failure.. it may make the most business sense

Here's a thread that might inspire you a bit:

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...d-i-didnt.html

Also, what you're trying to achieve is very realistic as long as you're willing to put in the work and have the mindset of an entrepreneur (which is set of certain skill sets that can be learned).

Spud Web was 5 foot 7 inches tall and Mugsy Bogues was 5 foot 3 inches tall - both were told they would never make it in the NBA. They both proved their naysayers wrong by their sheer focus and work ethic. What you're trying to achieve is a million times easier.

So don't quit, writing 33 articles is nothing compared to what's lies ahead. Some business owners don't even see a real net profit for years, so 7 months isn't really that much time if you think about it.

Good luck,

RoD "Yep-Still-Sober" Cortez

A few points:

1) 33 articles in 7 months is NOT a "full time" effort in this business. It's not even a 5% effort (2 hours per week instead of 40 = 5%).

2) You don't seem to be tracking anything. Bad dog. You MUST track things to see what is working.

3) If you made zero sales it means you have either not enough article views, or not enough click throughs (or perhaps the niche market sucks). If you get no click throughs then you should NOT be writing unless you get training to write. I don't do sewing, I don't sing, I don't build model airplanes ... because I have no skills in those areas. If you write like crap, either get trained or don't write. Hire someone else.

I thought you were quitting.

Edit: I'm not encouraging you to quit. But rather, just pointing out the irony of your proclamation in the thread title and your subsequent plea for help in righting the ship.

keep learning

if I were you,I am gonna use PPC to test water, certainly you need to parepare a couple of hundreds of dollars, otherwise, you need to learn how to use micro niche finder ,keyword explorer ,marketing sumarui tools ,it has learning curve...succeeding iinternet marketing count on seo technology, you either use ppc or learn SEO first, otherwise, you waste your time ...

This is all you have been doing for 7 months?

If it is, then there's no wonder you have not made a sale.

It took me over a year to make my first money online. Not to mention that I had lost my job, had no place to live, and no computer.

I made my first sale from going to internet cafes, using computers at public libraries, and anywhere else I could get access.

But I never gave up and it paid off.

Your success or failure all comes down to you and how bad you want it. Every person on this planet that wants to do become successful at something will have to go through failure. It's the ones that learn from their failure and keep pressing on that will succeed.

Give up now and you only prove to yourself that you don't have what it takes to be an internet marketer. The choice is yours.

To be honest it doesnt seem like you have a full understanding of Afilliate Marketing.
Much more work is needed in my opinion to reach any sort of significant sales level.

You have taken the first step and put something up! Most people don't even get that far.

Keep learning, keep doing, keep going.

Warmly,

Millard

Tell me something, you have been in this game for 7 months but how much of that have u spent changing your model?

If something isn't working then you have to change it and try something else until u find something that works.

The reason you aren't making sales could be a few different things, you articles, you presell, your offers landing pages, your offers, you website design, the colors on your website..and much much more..

the key to success is to try things until they don't work and then try something different. Keep repeating that until you find something that works well.

Doing the exact same thing for 7 months is NOT going to get you anywhere.

Your story is pathetically similar to mine, about a couple of month i posted a similiar thing like this. And gave myself 3 month utimatum. A long the line i realize my major problem was not the niche or product am involve with but traffic.

One thing that helped me overcome my problem was installing an ad tracker.

With an ad tracker you know exactly where is a waste of time and where is worthwhile to promote your business.

There are a lot of things involve in marketing online, naturally people do not commit to any thing online at the very first time. Thats why entrepreneurs use auto-responder.

First you need to know your target market.

You need a site or blog.

Pick a few less competitive keyword and start promoting it. Traffic climbs slowly, you need to do it consistently using the following methods below.

Article marketing

Blogging

Traffic exchange

Forums

List building

PPC

And so on. At worst get a mentor.

Today my traffic is climbing as well as sales.

7 months is a lot of time invested... please dont quit... you need to regain your focus, you need a plan! I found that Dani Johnson has been huge inspiration to me! You just need to keep chipping away at it... something will give.

To Your Success!

Hey buddy atleast you took the time to put in the effort, that is more than can be said of most other newbie IMers..if I were you I would stick with it and just keep tweaking until you start seeing results. Rather than buy more products, just look around this forum and see other blogs and copy what they are doing..

First off, you say you have been full time for 7 months, and in that time you've managed to put up 3 free blogs and publish 33 articles. Let's take a look at just how "full time" you've been...

7 months is roughly 210 days. You've managed to put up a free blog every other month, on average. You've managed to publish an article once a week, on average.

Let's be generous, and say the blogs took you five hours each. Another 3 hours for each article. That's 114 hours worth of work. If you only worked the equivalent of a full-time job, that's 150 days at 8 hours per day, or 1,200 hours available. 114/1200 = around 10%.

Calling that "working full time at IM" is a joke, unless you've been doing other productive things you haven't mentioned.

Next, "affiliate marketing" is not a niche. It's another name for commission sales. You've apparently decided to sell within the "relationships" niche and not only that, the very competitive "save your relationship/get your ex back" sub niche. You'll have to put in a lot more than 3 weeks worth of work every 7 months if you want to compete.

People will probably jump on me for being harsh and not patting you on the head for "taking action". Maybe I am being harsh. It's not a personal attack. Rather, it's meant as a bucket of cold water to wake you up.

One poster compared what you've done to bringing a dull knife to a gunfight. In a niche that competitive, with the little you've actually done, it's more like facing major league pitching with a pencil and expecting a home run...

Quitting is what youre doing wrong!!!

Never, never, never, never....give up brother!

Plus why would you waste seven months of incredible learning? Just keep at it man...but maybe change tack slightly...affiliate marketing is incredibly lucrative...100's of people have the proof...

Problem is...we hit major obstacles, make nothing and think bugger it...Im outta here...then what ya gonna do?

Try something else...till ya hit the roadblock and throw that away too?

Just a little more patience friend...and perseverence - use what you have learnt combined with someone elses knowledge and vary your attack slightly...you wont regret it!

I'm with McCabe. I started IM 1.5 years ago with a new infoproduct that I wrote myself, a new website that I wrote myself, and 65 articles that I wrote...myself. It took me about four months to do all that because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

It took me until December 18th, 2009 to get a sale. In that time, I've completely rewritten my website, changed the title and feel of the infoproduct, and written another dozen articles, all while I wrote a kajillion articles for other people in order to make enough money to pay rent.

Since then, I've gotten about one sale every month "on autopilot". The first sale is about to make it past the 60-day guarantee without getting refunded. That will make me very happy. I'll be able to call myself an internet marketer and mean it. But that's only come after many, many hours of hard work. And some outsourced labor, too.

33 articles and a few blogs is about two weeks work from my perspective, and I'm slow. I guess the real question is, what else have you been doing?

You are trying to push those products way to hard!!!

You're not much on using subtle approaches are you? Remember to help your visitors and give them value. Recommend your product, not bombard them with links to it.

You need to presell and get rid of some of them links.

Make sure you are getting "targeted buying traffic" to your articles/blogs, or you'll continue with your negative results.

One of the best ways to become successful at anything (definitely applies to affiliate marketing) is to observe the experts and learn from them.

Why quit affiliate marketing? You already know way more than the average joe about this making money online. We all fail online, even the Super Affiliates, but we learn from them and continue to try new things until we find that sweet spot. That will be the day you'll be glad you never gave up.
FYI, sometimes it helps to take a little break and then collect your thoughts and ideas and comeback with a fury.

Good luck on whatever you choose to do.

This thread is an inspiration to me. I've thought about quitting IM altogether and taking a full time job again but W2's are here so I am sticking it out for another month

Plenty of good advice here and while I don't have time to read every post, I don't think anyone has said this: get rid of Clickbank. That's right, stop doing what every IM newbie is doing and that is promoting ebooks just because some WSO or guru told you to.
The second I ridded my portfolio of clickbank, I started making real money.
Im not saying that clickbank products can't make you money, but writing articles for directories promoting CB is what 10 million other marketers are doing. Be different, be original and think for yourself. And read all the posts in this thread because many people have kindly taken their time out to help you and give you free advice.

study more tips around here, please do not give up.

why not try out craigslist for instant good result?

Ike, seriously you need to totally re evaluate everything you are doing. For one thing what the heck does the blogspot you named solution to your hair on fire problems have to do with making up with your ex ?? Before I went to your Site, I thought it was a hair loss blog.
Please rename this blogspot. Better yet go and buy a regular Domain at GoDaddy for $10 a year.

Sorry, but as many others have said this will just NOT fly in the general IM World where English is the primary form of communication.

I have some articles published in the ezinearticles and only generate 2 sales ($73). Very good for newbie.

How to dig the "buying keywords" so that I can make more sales ... help please. Terry Kyle's WSO is very good, but it is long words I have to read.

I am looking for mentor, maybe I have to pay monthly payment is no problem.

Everyone has given you good advice. You simply need to do MORE work. If you want to work for yourself, you have to work ten times harder than someone at a regular 9-5.

At the height of my article marketing, I was averaging about 25 articles A DAY! And for the weekends? About 50! ALL WRITTEN MYSELF. Now, were they of the highest quality? No. But that volume allowed me to make enough money to move into other areas, like paid advertising. That is, PPC, media buys, Facebook, Myspace etc. The only reason I was able to diversify was because I wrote until my fingers and wrists literally throbbed! Don't be lazy. Work hard and you'll be rewarded.

33 articles submitted and 7 months online, to me that is about 1 article per week which is nothing.I have been online since 2001 and still today I occasionally do 15 hour days marketing my blog.

I also noticed you have your affiliate link posted too many times in the articles.As a reader this put me off because I do not want to be sold anything, I want to be offered a solution to a problem I have.

I recommend you look at blogs that are successful and see what they are doing, then apply the changes to your own blog.

As many others have said, don´t quit! Keep going, no one said it would be easy.

Reading all the great help you have been offered here has also given me heaps of ideas!
Thanks everyone...

I feel Steve W. had a valid point too.
The days of a "fast online buck" are not available to many any more.
Internet tourists are very savvy now days & demand high quality & great value.
This is a genuine business opportunity & must be approached as such.
As someone else asked, What is your business plan?
Who is your mentor? (sign up to the big guys sites & see how they do it).

Most Uni students, doctors, & so on have to put in 5,000 to 10,000 hrs study & practice to earn a paltry 5 figure income.
Yet some internet newbies come in & after 5 hours expect to earn mega money...Sorry, it doesn't work that way anymore. Awwww Shucks!
The Internet has come of age & now demands product congruency with genuine business practices.
I really do hope you copy all these posts & print them out & study them. I'm sure you will find everything in here to help you. You asked for help & there's ton's of top info to use.
Study well my friend!

Kindest Regards,
Mary...(my nick name is Poppie, please call me Poppie)Thanks

Ikepeace,
Develop a list and work your relationships with your list. Don't try to sell to them first off, get some feedback on what they would like to know and then give them a white paper or report for free. Get to know them and talk to them like they're your friends ie with respect and friendliness. You're bound to get more out of IM that way than just being in for the quick $'s. Market to them with new products but make the products good ones and put in your point of view as to why it might help them.

The OP doesn't care, he asked "what am I doing wrong," but hasn't acknowledged any of the replies but there are probably others who are getting help from these replies. So I'm sure the replies aren't all in vain.

Well OP if you are seeing this - which I doubt seeing it's already a 3 page thread thread - you must kick yourself up and start REALLY working.

As Steven said in an earlier thread, 1 article weekly is by no stretch of the imagination a full time job.

So get up and take action, and don't even think about giving up when you haven't even stretched the surface yet.

Kevin

Don Give up.. I am also struggling.. =) Who knows you will succeed one day!

Hi ikepeace

Pl. go through this thread specially "The unknown Guru". The links he has provided is just great - use of blogger. I think you can really benefit.

http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ger-blogs.html
I have learned a lot form these threads
Parg

Well your first prblem is that your blogs aren't solving ANY problems that peeps are looking for.

Why do you have a blog called tips4haironfire.blogspot.com that has nothing to do with "hair on fire"? lol.
And you're offering an unrelated product for relationships.

You've got some serious disconnect going on.

"Relevance" is the name of the game. Offer something related to your chosen keyword.
Find a chosen keyword people are looking for
Make sure it's a solution to a problem that peeps would buy.

What you should do is give up.
Start again build a wordpress selfhosted website
in one niche only. Build yourself a list as well and you
could be making some money in six months if ya lucky.

Obviously he started the thread in the hope of getting traffic to his sites. He got traffic alright, but that's about it

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT AS SEEN ON GOOGLE NEWS:

"Obviously the OP has decided to quit after all".

A large sigh of relief was heard across the internet, and a peaceful hum returned to the forum.

Sam

You don't need to cloak your links, you don't need to buy a domain name for your blog. These things are optional and not required.

No your problem is your blogs, you are selling when you should be pre selling! Your blogs do not look like reviews, they look like you are trying to spam and sell the readers.

If you need help learning how to pre sell just ask around on here

There are sites that will actually help newbies out and this is one of them, I have a blog just for that, not even a money maker, if newbies find my blog leadmetomoney.com they will see products that actually worked for me. I think everyone has to find there own way and get into a rhythm, help from others is great but you can't have someone do it for you, you do need to figure some stuff out on your own.

Dont you think its time you quit your PRODUCT and not IM altogether? Everyone can money YOU can too..

Don't give up. You have only just begun. I gave up at one point a few years back. Luckily I started back in a year ago. If I would have just kept at it, I would be far better off than I am now.

I read some of your articles and honestly, they are very much 1st drafts. There is some spelling/grammar errors in nearly every post. I would remove all those links too.

Aside from that, the actual content is too wishy washy. By this I mean that you don't give very specific information in them, more general themes. So in the article when you mention a few things about male ego, why not write an entire article about that. Break it down further. Right now you are not offering much value through your articles.
my 2 cents

Interesting thread. Interesting insight into mindsets

firstly the blog names are not professionaly, they may work fro SEO purposes but not for making sales.

Have a high quality domain and professional theme with quality articles.

Switch over to WP.

Thank you

I commend you for your hard work, but give up? I'm not too sure. It doesn't matter what anybody says, what works for you will ultimately manifest itself in due course, but only if you persevere and stay open to other options. Perhaps take a break to regroup. I do that all the time. I take a break! And during one of those breaks I stumbled upon a new niche, by accident -- Vocal Coaching! You heard that right. I'm now teaching people how to sing! But then again, once upon a time I WAS a professional singer. I'm just cashing in on what I know and love doing!

"It's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped." - Anthony Robbins

Best of luck,

Anthony

Never give up! When you face failure you need to try out new strategies and innovative ideas to attain success. Failure is often the price of progress.

don't worry, I spun my wheels for 2 years before I made my first sale!

Now it make on average 1k a month and working to improve it...

hang in there!

Hey

Since I got a mentor back in August, I have a popular blog, I have made close to $4k online and have a growing email list of just over 3.5k subscribers.

How did I do this?

Some advice for you:

Get a blog going use WP.

Pick a domaim name to brand yourself ie use your name!

Add valuable content and help people.

Get an autoresponder service start building your mailing list.

Make a plan set some achievable goals.

Keep reaching your goals and move forward, and dont chase the money.

Take action build YOUR business.

okay.

cheers

Marcus

LOL the OP was never going to quit, nobody dedicated enough to wrote 33 articles themselves would quit. Good on ya and keep at it.

You wrote "answer to can I get my ex back is yes". This is scary. Real people do not talk like that. Please try to improve. I mean, it is no mystery that there are no sales in over a year. Would you buy from a website with such poor grammar? Look at web sites that are making money and try to imitate success.

I feel your Pain, But if you QUIT now then you are allowing defeat to run your life.
You just need to rethink things and it will all work out in the end. always remember this:

And this is what I have posted on my computer screen every single day.
this is my Quote: If It's Meant To Be It's Up To Me!

Mark