Money and Mind

I was really excited today because I was congratulated by a Guru!

As you know Article Marketing is one of my core strategies for building traffic to Money and Mind my website and recently I’ve been taking part in the Lieurance-King Article writing challenge to write 30 articles in 60 days.,

The challenge has really inspired me to up my production rate and I’m glad to say that I managed the 30 articles in about 15 days. The real reason for that was that I also had a personal goal to get my number of articles on EzineArticles.com from just over 50 when the challenge started up to 100 by September 21st, which will be 3 months from when I first published my debut web article.

So what’s that got to do with being high-fived by a guru? Well, if you know anything about the article marketing scene then you’ll know that one of the most well known and successful advocates is Jeff Herring - so successful at it in fact that he is known as The Article Guy.Jeff Herring has been in the game for a long time and has thousands of articles on the web continually bringing him fresh and highly targeted, free traffic.  He offers brilliant courses in article marketing on his site and also runs a series of Free Training Teleseminars to anyone who wants to dial in. You can even get Free Article Templates from him.

Yes, I know I still haven’t answered your question - I’m nearly there.  Jeff publishes most of his articles on Ezine Articles and I noticed the other day that in the Goal Setting category, he was pretty near the top of the top 10 authors with the most articles on that subject. But to my amazement, I was only a couple of places behind him. Now of course Jeff has literally thousands of other articles on other subjects and is way ahead of me in every other respect.

BUT - it suddenly made me wonder what it would be like to beat a guru at his own game, in some small way. So that’s what I’ve done. I sat down and wrote enough articles on Goal Setting to get me past Jeff’s total. They’re not all approved yet so if you click on The Top 10 Authors in Goal Setting now, the numbers will still show me behind, but in a few days I’ll be there.

Hang on, hang on, yes I know I haven’t told you how he came to be congratulating me yet. I’m getting there, I promise.  As soon as I submitted the article that took me past his total, I sent an e-mail to the LK Challenge Group, crowing about my success and gloating at how I beat The Article Guy.

You can imagine my surprise and embarrassment when I got an e-mail back from the great man himself, who unbeknown to me was a member of the LK CHallenge forum.  Ooooops!!!!

Jeff congratulated me and toldme that I had inspired him to write some more articles on goal setting. Me! Inspired him!! What a great moment.

Of course that means he’ll just sit down and write about a thousand articles and win his crown back again, so my glory will be short-lived, but Hey, it was nice up there while it lasted.

Since taking up the LK Article Writing Challenge my creative boilers have been going at full steam. I have now written 23 articles in ten days which is certainly a record for me, though, not I know for some other more dedicated writers.

I also set myself another record for the fastest article I have yet written.  11 minutes from idea to submission.  Phew - and I think it’s one of my better ones too!

Better than that though, I’ve been getting some great input and inspiration from some of the other writers taking part.  Such as Linda Della Donna and Dan Goodwin. Thanks guys.

I have also been inspired to start some joint promotional efforts with other article writers in the same niches  as me and will be firing off a couple of begging e-mails later today to see if I can get a little piece of someone else’s list in return for some content or a broadcast to my list.

I am getting quite excited about Adsense as a means of revenue, from my site. I have created a whole lot of new content pages recently including a collection of articles under the banner Pay Per Click Bootcamp

I am using Adwords to drive traffic to those pages and it’s been interesting watching how it develops. I am still paying more to Adwords for the traffic to get there than I am getting back from Adsense, but for some reason that I don’t understand, the gap is closing every day.

In the first couple of days, my Adsense revenue was only covering less than 10 percent of my Adwords costs, but this has steadily climbed, till yesterday, when it reached 75%. What is weird is that this has entailed no intervention from me whatsoever. I haven’t changed the ads or the content or the bid price or anything. It just keeps climbing.

Now of course it may plateau out shortly, but I will keep it running each day and see what happens. If it starts to show a profit, you will be the first to know.

There’s a great challenge for article writers taking place over at Ezine Articles. Run by Suzanne Lieurance and Kristen King, two professional writers, it is aimed at writers like me who use article marketing as a key source of traffic.

The challenge began on August 1st (but it’s not too late to join in) and runs till the end of September and it is simply to write and publish 30 articles within that period. That’s only one every two days, so not a huge task. However, if you’ve tried doing that you’ll know that sometimes it can be really tough. To help with this, Suzanne and Kristen have set up a great forum for discussion and encouragement, where everybody can share ideas and keep each other going.

I’m using the challenge to keep me on track for my own personal goal which is to have 100 published aarticles out on the web by September 21st - my score currently stands at 52.

Join the challenge here.

The free traffic experiment continues. After an initial alarming dip in visitors, when I turned off Google Adwords, I’m pleased to see that daily numbers have steadied and are now very slowly, beginning to rise again.

It will take a month or two to get back to where it was before, but I can now see that the slow and steady approach using articles and press releases, definitely does work.

The steady rise of my Alexa ranking has slowed as well, as I knew it would, but I’m still proud of my score at 849,345.