Money and Mind

After weeks of heavy keyboard tapping, late night editing sessions and bouts of feverish re-writing I have finally completed my first ever e-book and I’m really excited.

Well actually, it has evolved from a book into a course.

It is called Small Business, Big Ideas and is designed to help small business owners understand and apply the fundamentals of marketing. It covers some very basic stuff, but in my experience that is what small businesses most need.

It has gone out for review with a bunch of friends, business owners and other interested parties and I’m waiting for their feedback, before launching it on the unsuspecting public.

More news on this soon.

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.

My experiment to see if my site can survive on free traffic alone, continues. It’s been three days now since I switched off the adwords campaign. The initial drop was much greater than I expected. Having analysed my stats through Google Analytics I had estimated that about half of my traffic was coming from sources other than pay per click but I was wrong.

As it turned out, my traffic has fallen by about 90%, which was such a shock that I almost turned Adwords back on again. However, I decided to hold my nerve and interestingly, it looks
like my signups have only fallen by about 50%, which proves the theory that organic and/or article traffic is much better quality than paid for.

After the initial sickening drop, daily traffic has held steady, so I’m going to stick with this for a while longer and hopefully shortly I’ll begin to see it slowly rising as more articles gain wider distribution.

My Alexa ranking also continues to rise. Well it falls really but the lower the number the better. It is now at 1,074,136  It may fall through the one million mark soon which will be an excuse to crack open a bottle of mineral water (well, it’s a pretty small milestone). However,
there is a big BUT here as it’s based on one week and 3 month averages - so the traffic drop won’t have been reflected yet and I expect it to start to move out again in the next couple of weeks.

My Alexa ranking has now jumped from 2 million and something to just over 1.1 million, in a few days.  This is due to the averaging over three months that Alexa applies, I know, but it’s really great to see progress in return for effort. I have now also taken the decision to turn off my paid advertising for a while and rely solely on organic and referral traffic, so that I can track the effect of the activities that cost me nothing.  Just before I turned it off, I was getting about 60% of my visitors from Google Adwords and the rest from articles, stray searches and e-mail links. 

So of course, the immediate effect is that my daily traffic is down by 60%, which feels a bit like somebody cut off most of my oxygen, but I am challenging myself to get the daily stats back up to the pre cut off level in one month’s time. My aim is to deliver something every single day, including the days when I’m away on holiday for a week.  Deliverables including submitting an article per day to the major sites and a blog post every day at least, as well as any activity that creates additional links 

By the way, if you haven’t checked out the new Special Content sections on my site covering Goal Setting and Positive Thinking, then do so now.  (That was a sneaky way to get more traffic by the way). I’m also going to publish a mission statement – which you are welcome to read – in fact it will be my next post.  I figure if I put it out there, then I have to work harder to live up to it.

What a very interesting day it has been. I have been concentrating on learning about how to drive traffic from Hub Pages and Squidoo.com.

I’ve been reading about using the latest websites to help you build a viral loop.

Check out my efforts at my new Hub Page and my Squidoo Lens to see what I’m talking about - I’ll let you know how much traffic this begins to generate over the next few weeks.

By the way, what do you all think of the new header graphic on the website?

The front page revamp continues. I have now completed and loaded up the new e-course  7 Easy Ways to Have A Great Day.  It is available to anyone who subscribes to the newsletter and it is completely free.

Phase 2 of the redesign is also complete, now that I have uploaded the new header design. I’ve gone for visually stating the obvious by including a graphic of a stack of dollar bills and a brain on the right hand side; Money and Mind, see?

Simple, but effective.   I like it anyway.

The Adsense revenue continues to rush in! Well, OK, trickle then. It’s up to $1.90 now and as I said in an earlier post - that’s at zero cost to me.  As the traffic builds, so too will the money I’m assuming.

I’m off now to study some more on increasing blog links.

I’m excited to find that my site Money-and-Mind has finally registered on Alexa and I now have a traffic rank for the first time! OK, OK I’m only ranked at number 2,245,649 but there are plenty of other sites out there with lower traffic than that and, hey, Money-and-Mind has only been online since June 21st - so Im pretty pleased with myself.

Phase 1 of the front page revamp is almost complete and I’ll be rolling out my new sign-up bonus later today. It’s a 7 part e-course that I’m really pleased with, called ” 7 Easy Ways to Have A Great Day”

I’ll be posting again later when it goes live.

Hi Friends,

I have lots to write about today, but I’ll save some for other posts.

 I have decided to revamp my homepage because I believe that I could be getting a higher conversion rate.  I’m happy with the way my traffic is building, but I’m sure that more visitors would sign up for the newsletter, if I make a few changes.  At the moment, my average conversion rate in the last month has been around 8%, which considering that I’m giving something away for free is pretty low! I reckon I can do way better.

The first change is going to be a new Sign-up bonus.  I’m in the middle of writing a new e-book called, Have a Great Day and it’s all about how to ensure that each and every day is better than the last.  As soon as it’s done I’ll let you know and even if you’re already a subscriber, I’ll make sure you get a copy.

Keep smiling. Andrew