Newsletter and Submit Your Article Review

Hello and welcome to the final third of 2010!

As I write this post it is a very grey, wet and windy day here on the east coast of Ireland!

I’m delighted to get my feet back under my desk and get back to some serious work. The summer months are traditionally the quiet period in this business, the traffic to my eBay listings and my other sites drops off so I wind things down and take it easy for a couple of months.

Now that the children have returned to school and the summer vacation is a fading memory everybody’s online activity will return to more normal levels and begin picking up as we head towards Christmas.

Now seems like a good time to bring you up to date with my business and my plans for the rest of the year.

—eBay, the business that started off this whole online marketing adventure for me;

Selling vintage prints removed from old books that I buy cheaply online remains a valuable income stream for me and I plan to start listing my vintage prints again this week (Sunday), you can read about my eBay activity during the early part of the year in my blog post here, there is also an exclusive 50% discount off my eBook “Prints Make Profits” my step by step guide to rescuing old prints and selling them for incredible profits on eBay.

—20 ways to make money — great FREE contest!

The contest to find new ideas for “20 ways to make money now on the internet”, the eBook I co-authored with Jim Cockrum is nearing its closing date of September 15th.

Watch the video in my post here for full details about the contest and how you can use it to gain massive exposure for your ideas. Visit Best20ways.com and grab your 5 FREE chapters to get an idea of the kind of ideas that we are looking for.

I am currently working with 2 subscribers who have submitted ideas that will make great new chapters in “20 ways”. Over the next few weeks I will be walking them step by step through the product creation process via Skype and screen shot video. At the end of the process they will each have a chapter in “20 ways” dedicated to their idea with a link to their own eBook selling on ClickBank and building their own subscriber lists!!

And that’s not all!

Myself and Jim are determined to make this a springboard to internet marketing success for the lucky winners so will expose the winning ideas to tens of thousands of potential buyers and subscribers through Jim’s six figure list and the multi thousand membership of his site mysilentteam.com!

It is impossible to overstate the life changing potential of this kind of support and exposure. Just a few short years ago I was wasting my life in the same dull office job that I had done for over 20 years. I discovered eBay, watched and learned how others were using it to make money, added a few of my own ideas to develop my money making method and wrote a short guide to show others how they too could use eBay to supplement their income.

Today, thanks to the support of established and trusted marketers like Jim Cockrum (and my own hard work and determination!) I no longer work in that dull office!

If you have similar ambitions this is your chance, please don’t let it pass you by.

— Driving traffic

You can create the most amazing product on the market but without this mass exposure to the right people (targeted traffic) it won’t sell.

There are many different ways to drive targeted traffic to your sales page,blog or affiliate product landing page but the key point to remember is that your traffic must be interested in your offer or your content.

I have spoken to a couple of marketers recently who were using traffic exchanges to drive traffic. The idea here is that you build up your traffic ‘credit’ by visiting other web sites and this credit then entitles you to a certain number of visits to your sites.

I tried a traffic exchange myself a couple of years back. I spent 30 minutes or so first thing every day visiting dozens of random web sites, it is a requirement of the system that you stay on each of the sites for at least 10 seconds to earn your credits and I did so diligently for weeks to build up my credit ‘bank’.

The next step is to feed your own URL’s into the system and “Hey Presto!” you get a flood of traffic to your own sites!!

“Brilliant!” I thought as I waited for the deluge of sales and subscribers.

It was only several days later when the deluge had failed to materialize and I’d checked my Google analytics stats that the penny dropped and I realized my visitors were doing exactly what I had been doing — visiting hundreds of random web sites (including mine) and staying on each for 10 seconds!

I had spent all of those hours generating masses of completely worthless traffic but the experience taught more a valuable (if painful) lesson — in traffic generation (as in so many other aspects of online marketing) it is QUALITY not quantity that counts.

My preferred methods of generating quality traffic include article marketing.

The advantages of article marketing include its simplicity (anyone can do it) and its effectiveness.

It really is as simple as writing around 500 words about your chosen niche and then submitting your article to as many article directories as possible.

Each article has a resource box which you can use to link to your blog or sales page. the article directories make this content freely available to online publishers and the result is that you build back links to your sites which enhances your search engine ranking and helps drive organic traffic (free traffic that comes from search engine listings). You also benefit from mass exposure as your articles are picked up and republished across the web and readers click your links.

Successful article marketing requires persistence, you need to submit articles regularly and continuously to reap the benefits but here lies the main disadvantage of article marketing — it is very time consuming.

To do keyword research and then write a good article from scratch can take me a couple of hours, I can then spend several more hours submitting my article to multiple article directories and to get maximum benefit from this activity I have to repeat it every couple of days on an ongoing basis.

Now, I’m not the sort of person who enjoys repetitive activity like this, so I’m delighted to have discovered an alternative.

I have been using an automated article submission service called submityourarticle.com for the last few months and this means that I only have to copy and paste my articles to one site which then distributes them to hundreds of other article directories on my behalf.

I am also currently testing the services of a ghostwriter to research and write my articles to reduce my work load even further and I will keep you up to date with how this progresses.

I have created a short video to show you the success and sales I achieved from one article submitted to submityourarticle.com

Want 5 easy side hustles? Get your FREE guide: "5 Easy Etsy Product Lines You Can Do Right Now!"