First articles published

I'm half way through the Accreditation Article Marketing course. Good for the basics. I want to get to the end for a preview but it won't let you! Better to follow the steps, no matter how pedantic, so the grounding is there.

Along the way I've published and had accepted an article with Ezine - the "holy grail" it seems, along with a handful to Squidoo & a few other directories

The help in the WA forums has been great. Though after 2 months, I'd got to know a few of the guys so just directly asked one of them the real deal. He's followed the same path as I am taking & earns more than enough to live on. He's not a salesman, just focused, determined & resilient.

For each campaign, target around 1000 different keywords & 12000 unique articles to dominate a niche. He was good enough to tell me the applications & tools he uses to do this efficiently. I'll start with these then adapt as I go.

There are quite a few others who I'm messaging & we'll undoubtedly be swapping notes too.

Within WA, there is a push by some to promote WA itself. I may get onto that later but I have decided to focus on writing articles for my selected niches first. Keep it simple and stay focused!

I've also got a zippier laptop now - though the downside was I had to reinstall Vista. Still I can publish articles much more speedily.

Go your own way

Been watching a history of Fleetwood Mac on TV and the blog title fitted

I've embarked on an 11 lesson / 30 hour course to gain WA Accreditation for Internet Marketing. It's an internal WA thing but feels good value for $67 and ensures I stay focused to reach a certain level of learning. It'll help other WA affiliates know I'm relatively serious.

However I've not followed the learnings in Lesson 1 of the Article Marketing Accreditation Course

Instead, I've kind of adapted as I've gone so I'm not following the herd

The idea of using DMOZ to find a niche underwhelmed me & I used ebay / amazon "bestseller list" to find a niche whilst checking "google trends." Nice combination.

I signed up to Clickbank. Yes its easy but I'd rather promote a quality product. I remember reading in the forum that GeorgiaRedneck also chose not to use Clickbank

So I signed up, using an existing website as my "base" to Pepperjam (who rejected me) and ShareaSale who thankfully accepted me. This gave me a fantastic pool of quality products to browse & refine my niche.

Now I've got a great niche (after 3 or 4 false starts with DMOZ) and its onto lesson 2 - writing an article!

Holiday Inspiration

A holiday can do wonders! Two weeks ago I thought I'd come up with a good niche and had started analysing it. Then whilst on the plane (where I always come up with my best ideas) out to Cyprus, I hit on a truly brilliant niche.
And now I'm back from holiday, I'm keenly following it up.
I can easily think of 30 odd unique articles to write. If I work on this, I'd hope to make this over 50. Wow! Then I can submit each in a slightly altered structure to 4-5 article sites.

Whilst on holiday I decided to target doing 5 campaigns before Christmas. The first will take 2 weeks, thereafter each should take one week. By then I'll know if this whole shebang is a go-er or not.

I also worked out a structured approach -
Find Niche - Find products to promote - Carry out Research into the niche - Create a pool of article subheadings - Create the framework of a website - Use subheadings to create series of articles - pad out website with content & links - submit articles
So lets see if this approach works. I'll update it once I've followed it through