My First Article

My current assignment with Wealthy Affiliates is to write and submit an article to Ezine or one of the article directories. This morning at 2:30 am, I was laying in bed wide-a-wake and thought why not get up and get some work done. On my to do list was fixing some links in ChuckyTrader.com and writing my first article. After fixing the links I started on the article.

What to write about? One reason I started my blogs, besides be told to, was to capture my activities as I started this new adventure of internet marketing. So I went back to them and started reviewing what I had written. My first blogs were posted under the label of "beginner" and I thought, that is exactly what you are, so my title "The Beginner -- Internet marketing". This article is basically my background, the move to Internet Marketing, and what I have learned so far.

In my family, my wife is the one that understands the English language and phasing so I had her review it. My draft is now a red draft of corrections for me to make before submission. I am first going to submit to Ezine and see what happens. I have tried to follow their guidelines, but as beginner probably will have some corrections to make. We will see... Maybe on the next blog I will have the results and a link to the document.

Later...

Trying to maintain direction

As of the 10th blog, I am dropping the blog number. Will stay with date and title.

As I get into week 2 of the Wealthy Affiliate lessons the more I realize what I don't know in internet marketing. If you look at Thursday's blog you will see the outcome "Learn the inner workings of Internet marketing & Affiliate marketing". This goes through the basics of internet marketing and a video on how internet marketing works. This section is fairly straight forward.

Then you get into the affiliate networks. If you are going to sell as the middle man, these are the type of companies that you need to sign up with. The top affiliate networks are: Clickbank.com Linkshare.com, CJ.com, Shareasale.com, and Performics.com. Also in this section you learn about "Pay-Per_Sale" (most common these days), "Pay-Per-Lead", and "Pay-Per-Click" (least common). I studied up on Clickbank.com, signed up with them, and spent some time going over the products. Wealthy Affiliates has a Clickbank tool that makes looking at the different products for sale much easier. One of the affiliate links that you get with Wealthy Affliates is a link to themselves for new members to sign up where you get credit for the sign up.

I am now getting into one of the more difficult parts of the lessons, for me, and that is article writing. First I worried about what do you write about. Then I worried about how to imbed the appropriate keywords. I guess it is just the negatism of the personality showing through. My wife says for the first article to write about myself. I guess that makes sense. So I believe that is the approach I will take. Wealthy Affiliates gives you a checklist to follow and I have another document that also goes over it so should be ok. I am still a little confused on the requirements when it comes to imbedding links, etc., in the articles. I am sure this will clear up as I try to submit. Like anything else, sometimes it is best to forge ahead and see what happens. I need the article to reference keywords in the ChuckyTrader web site so may have to make some changes there.

Blog9 - Wealthy Associates Blog, Etc.

In the 8th blog I mentioned that I came across a forum where they are starting a new campaign from scratch. I joined the forum and today they are voting on what product(s) they want build a campaign around. They were 29 suggestions with suggestions mostly for home owner products. One of the stand outs was "Pets - pet health, pet tips, pet care, etc". This is the one I voted for and I believe is leading in the count. We are to know the outcome on Monday.

I am now on week 2 of my training with WealthyAffiliates. Here is the list of what you are to learn during this period:

Learn the inner workings of Internet marketing & Affiliate marketing
What are Affiliate Networks, and how can you leverage them?
The different "types" of Internet marketing
Choosing your direction
How to become an expert, not a generalist
Choosing an industry and product to sell online
Begin understanding consumers
Setting up a Pay-Per-Click advertising account
Squidoo.com

It says in the intro to week 2, that this is the week where some of the big decisions will have to be made. I expect that is why "Choosing your direction" is highlighted.

I was reviewing Ivana's document http://affiliate-niche-stores.com and she commented about a video site on wordpress blogs http://www.internetmarketingcourse.com . I discovered that this site also had a lot of how to videos where Tim Gross leads you step by step through what process you are attempting to do. Optaining a new domain for instance. You might want to take a peak at it.

8th Blog - ChuckyTrader.com and Wealthy Affiliates

I have not been comfortable with my landing page (1st page) on ChuckyTrader.com for some time so today I decided to do something about it. The content has been changed to include more pictures and each picture now contains a link to its referenced page. I use Thrive Learning as the web site host and they have been creating a new builder. (Must say that it is much better than the old one.) Of course of with anything new you have to learn how to use it, and, they still have some glitches that you have to work around but I am getting there. They do have a nice feature for lining items up however and that is a table where you can add pictures and the text below it with all of the general formatting tools. I also added supplies for contractors and magazines.

Today while reviewing my homework in Wealthy Affiliates, in the General Marketing forum, I came across a group of users that are starting a campaign from scratch so I joined them. (A campaign is where you are selling a product on the internet.) They are at the stage of trying to select their niche and what product to sell. One of the users is leading out in this endeavor and its appears to me to be a good way to learn. After reading some of the posts, I really feel like a novice. Half the time I don't know what they are talking about. Oh well, that is why I am doing this... To learn. More on this later.

Yesterday I mentioned about the Stock & Online Trading niche. I am still thinking about that one. To persue it will probably required a new website dedictated to that. May put this idea on hold for a bit.

One of my associates (Pat) has been using Craiglists to drive users to his website by offering give-a-ways. He has been getting a lot of hits in doing this and may have come something that could be profitable. He has included a link back to chucky.com for the Free Web Site but at this time the reponse has been low.

7th Blog - Stock & Online Trading

In my last post I mentioned that Wealthy Affiliates likes you to post on their forum. This morning when I signed in they reminded me that I needed to select a niche that I would concentrate my sales around. I discovered that one of the niches was "Stock & Online Trading" so I thought why not, this is what I have been doing for last 5 years.

Here is a little background. In 2004 I spent almost a year taking classes from Invest Tools, and became a Master Options traders. In 2005 I switched over to products from Global Tec Solutions just because I liked their charts better. (Invest Tools uses technical charts and Global Tec uses pressure charts.) I had done OK as a trader until this last year where I couldn't accept the fact that we were in a bear market (I am a positive person by nature) and got burned along with a lot of other investors. I have traded most aspects of the market; stocks, options, option spreads, commodities, and forex at one time or another. I am currently actively trading forex on paper and plan to go back live in the new future. As for the other markets, I am not currently trading them. I noticed in reading some of their forum posts there were numerous comments on how to produce income from the links back to trading houses. I plan to peruse this.

If it seems that I am jumping around a little in my endeavors to make money, you would be correct. I have discovered in my readings that this is very common but you will eventually settle on your niche. That is one of the aspects that Wealthy Affiliates helps you with.

Don't forget to visit http://chuckytrade.com. We have the best sellers and new releases from Amazon.com. If you know of contractors needing supplies, have them visit my site under Contractors.

Blog6 - Wealthy Affiliates

In my 4th blog, I mentioned that I had signed up with the Wealthy Affiliate program. This is a progress note and more...

Wealthy Affiliates starts you off on a 8-week training program that has 50 outcomes of knowledge that you are expected to have learned by the end of the program. These cover every aspect of internet sales from setting up websites, marketing your products, getting paid for clicks on your website, communication, setting up business campaigns, etc. By the end-of-week1 you should know the following:

What is Internet marketing and how does Wealthy Affiliate fit into the mix?
How WA can help
How to earn money with the WA Affiliate Program – Refer a friend only
Using your time wisely, understanding why WE (Kyle & Carson) create resources
Benefits of WA Spaces, Jobs, and taking full advantage of the Forum
How to get help (using help, site map, and contacting us…rules)

They really push communication and in the 1st week, you supposed to sign up for their forum and make at least 3 posts, one being an introduction of yourself. The rest of the week you are expected get your personal information entered and become familiar with their website and how to use it. I have most of my assignments done for week 1. Setups are done and I have made 2 posts and plan a 3rd one today. I have already discovered that as a newby, you aren't really sure of what you should post about so my first two posts were about myself. I expect today I will post about how I got to Wealthy Affiliates.

My initial impressions with the Wealthy Affiliates is positive especially the price. I am in group of 4 who started off using another organization, Thrive Learning, and we signed up for $4000. After our introductory sessions, etc., they wanted $10,000 to teach us everything that I see Wealthy Affiliates teaches. Do not get me wrong about Thrive Learning. I learned a lot from them in a very short and wouldn't be were I am today if it was not for them. One of the big things was how to buy and sell on eBay. Prior to Thrive Learning, I did not know how to buy or sell on eBay and how PayPal worked etc. I now have my own websites ainsworthetc.com and chuckytrader.com and an eBay account that uses PayPal for payments.

4th Blog - WealthyAffiliates

After I started reading the document "Build a Successful eBay Niche Stores" by Ivana Bosnjak a little closer, I discovered that I knew next to nothing about marketing and what to and how to sell on the internet. I was perusing her blogging website http://affiliate-niche-stores.com and found another article she had written called "Simple Affiliate Sale Guide" so asked for it. In one of her emails was a link to an article on how she got started. In a nutshell, she signed up with a company called "The Wealthy Affiliate University". I just signed up with them myself. Initially they appear to have a very good online training program that is reasonably priced. It is $39.95 monthly or $359.00 yearly. If you would like to check them out, here is a referral link.
http://www.wealthyaffiliate.com/?a_aid=9RyyusSZ

The following link is to her document on how she got started.
http://www.my-linker.com/hop/LearnAffMarketing

If you decide to do anything like this, you will discover that you will make many mistakes in the learning process. That is ok, because it is those mistakes that you learn by. WealthyAffiliates starts off with a 8-week educational program so I will probably slow down on my web development until I have a better understanding on how it all works. Anyway, more on this later.