Hi Y'all,
Roger -- the quote is usually attributed to Zig Zigler.
Mark -- great information, as usual. I'd heed Karen's advice, as she is wise beyond her years. She must know Yodi personally. Or as Yodi would say, "Wise beyond her years, is she."
On to John's articles. I'm not a guru in any sense of the word, but when I ran a test of article marketing, I had about 11 articles that got 2,200 views with about 450 clicking over to my fairly ugly site. And sold some product.
Since it was working, of course, I stopped doing it and wandered over to the newest shiny object. I'll be going back to it next week with my newest and main site (which will be live soon).
I agree with Karen's comments about the landing page and adding content. Very cool. My opinion is that I would not allow an adsense ad near any of my sites. That's actually one of the reasons why I don't hold EZA in the highest regard. More often than not, I'll use a syndication service for $6 each to blast a good article out. I've also started doing guest blog posts with a few people from this forum I care for and trust.
My feeling is that
you also need a stronger resource box. You're really not driving people with any kind of enticement. My original "bribe" was a free report that I researched and wrote entitled,
"5 Thing Your Doctors Won't Tell You About High Blood Pressure (And Why You Should Know Them." It had a monster-good cover and the affiliate offer was in the report.
Wandering on to a new subject...I always - and I mean always - post my best article on my site. Then I rewrite it a couple of times and submit
those somewhere else. Now, all my friends with whom I have traveled with in this forum know I try to promote my own products or a PLR product (re-done, of course) for which I get paid 100%. Here's link to one of my sites - The most recent post has a link at the end that goes directly to a sales page for a product I have written with 100% unique content:
www.salesmagicman.com.
I'll be migrating most of this content over to my newest site, but my philosophy will be the same. The new site will "bribe" subscribers to give up their email addresses for access to a 10-part video training series on internet marketing on the site. The target will be offline businesses.
So, summing up. Know your target. Know what they want. Give them value for joining up with you. Design every step with a basic flowchart so you can easily lead each site visitor into the next step of your sales funnel. The first step to claiming that visitor is an excellent article proof-read a million times with a strong call to action at the end bringing them to you.
Whew. I hope some of these thoughts help somebody. BTW, I'm a died in the wool fan (like forever) of Travis Sage and Mark Austin. Those two guys are at the top of my list as personal experts who would not ever steer me wrong.
Peace and Love. Out! - MagicMan
PS. The strategy of articles on US Free Ads is also very cool. Like tearing a dollar bill in half, I usually submit half the article with a link like "read more" to get them to my site.