I’ve been writing furiously and have pumped out 44 articles in the last four days, which I’m quite happy with. The lengths are all between 250-500 words, which I’ve been told is ideal, but I’ll probably start writing some longer ones for testing purposes. I ran into one annoying snag though. EZineArticles only allows new authors to publish a maximum of 10 articles initially, which must then be approved before they lift the limit and let the author right more. No sweat right? You’d think. Apparently though it can take up to 15 days for EZineArticles to go through the review process and approve articles! That just won’t do for now! I only have 30 days to get this done! What’s a soon-to-be article marketing billionaire to do?

Luckily for me, there was another blogger doing the exact same thing I am right now! I found his blog at the digital point forums, and you can read his journey as well at www.RossBeckham.com. What Ross opted to do was sign up for a premium account at EZineArticles, which brings the editorial review time way down. Ross has even had articles approved as quickly as a few hours after submission. Sounds great, but it’s almost $100 a month to sign up for such an account! Yikes. I might not even make that much over the course of the entire experiment! But, what fun is experimentation without a little risk? I decided to take the plunge and sign up. The results were pretty noticeable. My first 10 articles were approved within hours of signing up for premium, and the next 19 I submitted were all approved within a couple hours of submitting them. When I submit the rest, it should push me into “platinum author status”, which speeds the process up even, further. Needless to say, my submissions are rolling.

After having 29 articles live for one whole day, I’d racked up over 675 views, and had 68 clicks on the affiliate links. No sales yet, but I’m pretty happy with that traffic. 10% CTR seems good, but I’ve read about guys who consistently get 25%, so I’ll be looking for ways to improve that number.

Another note I’d like to make is about my process of getting readers from the articles to the affiliate pages. I’ve opted to link directly from my articles to the affiliates. Why? Well to be honest because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to take the time to make squeeze pages and do the extra work. That can wait for the next test.

What exactly is it I’m missing out on though? Well, experienced article marketers don’t just link directly to their affiliates. Why? Well for one, it’s wasting link-juice on someone else’s sights when that juice could be pumping up a site that you own. Secondly, by directing the reader to a squeeze page before the affiliate page, you get to try and convince them to give you their e-mail address. This is a huge point. If you can offer the readers something on your site before you send them off to the affiliate page, then you can build yourself up a mailing list. This mailing list then lets you follow up, so now instead of touching those readers once and having only one chance to sell to them, you can use your newsletter to send them more offers, or remind those who didn’t buy of the offer they missed out on. This multiple exposure strategy can really make a huge difference. If my initial experiment goes well, this will be the next step. For now though, I’m going to leave all that potential money on the table in exchange for doing things the easy way.