It’s been a while since I’ve done an update on this article marketing experiment. I’ve been very busy with my return home from Australia and with some assignments I had to take care of. As a result, my article writing came to a screeching halt.

Where I was once writing over 11 per day on average, I now sit at 82 articles written for 16 days of challenge, a measly 5.13 per day. It’s going to take some serious days of 15+ to get my average back up to 10. On the upside though, I’ve started to see sales on certain products, meaning I can now focus my efforts on writing for the niches that seem to be producing versus ones that aren’t.

Since my last update, my EZineArticles stats have risen to 5,841 article views and 1,104 clicks. My CTR is now at 18.9%, a solid improvement, based mainly on finding a couple click happy niches and improving my tactics to get the users to the bottom of the articles and clicking on those links.

To date, I’ve now seen 4 sales totalling $150. That means I’m converting clicks to sales at a rate of 1 in 276 on average. This is better than the zero sales I was getting before, but my conversions are still way too low. Hopefully focusing on the niches that are doing the best will bring that number down closer to the 1 in 100 that many people say is a good average to shoot for.

Regardless though, two thirds of the way through this challenge, after ceasing all work on it for close to an entire week, I’ve still  made $150. Had I kept up my pace at 10 articles per day, I’d have 160 articles right now. With that many, it’d be hard to imagine my sales wouldn’t be even higher.

Alright so it’s day 9 of this challenge and I’ve still yet to see a sale. I’ve had over 500 click-throughs to the affiliate product pages from the articles I have up, and not one has made a purchase. Clearly something isn’t quite working and I’m going to have to play around a bit.

One thing I’ve done is expanded the number of niches I’m trying to get into. Hopefully some of them will start to perform and I can then narrow my focus on them, but we’ll see. As of now one of the niches is already performing well article wise. Of my top 10 articles for number of clicks, one niche holds 5 of them. Again though, no sales.

One thing to note though is that if tomorrow I got 3 sales it would change everything regarding my conversion rates, and this drives home the point that really, my sample size is still very small. Yes, I’ve sent 500 clicks through, but at the same time I’ve only sent 500 clicks through, and that simply isn’t enough to make a sweeping generalization about anything. Once I get to 1000 clicks, which I estimate will be around day 15 or 16, if I’m still performing awfully, then I’ll call in some experts and make some changes.

Alright so the good folks at PayPal finally sorted everything out and reactivated my account, and in turn, my premium membership at EZineArticles.com also got reactivated. So now it’s time to resume with the challenge.

As of today, all the articles I had pending were approved, and I now sit at 58 articles after 5 days of writing, giving me 11.6 articles per day, which is above my target of 10 a day. I’m happy about that. My views and click-throughs trailed off a bit though, and I’m now sitting at 1,558 article views and 212 clicks. That’s a CTR of 13%, which is not bad, but could definitely be better.

And the big number, sales, still sits at zero. After 215 clicks through to the affiliate sales pages for the products I’m promoting, I’ve yet to see a sale. This I’m quite disappointed with. I won’t give up though. I’m going to give it a couple days, see what happens, and if nothing changes, then it’s time to take some action. After all, if I’m not converting sales, there isn’t much point, and people do convert sales at much better rates than 1 in over 200, so I must be doing something wrong. If I haven’t hit a sale or two within the next couple days, I’ll consult the experts and see if I can get some tips on exactly where my error is.

Wish me luck!

I’ve hit a quite annoying snag with this experiment. I’m currently on vacation in Australia. I warned VISA to expect payments to be coming in from unusual places, but I never even thought about warning PayPal. Now they’ve got my account partially frozen because they “believe it may have been accessed by a third party”. So now a bunch of my recent PayPal transactions are under investigation. This includes my EZineArticles.com premium membership account. So now my account has been set back to a standard account until PayPal finishes their investigation and approves the transaction. Great!

Since this is a huge set back to the experiment, I’ve decided not to count the days between now and when this all gets sorted out as part of the time frame. As this problem occurring, the experiment has been on for five days. Once my account gets set back to premium, I’ll resume the challenge at Day 6.

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