So I'm in the home stretch of the WA article marketing club.  So far being involved hasn't helped my bottom line (no sales--unless you count the WA gold I cashed out a few days ago).  It has done wonders to my WA member rank.  I'm within reach of the top twenty!  Got to celebrate the victories where they come.

I'm very reluctant to even look at my Google Analytics account right now.  Several of my fellow WA clubbers have been keeping a hawk's eye on their statistics and it seems to cause more pain than joy, so I'm holding back.  I don't think I'll gain anything from tracking the hits from a particular article, getting all my hopes up that it might be enough to generate a sale and then get disappointed.  I can feel the disappointment just fine when I check my email and there's no message telling me I made a sale.

I know that eventually GA will become my best friend, and it will help me to direct my energy to the parts of my campaign that are working while not focusing so much on what's not working.  Without GA you're flying blind and as time consuming as IM is, you need all the help optimizing time you can get.

But I believe there is a time to just write the content and get it out there and not worry too much about how it's received and where it lands.  I checked the page rank on a couple of my initial articles, noted that one of them showed up on the first page under my search terms and decided the system was working.  I haven't checked since, but one of my buddies ran into one of my articles while doing some research of her own.  So, I know my articles are landing, and for now that's all I really need to know.

I'm understanding more than ever that Internet marketing is a numbers game.  It's going to take a lot of traffic to make any sales, and so the first task is to put out enough content to generate the amount of traffic that can produce sales.  Until that traffic is coming, it seems silly to obsess over it or anxiously wait for sales to magically happen.  I'd rather spend my energy on writing another page on my site and then another article or two to draw visitors to that page.

The email I got this morning talked about how after 6 months we could easily have 60 pages built and  240 articles out there.  If each page and article yields one visitor a day, that's 300 visitors each day.  With a one percent conversion rate, that would amount to three sales a day.  It makes sense to me to check my GA maybe once a week and see if I'm getting one visitor a day from each article, as in, if I have 25 articles out, am I getting 25 daily visitors?  But this is after my articles have been given enough time to actually rank. If I'm finding I'm not getting 1 visiter per day per article, it might be time to look closely at how I'm writing the articles and my resource box and see if there's a way to better optimize my articles for clicking on my link.

If I'm getting the one visitor per article per day, and I have enough visitors to reasonably expect to make sales but I'm still not making sales, then it will be time to look at how I'm promoting WA on my site and how can I do a better job with it.

This brings me to another point which is that I have found another product to promote besides WA, but that is very compatible.  The product I'm promoting is Varolo, a company that provides advertisers with willing viewers and the viewers get paid an incentive to well, be willing to sit through a 30 second TV commercial.  Membership in Varolo is free and you earn commissions every time people in your downline watch ads.  So, your "customers" don't pay a dime to "buy" the product and the advertisers pay your commissions.  It's a rather sweet deal.

I believe it's going to become more significant for Internet marketers to have a product or two that doesn't cost anything to purchase.  Without getting into a long winded essay about the state of the economy, I'll just say that a major economic trend is the concentration of wealth, assets and cash into fewer and fewer hands.  Another way to put it is that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing.  In today's global economy, the "rich" who are getting richer aren't so much individual people as they are corporations.

Without making a value judgment on this trend, I believe the people and businesses who will thrive are the ones who can get the rich (the big corporations) to pay them.  I briefly worked for a roofing company which focused on replacing roofs after a hail storm damaged them.  It was relatively easy to sell a homeowner on a $10,000 roof even though the vast majority of homeowners do not have $10,000 to spend on a new roof or anything else.  The reason it was so easy is because the insurance companies were the actual customers who bought the new roofs and as we all know insurance companies are loaded.

Varolo's biggest clients are likely to be large advertisement brokers (they say in their videos they are in deep discussions with three out of the fifty total national brokers).  Anyway, those brokers and their clients are used to paying out boat loads of money for advertising.  The challenge they are facing among other things is that many of the recipients of their commercial messages are flat broke.  If someone doesn't have the money, it doesn't matter how good your product is if the prospect can't afford it.

This is a concern I have with promoting WA.  People wanting to make money online may already be financially strapped and a $97.00 monthly membership may not be able to work into their budget no matter how great a value it delivers.  Varolo shares some of the advertising revenue with its members.  The members agree to watch the TV ads, so the advertisers know that every single pair of eyeballs watching their ads will be attached to a brain that's receptive in some way.  As the wallet attached to that pair of eyeballs gradually gets fatter and fatter as it fills up with a share of the advertising dollars, those eyeballs are going to get even more receptive to the commercial message.  Essentially, the advertiser gets to pay the consumer directly rather than fork all the money over to some big corporate middleman and hope the poor consumer will be so moved to fork over some of his meager earnings on the advertised product.

I think everyone is going to be happier with this deal.  It might even bring back the middle class.

I was going to wax eloquent about how my big weakness when it comes to article marketing is that I tend to write too much and go on for too long... but I think that's already quite obvious.

Time to call it a... what?  morning again?