Today I completed Lesson Two in the Getting Started Guide, and then had to wait a day or so for Lesson Three to become available.  Not wanting to wait that long, I read "Who Loves Money" from cover to cover as well as an ebook on article writing.  I then followed some tutorials by Kyle and Carson on article writing and developing landing pages.  I'm still not sure why the testimonial landing pages are so incredibly long, but I do understand that the testimonial page is one of two common types of landing/sales pages.  The other type is the review page, which I honestly like better.  As a freelance writer I have plenty of experience reviewing products and chatting with store owners and project directors about the features, benefits, pros and cons of all sorts of products.

I spent hours browsing through several of the affiliate networks looking for products I could promote.  I'm amazed by the variety.  I found an earthworm grower with an affiliate program.  That would be totally up my alley as I myself am the proud owner of composting worms.  Unbelievable web sites selling amazing children's toys of all kinds, including one that posted expert articles on child development and had all the toys broken down by age.  There's a lot out there, and I could run a wide variety of campaigns.

My husband and I are homesteader wannabes, and one of the skills he would like to learn is woodworking.  I happened to notice a package of woodworking plans sold through ClickBank rated highly in one of WA's rating tools.  That caught my eye.  I spent a lot of time reading through the package landing page and asked a question on the forum about it.  Later, I noticed that he's not the only one hawking woodworking plans through ClickBank.  I quickly found two others and now I have a solid idea for my own landing page.  I'll write up some reviews about each one of them and get affiliate links to all of them.  Then I'll tackle an article or two raising (and hopefully answering) the question of whether it is worth paying money for building project plans when there are free ones available on the Internet.  Is it better to buy just the particular plan you want, or should you pay a bit more to buy an entire set?

This lead me to peruse some articles at ezinearticles.com.  Sure enough, there are a few ezine articles hawking those building project plan packages.  That's great as I can gather information to include in my own articles, particularly if the author has actually used the product.  I also suffered through a lot of bad writing.  One of the WA tutorials said you don't have to be a particularly good writer to be able to make money off writing articles and for the sake of those authors I hope that's true.  I also know I can write far better than that, and I expect that can only help me.  Speaking of bad writing, I saw a PLR article within the rapid writing tool on long distance dating that was painful.  If that's what's available for our use, I think I'll be writing my own content.  I do have to learn how to properly optimize it for keywords, though.

I applied for affiliate accounts at both ClickBank and ShareASale.  Of all the network sites I looked at, ShareASale is my favorite so far.  I mostly like the way they present the products and the variety of high quality products to choose from.  I also like www.lifetimecommissions.com because all the affiliate programs there offer residual income, like every time a customer pays a monthly subscription some portion goes to the affiliate who got the sale.  As an aside there are at least ten dating services listed there, so that's a great idea for another review type of landing page and series of ezine articles.  Even though I'm happily married I'm rather fascinated by the whole concept of Internet based matchmaking and would love to find some excuse to learn more about it.  That's the wonderful thing about freelance writing--you get to research all kinds of things you normally wouldn't go out of your way to learn or that aren't relevant to your life at the moment.  I guess that could apply to Internet marketing as well.

Next time I hit it hard I'm going to sign up with some of those ezine article sites.  Then I think it will be time to dive into Site Rubix and design a simple website or two.  I am so glad WA provides website design and hosting tools, not to mention keyword tools and tools to keep track of how your campaigns are doing.  Just having those things in one place is a huge plus.

I've been on a steep learning curve today but I think it's coming together.  Concepts like keyword optimization, keyword density, landing page, CTR etc. are no longer Greek to me, or should I just say I know more Greek today than I did yesterday.