I think that I am hitting the wall with Squidoo at least for awhile. I have been focused on building lenses for the past few weeks and my brain seems to be on freeze mode. Since I first began this experiment, I have created 23 squidoo lenses. I am happy to report that 5 of those lenses are ranked in the top 1,000. One has really shocked me and as of this morning is in the top 300 lenses on squidoo. One lens that is only 3 weeks old, has produced 4 affiliate sales.

Being the Marketing Hobo pretty much says it all. I can not remain with one thing for any length of time, so I keep moving around. I am going to wander for the next few days and see what location I want to camp at starting next week. I want to promote a few different Items than what I have been doing with squidoo. I have learned a few things about selecting topics and realize that in a couple places I got lucky and in a few others I just got lame between the ears.

When choosing a topic for squidoo, do not get caught up in the idea this is fun and easy. If you do you will find yourself in the same place I am with a number of the lenses.

1. There is no affiliate product to promote
2. There is no way to write articles to bring traffic
3. There is no interest in the topic

These three mistakes in combination could discourage you from creating more Squidoo Lenses.

You can make money with Amazon and adsense ads. This revenue will not be very much for a month. I read on squidoo the other day that you are doing well if your lens gets fifty cents a month from adsense clicks. The key to squidoo earning is:

1. create one thousand lenses each producing fifty cents
2. Good affiliate products that sell.

I will take number 2 any day of the week.

Just wanted to let you know whats going on at the Hobo Camp and what my plans are. I am still excited about Squidoo and am happy with the results of this venture. I will step back and let the cream rise to the top. I do need to locate a good affiliate product for the one lens that has shot to the top of the results. No point in letting that traffic only earn from adsense.

Have a wonderful day … a great weekend and I look forward to sitting around the fire and chatting next week

The Marketing Hobo has left the camp!!

Article Marketing, Bum Marketing, Internet Marketing, make money writing articles, niche markets, squidoo, Squidoo Lens

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Article Marketing may have some health benefits. Does that sound like a strange statement? I really hope not. Perhaps its because I am a little focused on aging at the moment, having just had another birthday come around. Not so unusual for me and perhaps for you, birthdays seem to make us focus more on self and issues like longevity and health.

Was listening to a well known radio and television personality by the name of Bill O’Reilly the other night and he was interviewing “Ernest Borgnine” who is now 90 years old. That Bill fellow asked Ernest what his secret to a long healthy life is and Mr Borgine smiled and replied “I keep my mind active”.

I got to thinking, I do internet marketing and I use mostly article marketing as my tool. Reading every day on different topics, creating an inventory of facts and then putting it all together to create a well written article, really keeps your mind active. If keeping the mind active does keep you healthy and allow you to live a long time, there is a side benefit to article marketing that is “priceless”.

As a final thought on this topic, there was one more thing that was noticed about Ernest Borgnines answer “he smiled and laughed when asked the question”. Being happy and smiling and laughing can also be a great health benefit. So can these two things be put together to create maximum health benefit for article marketing? Yes!

Smile and be happy while writing your articles. Remember as much as we want to see the results in readers and dollars - “health and long life are priceless”

Article Marketing, article writing, Bum Marketing, Internet Marketing, writing articles

As you probably know, I have been concentrating my efforts on a few squidoo pages to test the results. I wanted to update you on a couple of factors.

One lens that I created on the 10th of December, “How to build a food smoker”, has already received more than a thousand views and the majority of them have come from Google searches. Realize that I have done nothing to promote this lens, no articles, no forum posts, nothing. I am shocked, amazed and thrilled by the performance of this lens.

Another Lens that I created on the 8th of January, “La Caja China”, has also done extremely well. It has been viewed by less than 100 people, most from Google Search and yet this lens has already made 1 affiliate sale.

Just the other day I created another lens called “you are what you eat” and published it. This lens has a couple of visits in 2 days and as far as I can see that is it, so what makes this outstanding? Simple really! this began with an email a friend sent me and I have added a little but not much to that email. The total time invested in this new lens is about 20 minutes and it is already in the top 20,000 lenses on squidoo out of over 386,000 lenses. This is not a topic I would have thought of and I sure did not expect any results from it. I actually put it on squidoo more out of my sense of humor than any other reason.

I will continue with the squidoo experiment and while doing it, I will begin to formulate what I believe is a working model for creating lenses. I can not be sure at this point in time but I believe I will end up with about 100 lenses, each averaging around 5 dollars per month in basically passive income. That is my current goal for the year 2008 and my article marketing squidoo experiment.

I plan to have this done in a manner that I can complete my weeks squidoo article marketing in 1 to 2 hours per week. This should be accomplished in another week perhaps two at the outside and then I will look for the next step in my article marketing 2008 efforts.

Till next time this is the Article Marketing Hobo saying “Have fun”

Article Marketing, article writing, Bum Marketing, Internet Marketing, niche markets, niche topic, squidoo, squidoo marketing

Have you ever taken the train? I mean one of those luxury trains, that have sleeper cars, diner cars and observation cars? If you have you will probably understand how I feel at the moment about my article marketing ventures.

I seem to have a one track mind or else I sort of move from one type car to another on the luxury train of article marketing. I got onto a single track about article marketing, squidoo lenses and now seem to be moving from car to car. Is this good? Who knows but I am having a lot of fun and getting some pretty good results.

In a couple earlier posts I mentioned some of the squidoo lenses that I was working on. Three of those are returning some pretty nice results and I actually received a check from squidoo from the first months effort already.

Since then I expanded on the smoked food theme and how to build a smoker and included “How to Barbecue” into the mix. This lens has not done much at this point but its only a few days old and it is not exactly barbecue weather in most of the United States. May need to wait until spring to see what and how it does.

This morning I was reading about different topics and I found one that caught my attention, so I decided to make a lens on it. I named the lens “You are what you eat“. The lense actually lists a variety of different foods and their possible affects. For each of the foods I used a title that I included into the tags cloud. These benefits run from “Heart Health” to “Natural Viagra”. I am using this lens more as an experiment and look for it to produce traffic more than income. why would I want a lens that produces traffic instead of income? Simple really! There is a section that lists other lenses by: If I am right, this traffic could go to the other lenses where I might get affiliate sales. We always need to remember that people have more than one interest in life and the person that finds us looking for comic books may also have an interest in bum marketing or creating a web site.

I almost forgot to mention that I have also created “A Guide to Running a Marathon” and “History of Marathon” since the last post. I mention this because I do not want you to think I have been goofing off with my article writing.

Until the next time: this is the Article Marketing Hobo, see you soon!

Article Marketing, article marketing, Bum Marketing, keyword optimization, make money writing articles, News, niche topic, squidoo, Squidoo Lens, writing articles

Been gone for a few days but have not forgotten any of you. In fact I have had a couple of ongoing communications about some of the problems folks have with Bum Marketing Method and article marketing in general. It would seem that one of the most frustrating for people is the lack of a landing page for affiliate offers.

I will be the first to admit there is a slight gap in some of the promises about article marketing, like beginning with no money, just an idea and some labor. Every time you turn around there is another article directory going the same route as ezinearticles and not accepting direct affiliate links. Web sites cost money. I have said a few times that Squidoo is a cost affective answer for creating a landing page for zero dollars. There are also the free blog sites like blogger.com. Each of these choices have their advantages and their short falls.

There is another choice out there for you to look into, wikidot.com. You can create a free site and make some or all of your pages into landing pages. I can not really make this statement for everyone yet I can make it for myself, it has so many choices and options that I got lost the first three or four visits.

Can a page be created in a manner that fits our goals of a landing page? The answer is yes! Here is a wiki site to check out and your will see what I mean. http://earn1kaday.wikidot.com/exercise-and-nutrition

You will have to decide the best approach to creating a site with wikidot.com, it is beyond my scope to guide you, I just know it is one more resource at our disposal and one that I will continue to look into farther.

Take care: The Marketing Hobo

Article Marketing, Article Marketing Online, article marketing, Bum Marketing, bum marketing method, bum marketing, Internet Marketing, internet business, internet marketing