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Article Marketing Income Breakdown – 2010

by Lisa Angelettie · 2 comments

My Article Marketing Income

As our year comes to a close, you will no doubt read dozens of articles and emails from folks on what you should do to improve your writing, your blogging, and your business for the following year. I myself love to set business intentions for myself every new year — but before I do that — I thought that it would be a good idea for me to share something that I’ve never shared with you all before. Where my income comes from…

This was a cool exercise for me to do this year, because I am not going to even lie and say that I am meticulous about my business bookkeeping. I’m not. I basically know what comes in and have a round about idea on what bills have to be paid monthly (like webhosting, autoresponder, coaching, etc.) This actually took a bit of digging and calculating, but here it is – and I’m proud of myself! First, that I compiled this for you and secondly, because I did pretty well this year.

What’s the point of showing this to you?

Well, I want you to see that there is income to be made through article marketing and to give you a little direction of how people are REALLY making money online. Not some hyped up claims. This graphic shows my income breakdown for LisaAngelettieBlog.com (which includes Articology.com), GirlShrink, as well as a variety of other micro-niche sites that I have built and run.  So here it is…

Article Marketing Income

COACHING
As you can see from the graphic, a major portion of my income came from coaching private clients this year. I expect this number to stay the same or perhaps grow as I transform the way I deliver coaching to my clients in 2011. While I at first shied away from taking on coaching clients a few years ago, I have since discovered that delivered in a certain way — coaching can be rewarding for both me and the client as well as a serve as a lucrative income source for my business.

EBOOKS
The next largest source of income for me comes from selling ebooks that I have written and published. I am very happy with this number because last year I made a concentrated effort to put more energy into ePublishing. I knew it was the wave of the future. I know it’s lucrative if you write information people really want – but I had a little trouble with execution. I always had a bright idea but had a hard time putting those ideas into action. This year was a turnaround year for me because I got a lot more organized once I introduced a writing and publishing calendar in my business.

ARTICOLOGY
Third comes my income from my continuity program a.k.a. article marketing training program for newbies – Articology. I have guessed that this percentage was probably higher last year because my ebook stats were lower and because I launched it over a year ago. Sales are always better in the beginning of a launch and then they taper off. I expect this number to decrease if I do nothing, but my plan for 2011 is to grow my affiliate team. So perhaps that number will stablize with the help of affiliates.

AFFILIATES
Next comes my affiliate income which typically was my highest source of income until I decided to take on private clients. Affiliate income means all the money that I make promoting other people’s products and services. This includes biggies like Amazon, Commission Junction, Clickbank as well as smaller affiliates.

SERVICES
My next percentage comes from money I make providing Done For You or DIY services for clients which I really haven’t promoted in a big way at all yet. When folks ask me, I do it. Things like setting up Thesis Optimized WordPress Blogs, squeeze pages, etc. These are all essential parts of successful article marketing, yet I don’t want to make them a really big part of my income because they are time consuming.

ADSENSE
Finally — my lowest percentage comes from Adsense revenue. This number fluctuates as I add niche websites to my ePublishing group. I’m also always testing the advantage vs. disadvantage of using Adsense on certain sites (like this one). I had Adsense on here for a time, and made some money from it, but not enough to justify keeping it on the site. I thought it was too disruptive to the flow of my information here. I’m not really looking to increase this percentage for 2011, I just want to see an incremental increase over the next 12 months as other parts of my business increase in revenue.

CONCLUSION
I’ve created all this income around using the solid principles of writing articles and using them for marketing purposes as well as re-purposing them into ebooks and ecourses (ePublishing). The coaching I do is all on article marketing and ePublishing. Look out for me to talk more about this over the following days and how you can take steps towards making a real living online with article marketing and ePublishing in 2011. It’s going to be a great year!

How To Increase Sales Page Conversion In 3 Minutes!

by Lisa Angelettie · 4 comments

I have never professed to be a fantastic copywriter. I am more of a creative writer. I realized that long ago. Yet I have spent enough time online to pick up a couple of “good habits” that have made become a more intuitive marketer. One is how to increase your sales page conversion in 3 minutes flat!

FIRST
While I love pretty things (handbags, flowers, jewelry), that is NOT what works online. I have battled with clients over this while helping them build article blogs. Many of the clients I work with want pretty, when in reality some not so pretty things work really well online to convert prospects into sales.

SECOND
Testing this theory out over and over has made me a believer. Do you test? If you are just starting out online, you probably don’t. I know I didn’t at first. I spent so much time trying to finish one thing, I didn’t have the energy or the inclination to test another thing out to compare and contrast. But as I grew more comfortable with my niche, what I was teaching, what I was writing – I began to test. Testing sales pages, Landing pages. Emails. Etc. And one of the things that I have discovered through testing is something that can increase your sales page conversion simply by…

Changing Your Order Button.

I FEEL PRETTY…
These are an example of “pretty” add to cart buttons that I would have liked to use:

add to cart buttons

TESTING PRETTY VS. WHAT WORKS
When I first launched my article marketing training course and membership site (Articology), my sales page contained a simple link to the order page. Later I added a “sign up” graphic. I used both on the sales page and sales increased. I made the graphic bigger and I saw a little improvement.

Finally, after taking a look at some of the sites that I had recently ordered from, I noticed that many were using a bigger button. Many were using “add to cart” instead of order now or subscribe now or sign up. They were using an orange color for the button, and a few were using red dashed lines around the perimeter. Something I wouldn’t have normally used. But this is the type of button that ultimately increased conversion on my sales page by 35%.

Increase Conversion Sales Button

You will find buttons like this on sales pages of products and services that you buy from and that convert well in places like Clickbank, etc. You can easily create it in photoshop (that’s what I did), or you can find one you like and swipe it:) The advantage of creating it in photoshop is that you can add a little bit of type which shows the regular price and the discounted price for each of your products. This has been proven to help conversion as well. Something that looks like this:

SO WHAT NEXT?
I recommend that you begin to test your current sales page and order button vs. a duplicate sales page with the big ole’ orange button and see how your conversion compares. You can test sales pages a variety of ways. Switch out your order buttons with one that looks like this and watch your sales and conversion improve!

If you’re just starting out and selling your first product or promoting your first service, then I recommend to go with the big ole’ ugly orange button for now and test later.

As a few people in the comments section mentioned, this high converting button is called The Belcher Button and you can grab a copy to edit for your own site over on the site at: http://www.belcherbutton.com/

Free Article Marketing Lesson

by Lisa Angelettie · 1 comment

Free Articology Lesson

Thank you for your interest in article marketing and writing articles. Perhaps you have been thinking about using article marketing as a serious strategy in your business or maybe you just want to learn a little more about it before you do.

Well, that’s why I’d love for you to try a free lesson of my Articology article marketing training course, so you can sample the absolute tremendous information and value you will receive with each and every lesson in the course.

Already ready to join? Great, you can sign up right here. Otherwise…

Please sign up to receive your complimentary Articology lesson via email using the form below:

*You will also receive a complimentary subscription to my weekly marketing articles. Enjoy:)

 

What Is The Best Format For Creating An Ebook?

by Lisa Angelettie · 4 comments

Q: I want to create a few short reports with my articles and eventually my first ebook. What is the best format for creating an ebook that I am going to distribute and sell?

A: The best format for distributing and selling reports, ebooks, etc. is to create them as a PDF document. PDF documents can be read on both PCs and MACs.  Most people have the application to read PDF documents (Adobe Reader) already installed on their computers when they bought them. If people have an old computer – they can always download the free Adobe reader application from the web as easy as 1-2-3.

If you own a Mac, the easiest way to create PDF documents is by using the Pages application (part of  iWork). All you have to do is “export” your document as a PDF file. I save mine right on my desktop or in the appropriate file folder and upload it to my site when I’m ready to distribute or sell it.

If you own a PC, you can do this same sort of thing with Microsoft Word by clicking on “save as” and choosing PDF.

If you want some advanced options when creating your PDF document, it may be best to create it in Adobe Acrobat - the original and most popular PDF application. It’s pricey though.

If you don’t want to invest into any new software like the ones I just mentioned, and you are on a PC, there is a great free PDF creator that comes highly recommended. It’s called PrimoPDF. Now while I haven’t  used it myself, because I am a Mac girl, I have heard really great things about it. So it probably would be worth a try – especially since it is free.

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