Super Affiliate Challenge – Week 1 – half way update

The first week of the challenge is dedicated to finding a product, buying a URL, redirecting it to the clickbank hoplink and then moving onto article writing.

I ummed and ahhed about whether to use an affiliate product or drive all the traffic to my own ebook/membership course. I decided to stick with the programme and go with the affiliate product. As John Rhodes pointed out we need to be focusing on building traffic not optimising sales pages and dealing with customer service issues.

A good friend of mine has just released a product on Clickbank so it made perfect sense for me to promote it. The product is a high quality audio course with supporting ebook and he is putting a lot of time and effort into optimising the squeeze and sales pages. Each sale is worth $36.82 so I only need to sell 47 copies to hit my $1700 target – yikes that’s a lot of sales!

That done I then was supposed to spend 10 hours writing 15 300 word articles to promote the product. I discovered a cool new tool over at Ezine Articles that suggests articles for you based on the keyword you tell it. With the articles already written it was much easier to write an article off the back of it and I managed to knock out all 15 articles in just under four hours! The majority of them are 450-500 words too.

Next up we’re to spend three hours spinning those articles so we have five sets of fifteen to submit to five different article sites. I’m a fan of EZA so I decided to submit the original 15 there which I did yesterday. I had high hopes that they would be published ahead of the weekend since the previous three batches were all published within the day, but alas they were not.

I need them live before I submit the spun copies to the other five because I know how particular EZA are with having unique submissions.

Now the spinning I have yet to do. We’re supposed to do it manually – just swap out the title, the first and last par and tweak a couple of sentences. But I don’t think I can face it so I’m in the market for a decent article spinner. I think I’m going to give the Magic Article Writer and Submitter software a try – after all this way I can submit to even more article directories than the five we’ve been given. I have until Tuesday to get this task done so I should mange it ok.

I have spent an hour or two today trying to think of a smart way to keep track of all of the links – partly because we have to submit them as homework (I think if we reach the end and don’t meet the target they’ll check our homework to make sure we followed all steps before giving us our refunds) but also because we’ll need a record of all of the article links so that we can bookmark and ping them in later weeks.

I was going to do an excel spreadsheet but that requires lots of cutting and pasting. So I thought – why not use bookmarks? One click and the URL is captured and saved in my browser. Here’s my solution:

1. Create a new folder in myBrowser bookmark facility each week
2. Bookmark every page Icreate (ie article, forum post etc)to the folder
3. Once a week export the bookmarks folder to HTML
4. Open the HTML in a text editor and delete all of the links but those for the relevant week
5. I now have an HTML document with the article names and URLs
6. Extract the URLs and paste into an email to submit as my homework
7. Save as a text file so that I have them to hand for bookmarking

I thought it would be better to use a public bookmarking service to give some link juice but I couldn’t find one that exported bookmarks sorted by tag (both Safari and Firefox export sorted by Folder). Also many of them want extra detail like a description etc and are quite slow to load so it’s just too time consuming.

For the URL extractor I discovered a few windows software options but the only mac app I found was $50! Instead I’m going to export the bookmarks as HTML to my desktop and then upload the file via FTP to a private folder on my website. From there I just copy the URL into this site: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-extractor.shtml and voila I have a list of plain URLs.

Hope that made some sort of sense! I’ll see how it goes when my articles are published and I can start testing it out capturing the URLs. Having an online folder also means that when we have to screen capture some stuff I can just upload the pngs there and link to them in the email rather than attaching lots of images.

How do you keep track of all the articles and Web 2.0 properties you create?