Last night I made a huge change to my blog. I put any blog post that resulted in a sale on the front page. How did I do that? I just looked at my CB transactions, and matched the dates with the blog post.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a blog post resulted in a sale, becuase I didn’t start putting tracking codes in until very recently. However, it’s a clue.

I also made sure those posts were actually decent. So, I think I have a nice spread of posts on the front page. By the way, there’s 50 posts on the front page.

This should be magic for SEO. In fact, I woke up this morning and found a sale. It wasn’t from my email list, so someone probably found my site through search.

The sale was from my side bar. Meaning that someone clicked on the product through the side bar and purchased it. That’s the magic of tracking codes – You know exactly how the customer got to the product.

But what you don’t know is what triggered the sale. My cousin asked me the other day about this. He gave me some ways to track this, but it didn’t work.

I’m not an expert in google analytics, and I’m going to spend some time to try and find an answer to this questions – “What actually results in a sale?”

- Is it a series of posts that they read?

- Are they looking for a review of that product?

- Where they already searching for that product?

A lot of my posts that are made through my email list can be easily traced back to a particular post. However, when it comes to search traffic – it’s difficult.

It’s going to be search traffic that’s really going to allow me to live the type of lifestyle that I wish to live. This thing needs to be hands-off.

Right now I’m putting in around 30-40 hours per week. Eventually, that number should go down to 4 hours. Most of the tools have already been set in place:

- High Traffic blog

- Targeted Maling List

- A selection of affiliate Products

So, it’s only a matter of time. I need to be smart, patient, and willing to experiment.

Last night I started a screenplay. It’s been over a year since I’ve written anything that is not related to Shah Training. It felt really good. I forgot how therapeutic scrpt writing can be.

Future plans are naturally to just keep working on Shah Training. The goal is to optimize the site for search. I want to see at least 10 sales per day just through search.

I just looked at my analytics and notice 33 hits from Google already. It’s 8 am so far. That’s not too bad at all. I usually so only 20-30 hits overall in the morning. RIght now my total hits are 87 from a variety of sources.

Alright, lets see what happens the rest of the day.

I’ve been getting really high click backs lately, at least 10 for most articles. I noticed a few very important things:

- The title needs to be simple, with the keyword as the base of the title. Don’t make anything too flashy, or too common. If there’s 4000 other articles with the same title, chances are your article won’t rank too well.

- The body needs to be personalized. Don’t regurgitate the same BS as every other article. Don’t give out too much information either. The one’s that that have a higher click rate focus more on results and benefits than actual advice.

- Make sure you have a call to action. Just don’t say, “To find out more, click here.” Say something like, “Now it’s time to reveal to you guys how I achieved some great results…”

I’m sure these pointers are nothing new, but I noticed a ton of questions about Ezine articles, so I’d thought I’d share these quick tips.

Here’s the truth though – despite the great traffic I’m getting from ezine, not many have converted, especially with the particular article I’m talking about with 20 something click backs within a few hours.

This could mean that my landing pages suck, or that ezine articles just don’t work as well as email marketing. At the end of the day, it’s the people that trust you, who’ll buy from you.

One thing I have achieved though. Remember I said I couldn’t get sales Monday thru Thursday? Well, I’ve gotten at least one sale each day this week except Wednesday. So at least that’s a good thing.

UPDATE: I just spent yesterday changing the link back to ALL of my ezine articles (all 90 of them) to point straight to my opt-in page. At this point, I’m convinced that the Ezine to Landing Page concept of “bum marketing” is not my time. So far, I’ve made ONE sale from bum marketing. All others come from my email list.

So the goal is to get 100 sign ups per day to my opt in list. That’s 100 potential customers DAILY. If I get around 10-20 (lets say, 15 per day) sign ups right now. That’s 105 per week. I get around 5-10 sales (lets say, 7 sales) per week

105 sign ups per week = 7 sales per week
105 sign ups PER DAY = 7 sales PER DAY

Most of my sign ups were coming from PPC, so I’m guessing ezine articles will have more qualified leads. I think this is the fast track method to seeing double zero daily commissions.