June was actually a record month for me which was great, but it was also a very enlightening month.  I have decided that I need to get to another level in the internet game.  While I have made some ok money with affiliate marketing I guess I have bigger plans.  With that in mind I am taking a bit of a break from this blog.  My goal is to be back in fall with some exciting announcements.

What announcements you say?  Well I have three product ideas that I want to experiement with.  They would all be ebooks distibuted through clickbank.  I have one idea I can do with my father, another I will do on my own, and a big idea that will require the help of a expert.  I will start with the first two and learn enough to move on to the third.

 I will still be promoting my affiliate sites during this time and probably trying new things in this realm as well.  I just know that I want to shift away from making money for others to making more money for myself.  Of course this is easier said then done…but you have to start somewhere.

Feel free to contact me even if I am not blogging.  I always like to hear from other people in the industry.  Hopefully I will have some good news to bring in the fall!

Because I am so thankful for my internet marketing success, I told myself a couple weeks ago that I would donate one my Clickbank checks to charity before the end of the year.  I make most of my money through Clickbank so this really started off with the best of intentions.

Well now I am halfway through this current earnings period and my sales stink.  So guess which check is going to charity?  That’s right – this one!  Now before I get criticized for my grinch-like ways, I want to remind everyone that I have a kid to feed and I am far from a rich man.  I try to put all of my internet earnings into savings for my family’s future needs.  It’s not like I drive a Lexus to work everyday.

So I am making this post in hopes that the internet gods are listening.  If you want the folks at ModestNeeds.org to better help those who need it, then start sending some buyers my way!

In an effort to save myself from a karma meltdown I am going to make my pledge for next year right now.  In 2008 I will donate the equivalent of my BEST month in Clickbank earnings (2 checks worth) to charity.

See – I’m not really a grinch after all

Obviously I was mad and started to consider ways to get this person back, but then I thought more about it.  First of all, the site in question makes less than $100 a month.  Secondly, since I have already done some link building and promotion, the search engines have likely credited my site as the original source for the content.  Lastly, I figure if this guy is that shady, then he is probably not someone I want to interact with on any level.  All these reasons plus the fact that I am aiming for bigger things has kept me from pursuing any action.

Some may question my passive approach to this incident, but here are some things to remember about the future success of my site over the stolen one…

-My article marketing efforts all link back to my site.
-All of my original content is immediately linked on social sites, giving me the credit.
-My site will grow; the stolen website will remain static.
-I recently added an email opt-in, whose registrants will always be mine.
-I will likely rank higher in the serps for every key term.
-Again…the site is only making a small pittance.  Not enough to worry about.

Of course I could consider this to be a compliment to my website abilities, but I tend to think I am simply an easy target.  The site was designed with an HTML editor, so it is probably easy to copy with just the source code.  I did notice that the thief added a couple of different products to the mix, which gave me some ideas on how I might monetize things better.  With that thought in mind, I am going to monitor his site.  Maybe I can learn a trick or two to help me optimize my site better from a sales perspective.  I suppose it would be pretty ironic if the thief indirectly helped me earn more money!

If there is any downside to EzineArticles, it is their strict usage guidelines and submission requirements.  They are quick to ban accounts or submissions that don’t meet their terms of use.  This has never affected me much since I always pay attention to the rules and never try to sneak anything by the editors.  That being said, I was floored the other day when I received an email informing me that my account was suspended.  It turns out that one of my pen names had violated a policy on “author names”.  Here are the author name regulations as written on the EA website…

Your AUTHOR NAME must have a First name and a Last name.
-We do allow “First name – Last initial” or “First initial – Last Name.”
-We do not allow two initials for your AUTHOR NAME.
-Your First and Last name must begin with a Capital Letter.
-We do not allow company names to be your AUTHOR NAME.
-We do not allow email addresses to be your AUTHOR NAME.
-We do not allow adjectives or nouns or descriptors to be part of your AUTHOR NAME.
-You may NOT include your title after your AUTHOR NAME unless you hold a doctorate-level degree (Dr., MD, DDS, PhD, etc.)
-We do not allow religious titles before or after your name.
-We do not allow more than ONE author name to have an account. If your article was CO-AUTHORED, then please put the CO-AUTHOR’s name in the RESOURCE BOX and we will manually add them as a Co-Author to your article BY-LINE.

Sounds simple enough doesn’t it?  But for reasons I still don’t understand, my pen name was flagged by an editor.  I can’t give you the name for competition reasons, but I can tell you that it wasn’t a traditional first name.  Thus, I am guessing they perceived it as either a “company name” or “adjectives or nouns or descriptors”.  It was not my intention to break the rules, but intentions don’t matter when you are using someone else’s website. 

The suspension had an immediate impact on my traffic and sales.  I receive 50 to 100 unique visitors a day from EA and a handful of my articles rank very well for the niches I target.  Because the visitors that come from my article links are so well targeted, I was at risk of losing a consistent stream of warm leads.

EA invited me to correct the problem using their standard “contact us” form.  I figured I was up the creek since it would likely take days for them to fix the issue…if they even accepted my resolution.  In that time my articles would probably lose their positions in the search engines and my websites would lose the link juice I was getting from EA backlinks.

Obviously I had little choice but to submit a replacement pen name and pray that things would work out.  Hundreds of hours of article writing were on the line, yet my destiny was held hostage by a simple contact form.  Knowing what I know about people getting banned from adsense and the like, I was not very confident.

Low and behold I received an email the next day approving my new name and reinstating my account.  The editor thanked me for my swift response, but mentioned nothing about why the suspension occurred.  Frankly, I could care less so long as my articles are back online.  My high-ranking submissions appear to have maintained their positions in Google, and a couple of new articles pending approval were accepted.  It looks like I avoided catastrophe…this time.

While the whole ordeal was a little stressful, I learned a lot from it.  Here are some things I will be changing from my old approach…

-Never assume that a good thing lasts forever.
-Never rely on one source to provide the bulk of your sales.
-Make sure you keep organized copies of your previous submissions.  (I never used to worry about having backups for EA submissions since they are all stored in my account).
-Familiarize yourself with an alternative service to the ones you already use.  In other words, have a backup strategy for each marketing channel you utilize.
-Don’t get too cute with your author names!

EzineArticles is a great website, and I actually appreciate their stringent policies.  It keeps the quality of the website and its content valuable for everyone.  I was also very impressed with how quickly they addressed my issue, especially since it could have been quite costly for me. I do however wish that they would have been clearer on what I did wrong.  Oddly enough, I had submitted 32 articles over the past year with the same pen name that was suspended.  Perhaps they only recently started cracking down on author names?

No matter what the reason was behind my suspension, this was a big wake-up call for me.  I need to have three or four proven marketing methods for each site.  Article marketing has proven successful for me, but it is time to branch out into other marketing channels.  At least then I won’t be screwed if one of them doesn’t like my name!