Lessons Learned From The $300 Challenge

January 15th, 2008

Well it’s long past time for me to share my results and lessons from my one week $300 challenge. For those of you who may not be familiar with what I am talking about, on about the 17th of December I challenged myself to make $300 by the end of 7 days, without spending a dime. I planned to do this through article marketing that pointed to my affiliate offers - i.e. write articles and submit them to directories like eZineArticles and GoArticles, and in the author bio have some links pointing to my website, which would be pushing affiliate offers along the same subject on which my articles were written on.

So, I’m sure you’re all anxious to hear if I met my goals or not, so here goes…my total revenue was:

$7.25

Yikes - not even close. But do I consider this a failure? No, not at all - true, I did not meet my monetary goals, but I learned a ton and gained a lot of invaluable experience, which in the long run I consider even better. So instead of telling you how I made $300 and how you can too (since obviously I can’t talk about that), I am instead going to use my next couple of posts to talk about what I learned and how it can be applied.

First, let me give you the details of my challenge. I ended up writing 25 articles that ranged from on average 300 to 400 words in length on the subject of improving your abs - from exercises to cautions to eating habits, you name it. I submitted all of these articles to 3 directories - eZineArticles, GoArticles, and one more lesser known directory. I also created 11 videos (editing and compiling other non-copyrighted videos) which I uploaded to YouTube and MetaCafe. The articles of course had a link back to my site at the bottom and the videos have text at the beginning and end that pointed to my site.

eZineArticles tracks your click count, which is very handy. To this date my articles have generated 603 clicks and 4,381 views. I do not know how many clicks the other directories have sent me, and I am unable to track how many clicks each article has generated from once they have been republished on a third party site (eZineArticles only tracks the clicks that originate from their site).

From YouTube I have achieved to this date 7,132 video impressions with an unknown number of clicks, and MetaCafe has given me 36,087 views and again and unknown number of clicks, which brings my total video impressions to a nice 43,219.

During December I averaged 56 unique visitors a day to my site and this month I am averaging 68 per day. Now this is not a huge amount of hits by any mean, but keep in mind that these visitors are fairly targeted - they are all looking to improve their abdominal muscles. The fact that I only managed to earn $7.25 from them I am attributing to a poorly designed and written landing page.

First I redirected the users to an offer from ClickBank which had a fairly good conversion ratio, but I did not make any sells. Then I redirected the users to a zip submit offer through Copeac for free healthy food samples, which is where I made my $7.25. Then I tried creating a custom landing page that gave the user a couple of options - the two above and another offer through Copeac, but I failed to make any sells. Currently I have it back to redirecting to the zip submit offer.

My conclusion is that there is definitely potential - although 68 hits a day is not very much, remember that it is fairly targeted traffic, and targeted traffic is worth it’s weight in gold. Pretty soon I will be trying out a different version of my landing page and see if I can’t get some sells by improving my copy and design.

In my next couple of posts I will be taking closer looks into more specific parts of my challenge and really dissecting the ins and outs of my process and what could be improved upon and what I believe has potential. Stay tuned!

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