On the weekend, I was browsing one of my favorite forums and ran across a great thread titled something like “13 Things I’ve Learned After Submitting 1500 Articles.” Posted by Tim Gorman over at the Warrior Forum, Tim went on to share a lot more than 13 things he’d learned from posting 1500 articles at EzineArticles.com. The thread was a great read, but unfortunately, for reasons unknown, was completely deleted by the powers that be over at Warrior Forum.

Now here’s the kicker: Tim is Major Tim in the US Army, working 12 hour days before he comes home and puts in a few hours on his sites and article marketing. And he’s making six figures a year from his internet ventures alone.

This guy who’s out there saving our country and training our soldiers can do 1500 articles but I can’t pull together a measly 10? Ouch.

Needless to say, I’m humbled.

And am upping my article marketing campaign pronto. After doing some Googling, I found Tim’s method for marketing his articles. It’s intensive and at first glance, exhausts me already. But even if I take just a small piece of it, I’ll be doing better than before.

To read Tim’s 30 Day Article Marketing Plan, you can download his free report from NicheBot. It’s well worth the read, even if you think his plan is overkill. What’s most interesting is how he submits certain articles to EzineArticles.com only, while doing a blast to 100s of directories with other articles.

I may not be dropping 1500 articles on the WWW any time soon, but between my ability to write one or two a day, hiring a ghostwriter to do more and (maybe) hiring someone to completely rework PLR content I have, I’ve got a plan. In the meantime, I’ve hit my initial 10 article limit with EzineArticles and already been boosted to Platinum Author! Woot!

What’s your article marketing plan?

So it’s official…we’ve switched over to a new host and a new look. There are still some admin things to attend to, but overall, it’s DONE. I found an awesome guy to customize this theme for us, freeing me up to work on other things. I’ll talk about him, too, in my upcoming RAC post.

Here’s the scoop on our new design: this is the Branford Magazine theme and I downloaded it for FREE. You know how much we love free around here! Inspired by Brian Gardner’s Revolutions theme and my friend Dennis’ new design, we wanted something that allowed us to keep the good stuff front and center, rather than pushing it to the end of the line like most blog themes do. The author of Branford Magazine is German, so his site is geared toward both German and English speakers. His English is excellent (much better than my German! ) so you should have little trouble with his directions.

Now, here’s a disclaimer: this magazine theme requires a learning curve to implement. Since it has a different way of handling posts, you’ll have to do some work to get it to display the way you want. It’s not as simple as plug-and-play.

Typically, I like to figure out everything for myself and have a hard time asking for help. This time, though, I almost immediately found and downloaded an excellent ebook to get this new theme running ASAP. And it was only $12.

Aisling D’Art is the creator the ebook, called Sites That Soar! Aisling is an artist first, so her directions are very clear and she includes plenty of screenshots to walk you through the process. Naturally, she can’t include every modification you may want, but you’ll be satisfied with a good looking, usable blog within an hour or two of installation following her techniques. I did find a couple of typos in the ebook and when I emailed Aisling about it not only was she gracious about my email, but, within 24 hours, she had made the changes and updated her ebook with the correct info. I love that!

If your blog is ready for a makeover, consider using a magazine theme. Every now and again, we’ll update you on visitor satisfaction. We hope to see much improvement with visitor involvement due to our new look!

As we’re sure you noticed, we’ve got a whole new look to Chick Magnate.  I figured a move to a new hosting company was the perfect time to introduce a brand-spankin’ new theme, too.

This magazine-style setup will make it easier for us to showcase the information we think is important.  Blogs are wonderful things, but unfortunately, a juicy tidbit you wrote six months ago may still be valuable info, but it’ll get lost in the Archives shuffle with your standard theme.  This way, we can keep the good stuff front and center and make it easier for you to find the posts you want to read.

There are still a few kinks I’m working out, so please be patient.  Once it’s just how we need it, I’ll tell you more about the theme, where I found it (free!  see why I want to marry it?) and share a great ebook I discovered that cut way down on the learning curve.

What do you think of Chick Magnate’s new look?  Post and let us know!

Alice recently created www.schmoozins.com, a general interest site for women. Currently on the front page, you’ll find articles titled “Make Up application Tips for the Busy Woman” and “Organic Gardening Information: What are the Benefits?”

Alice has taken Schmoozins a step farther, by adding an interesting twist to the run-of-the-mill sites out there: not only do you get tips and advice on a huge variety of subjects, but you can also contribute your own content! If you own a female-centric web site, this is an excellent opportunity for you to get some exposure and build your expert status on the web, while providing useful information to a very targeted market.

In our experience, Alice and team always over deliver, so we expect www.schmoozins.com to become an excellent resource.

Thanks to my disorganization and my web host holding this blog hostage, Chick Magnate was down. Tip: don’t want a web site hosted anymore? You need to CANCEL, not just neglect to pay the annual hosting fee. Oops! This, coupled with some other site issues I’ve been having, sent me into an internet marketing tizzy.

What other issues? Well, I accidentally deleted the template for my most profitable web site and so need to redo the whole thing in order to upload new pages. While I won’t be starting from scratch exactly, it’s still a lot of work. Next, I’ve been giving away MUCH too much free time to potential web site clients, trying to get them to see the joy of having someone else do their dirty work. And I’ve been suffering from my worst work habit: not staying focused.

In a rash move yesterday, I logged into another web account I have and DELETED five sites. I only kept sites that fit my main site’s pet theme. Laptop cases, gone. Roomba vacuums, gone. And so on. I then contacted the ghostwriter I hired a few weeks ago and told him I no longer needed laptop case and roomba articles, so could he do some more pet niche ones, instead? Thankfully, the answer was yes.

So here’s the plan: for the time being, I’ll have fewer sites and really just one huge one that I’ll spend the majority of my updating and marketing efforts on. Except for this blog and promoting our search engine placement services site, the rest of my time will be spent working on my pet network. Thanks to my new found enthusiasm for my main site, I’ve already created a YouTube vid, built a screensaver I’ll upload to free shareware sites, and sent out an email promoting a dog treat offer.

Now I have to get back to fixing up that template.

AND, move this blog to a whole new IP. Chick Magnates don’t like being held hostage

Admittedly, Erin was on board with the idea of outsourcing LONG before I was. It’s only just recently that I recognized the value having hiring someone else to handle projects. So last week, I hired a ghostwriter to create 25 niche articles for me. This week, I pulled together a quickie article, a list of article directories and an extensive list of general directories to pass along to our VAs. Their next gig for us will be submitting the article and adding our new web site to a load of niche and general directories. I’ll also use most of the niche articles I get for article submissions; of course, I’ll let our VA team handle the submissions.

It does take time to plan for using a VA. I probably spent a half hour yesterday creating an email detailing exactly what we needed done. Between the hour I took to write the article and the 30 minutes spent drafting their task list, I’m an hour and a half into this project already.

BUT…I figure it will take them at least five, and more likely seven, hours to submit the articles and get links in those directories.

That’s five to seven hours I can spend watching Real Housewives of New York City or getting my nails done. Oops!…I mean, that’s five to seven hours I can spending working on larger projects, like planning out a marketing plan for our sites or installing Build a Niche Store on another domain, for example. By hiring a VA, I get the luxury of spending time on the duties I enjoy, while they do the drudge work! I’m a convert!

So how did Erin get so smart about outsourcing? She signed up for Alice Seba’s Outsourcing Sweetie membership. (Yes, I know, kids…Alice again. But seriously, the woman knows her stuff.)

Outsourcing Sweetie shares how to find a qualified Virtual Assistant, what tasks you can ask them to do, training manuals, step-by-step to do lists and lots more info to help you get started. Right now, there’s a $10 special to get in, so get started today!