Ok, I’ll just come out and say it - I was a bit disappointed when I saw my submitted articles generating absolutely no leads to my niche site (mental note - don’t write articles when you’re so sick you can barely stand, much less type).

I guess it was great timing, then, that I came across a great thread on WF by John Casement explaining how bum marketing can earn up to $75,000 a year for anyone who cares to put in one hour of work a day for the next 12 months.

One of the replies the thread received was by Vince Runza (here’s a link to his site if you want to check it out) - and bloody hell, was that just the thing I needed to hear or what?

Note Well: the first two months, you get no profit. A hobbyist would quit, at that point. A business owner would smile and say, “Now, the fun begins…”

- Vince Runza

You know, I thought I had long since stifled my tendency to always go for instant gratification - it’s an ugly trait of character to have, especially in IM. Unfortunately, it seems that my experience as an article writer has spoiled me somewhat (get a contract, finish it and BANG - you got $1,000 in your PayPal account).

Vince, you’re so bloody right! I’m not quite at the stage where I’m ready to have fun yet, but I sure am going to persevere - and I’ll be laughing last.

Well, in addition to slowly building a list of subscribers, I’ve also released my secret weapon to bring out the article writer in you! In an act of shameless self-promotion, allow me to introduce my “20 Hints on Writing a Better Article” report, which is available for download to anyone free of charge. Simply fill out the form below to get your free copy today!

Well, since for the next month or so I will be focusing more on residual income rather than article writing, I thought I should find a way to still deliver writing tips to you without diluting the contents of the blog.

Therefore, you can now sign up for my article-writing course by entering your name and e-mail into them form in the top-right corner of the screen. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be beaming some rather nifty article writing information into your mailboxes, including how to get started, what pitfalls to avoid and even where to look for clients.

The course is completely free of charge.

Well, as you know, I cheated a little bit in that I’ve already done a few article submissions. In fact, here are my article stats:

• ArticleDashboard: 2 articles approved, 3 awaiting approval
• GoArticles: 5 articles approved
• EzineArticles: 5 articles await approval (estimated approval date: March 29)
• Total Number of Unique Articles: 5

As you can imagine, my earnings record has not been terribly impressive so far

• Adsense Revenue: $0
• Affiliate Revenue: $0
• List Revenue: $0

Obviously, I’m off to a slow start here, but I’m hoping it’s nothing that a bit of article writing frenzy can’t cure! After all, I spent the last month writing articles for others - surely I can now do the same for myself?

As I promised yesterday, I am now announcing my goal for the next month. Just as I implied yesterday, this month I am going to focus mostly on developing residual income streams, though this doesn’t mean that I won’t be accepting any article contracts (I have to pay my bills, you know).

The goal is to reach $500/month in residual income within 31 days.

As I am giving myself a full month to complete this goal, you can expect to see how badly I failed by on April 24, 2007, 11:59PM local time.

How am I going to achieve this goal? Here are some of the methods I am planning to use in my quest for success:

• Bum Marketing through article submissions
• Andrew Hansen’s “Niche Marketing on Crack”
• Squidoo marketing
• List building

I am still rather iffy about building my own list, if only because I’m a bit too greedy to cough up $19.95 a month for Aweber given that I’m not convinced I’ll be able to generate any sales with it just yet. With that said, I know the age-old adage that one should start building up their list as early as possible - and any income derived from this list I will treat as a form of residual income.

Can I do it?

Ok, so ArticleDashboard doesn’t like bold tags around hyperlinks - all 3 of my articles were denied for exactly that reason. Live and learn, I guess.

You know, it’s always a lot of fun to find a profitable niche - but it’s even more fun when you actually create all the Google content for the niche.

The articles that I submitted yesterday are slowly but surely finding their way around the Net. Just a few hours ago, entering the keyphrase that I was optimizing around would have yielded no results whatsoever; now, there are three sites (one of them is my niche product blog, which was indexed in just two days), and all of them are based on the article content I submitted!

Now, unless Wordtracker got something wrong, I think I should be seeing some more traffic to my blog (which, sadly, is on the second place in SERPs) - I’ll keep my fingers crossed and see what happens!

I’m not sure if it was sickness-induced delirium or Steve’s Online Cashcow blog, but in spite of my earlier claim that I will be spending most of the day playing Oblivion and generally feeling sorry about myself, today ended up being fairly productive in terms of bum marketing. I’ve written and submitted three articles, with the fourth one in works as we speak.

Some observations:

• ArticleDashboard takes just 1 day to approve your articles, compared to EZA’s 7
• Though none of them have been indexed by Google yet, they have already been downloaded about 60 times (total stats for ArticleDashboard and GoArticles). I’m not sure if this is because they spent some time on the front page immediately after their approval or if people are actively searching article directories for the keyphrase in question
• Out of 60 downloads, I only got one lead to my site, which is somewhat disappointing - I am experimenting with placing my site URL in <b> tags to make it stand out more (it really isn’t noticeable because of the color scheme at ArticleDashboard and GoArticles)

So far, I’m rather enjoying article marketing - I’m not yet following Andrew Hansen’s guide step-by-step, but instead combining some of its elements (in particular, his unique spin on picking the niche) to hopefully create a money-making powerhouse online.

It also looks like the upcoming one-month challenge will focus on residual rather than manual income. I saw Steve hit a total of $450 a month within just 12 days; now let’s see if I can hit $1,000 a month online in residual income! This isn’t yet an official statement of intentions (I’ll post one tomorrow), but it sure seems like bum marketing will be the order of the day for the next month or so.

You know, I used to think that $1,000 a month online from article writing was a good start, I really did. That’s until I came across Steve Rowland’s blog, where he’s documenting his journey to reach $4,500/month in 30 days - absolutely from scratch.

And he’s succeeding, too - after about 12 days, he’s pulling in $50-60/day in affiliate sales, all through article marketing. He has earned $436.86 so far, which is almost half of what I earned in 30 days, except that he’s getting it from what is effectively residual income streams and I’m not.

Now, granted, he’s being mentored by an IM guru, but, still $436.86 in affiliate revenue in just 12 days is simply incredible, especially given that he can probably expect to earn that much consistently in the future. Go, go residual income!

Anyway, if you’re interested in checking out his blog, it’s right here - and it’s well worth watching! I don’t know if he’ll manage to reach $4,500 a month, but even if he manages $1,000, that’s still amazing, given that it’s residual income we’re talking about here.

Thanks to Andrew Hansen’s book, I found over 30 different services worth pinging when updating this blog. Having just finished adding them all (took me a while), I’m quite anxious to see whether - if at all - they result in a traffic increase.