About a month ago, I wrote about Steve Rowland’s experiment to earn $4,500 in residual income online in just one month from scratch.

Well, he’s finished his experiment about two weeks ago - and although he only earned $2200 from affiliate marketing, he managed to raise the rest of the amount through list marketing and his WSO (which, ironically, was about how he earned all that money to begin with).

Live and learn, folks - bum marketing still works very well if you can just get off our lazy bums and do what Steve did (I think he had about 100 articles in circulation by the time he was done).

His blog is inactive for now as he’s busy spending his money and enjoying his new humongous flatscreen TV, but I’m quite looking forward to see how he does next month.

You can check out his blog at http://onlinecashcow.blogspot.com

Some good news for a change - my EzineArticles account has been reinstated after I rewrote the better part of my articles.

Here’s a lesson for you, folks - don’t ever write 20 similar articles and then have one editor review them all…

Anyway, it seems that they also demoted me from Basic Plus to Basic again - as usual, they didn’t mention that in the reinstatement e-mail they sent me and I just noticed that when I checked my Account Status page.

I’m currently talking to EZA to see if it was an accident (reinstatement to Basic instead of Basic Plus - could happen to anyone) or a form of punishment (I hope it’s not, but I have a sick feeling that it is).

I’m so not looking forward to writing another 35 articles again to get to Platinum (I was about 11 articles away, too).

Well, as you may have guessed, I did not reach my goal of earning $500 in residual income over the last 30 days.

This was, unfortunately, an effort plagued by systematic setbacks, some of which I am personally responsible for, whereas others simply came right out of the blue and smacked me exactly where it hurts the most.

My bum marketing campaign was delayed substantially by waiting to be approved for Basic Plus status with EzineArticles, followed shortly by the suspension of my account due to similar article content. That, at least, was a man-made problem that I take full responsibility for and that I should have anticipated.

This spring, I also suffered with my first case (in 23 years!) of allergies, which pretty much knocked me out cold for about two weeks and resulted in cancellion of one extremely lucrative writing assignment, in addition to rendering me unable to restore my EzineArticles account by rewriting my submissions.

Finally, I also ended up dealing with a completely unexpected amount of university coursework, which left me very little time for writing articles. My part time job was responsible for swallowing up what little free time I had left.

On the positive side, I did learn a few lessons from this debacle. First of all, I finally started keeping an agenda (Google Calendar is great for that). After just a few days of following my schedule to the letter, I already saw some rather impressive results and managed to find quite a few hours of extra time. Whoever said that there are only 24 hours in a day probably never heard of proper organization.

Am I giving up on bum marketing and residual income? God, no! My schedule tells me that I will have a lot more free time starting on May 9, which is when my university term ends. Armed with a more organized schedule, I am confident that I will be able to turn my dream of earning $500 a month of residual income into a reality.

In the meantime, wish me luck with upcoming exams and term papers!

No, it’s not another complaint about my allergies (which are actually getting a bit better now).

Instead, I found a new way to make myself sick - by creating a minisite on skin disorders. I’m not going to reveal the exact niche I’m targetting, but let’s just say these pictures sure don’t look pretty and just might be the thing I need to get me on my diet.

However, I am trying something new this time around - instead of making a niche site per se, I’m going to set up a squeeze page with a 5-day autoresponder series explaining how to address these skin issues. Of course, I’m going to squeeze some affiliate links in along the way.

It seems to be that using a squeeze page will result in higher conversion rates than simply putting a niche site together. After all, niche site visitors have no incentive to click on your affiliate links, and you haven’t really had the time to build up some trust with them. More importantly, when it comes to your EzineArticles biography box, they have no reason to click on your link.

My squeeze page, however, will offer them a free e-mail course, so that’s a tangible benefit I can put into my EZA bio. Over the next five days, I will try and build up a relationship with my readers, so when I finally start peddling affiliate products to them, they will be in a better mood to buy.

Basically, the theory boils down to increasing the visitor’s inclination to buy every step of the way - from presenting them with a free course to building up trust to eventually selling the product.

Will it work? We’ll see!

I am still struggling with my allergy, which has gone from bad to worse, and hence the lack of updates. A few highlights though:

• I have made close to $300 in affiliate revenue so far
• EzineArticles suspended my account for similar content
• My niche site - http://www.home-income-opportunity-online.info is now operational

More updates when I feel better.

Right, folks, I know I haven’t updated my blog for a while, sorry for that. I’ve been dealing with a bad case of a Spring allergy, which left me with a running nose, deep cough, Darth Vader-style breathing sounds and, most importantly, a burning sensations in my eyes that I get after spending more than 30 minutes in front of the monitor. With my eyes hurting so much, I tried to take it easy and stay away from the computer as much as possible, hence the delay in updates.

Anyway, insofar as residual income is concerned, I’ve earned a total of $220.06 so far, of which $122.10 came from selling Andrew Hansen’s Article Speedwriting course and the rest from Clickbank sales. In fact, April 9 was the best Clickbank day for me yet, with a total of $97.96 in sales! Unfortunately, so far, my affiliate sales are few and far in between, and I think I’d prefer lower but consistent income as opposed to income spikes followed by days of zero sales.

I currently have about 15 articles in circulation all in all - haven’t been able to write much more than that due to my eye problem. My niche blog is getting about 10 unique views a day, but I think that number will pick up by a lot once the last few articles I submitted get indexed by Google. I also made a mistake by attacking a single long-tail keyword with multiple articles, many of which went into supplementary results on Google, pretty much becoming a waste of time and effort, which helps explain why my daily visitor inflow in so low in spite of 15 articles in place to drive the traffic.

On a side note, my EZA submissions now get approved within a day, even less, in spite of my Basic Plus status. Yay!

Well, another setback to my secret malevolent plan to buy my way to ruling the world by creating an IM empire - EZA upgraded me to Basic Plus, instead of Platinum.

This means that my articles will still take a week to approve - and, upon submitting another 15 articles, I will be subject to another review process, this time hopefully leading to a Platinum upgrade.

All in all, I am rather disappointed, as I have never had a problem with EzineArticles before and was kind of expecting a Platinum upgrade. Oh well, I have the whole long Easter weekend ahead of me to churn out 15 quality articles - as good an incentive as any, really.

Wohoo! I made my first Clickbank sale - overnight, too, just the way I like it! Now, $18.33 is nothing to brag about, but it proves that bum marketing has worked for me - and it can work for you, if you try.

It took me less than a week to make this sale (my first article on the subject in question was published with EZA on March 28). All in all, it came a bit faster than I expected, which also shows just how badly my income is being affected by the EZA delay in upgrading me to Platinum status.

How Did I Do It?

1. I have submitted a total of 5 articles to EZA, GoArticles and ArticleDashboard. All articles were optimized for a specific long-tail keyphrase and currently rank as the first result on Google for it.
2. I used a number of tricks that I got from Andrew Hansen’s “Niche Marketing on Crack” - I did not follow his method step-by-step, but some of the hints he provided were extremely useful. On this note, let me add that “Niche Marketing on Crack” is a great manual, especially if you have never done bum marketing before (and even if you have, it still has a few good techniques you can use to optimize sales and increase conversions).
3. All keyword research was done using the free Wordtracker tool and Niche Detector (which is another great tool released by a fellow WF member).
4. The keyphrase I targeted received approximately 21 daily searches in Wordtracker, which isn’t all that much. As I said, I already have a list of other keyphrases I’m going to target, but that’s conditional upon the upgrade of my EZA account to Platinum.
5. All articles that I submitted redirected readers to a Blogspot review page of the product I was selling. With no domain hosting, this method hasn’t cost me a dime, so I literally made money out of thin air.

In short, I’m very happy and am going to follow - as well as tweak - the checklist above for optimal results. Feel free to follow along, and maybe I’ll get to $500/month residual income yet!

Yep, that’s right - today was my first-ever overnight affiliate sale! Whoever bought the “Article Speed Writing” e-book by Andrew Hansen (which, by the way, is a great e-book that teaches you how to cut your writing and research time per article to a total of 30 minutes) - thanks, you’ve truly demonstrated to me the ability of affiliate marketing to make money even when you sleep. Nothing beats waking up and checking your affiliate stats to see a crispy $20.35 sitting in your account.

This bring my total affiliate income to approximately $60 - this is nothing for a 10 days’ worth of effort, but keep in mind that with my Platinum status application at EzineArticles still pending, my hands are pretty much tied. In fact, my affiliate marketing campaign has pretty much come to a standstill, since nothing can beat EzineArticles in terms of convertibility and search engine rankings.

Well, EZA should be approving my final article any day now, so I’ll be able to resume building my online empire (using the “Article Speed Writing” method to speed up the process a lot, of course).

Stay tuned, folks - once I get my Platinum status, my articles should be getting approved within 24 hours, so I’m looking forward to a period of massive growth. Things are about to get really interesting this week!

Well, my bum marketing campaign has been delayed now by almost a week by EZA sitting on the fence and refusing to finally approve the last article I have submitted. Since I’ve reached the 10 free submissions limit, there’s nothing at all I can do but sit here and wait for EZA to pull their finger out and actually do something.

I’ve started getting some traffic to my niche site, though not a whole lot of it (about 10 people a day, mostly through already published EZA articles). Unfortunately, I made the mistake of optimizing my initial set of 4-5 articles around the same keyword, which means that Google grouped them up nicely in one category, so only one of them really shows up in search engine results (and the rest are displayed as similar results if the user chooses to see them). Well, live and learn, I guess - soon as my Platinum EZA membership is approved, I’ll work on attacking a number of other keywords, which all have around 50 daily searches on Wordtracker.