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!

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?

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.

Having read Andrew’s “Niche Marketing on Crack”, I’ve decided to combine it with a more traditional approach to bum marketing and leverage the power of article submissions and Squidoo lenses to hopefully create an affiliate marketing monster. I’ve picked out a niche (dealing with IM, actually - yes, I know it’s very competitive), and despite being quite sick managed to write and submit a few articles to three article directories (EZA, GoArticles and ArticleDashboard). I wrote 2 articles and submitted each one to three directories - I know this isn’t the recommended way of doing things, but I’ll see how badly - if I all - I will be penalized by Google for it before I jump to conclusions.

A Blogger blog with direct links to the product I’m marketing is now awaiting its first visitors (I already got some through Digg and Reddit, but that was mostly for list-building rather than genuine traffic) - I’ll keep my fingers crossed and see how it works!

Well, as you saw, Wednesday came and went without any updates from me on the status of my project and my effort to earn $1,000 online within a month. My apologies for not updating you - sadly, my ISP decided to upgrade everyone’s connection free of charge. This sounds great, if you don’t consider the fact that it meant constant service interruptions for two days. I was literally getting disconnected every 10-15 minutes, which is why I wasn’t able to post anything, or, more importantly, do the research I needed to submit my work to the client on time. As you can imagine, the final submission was despicably late (in fact, I only e-mailed it a few minutes ago).

Sadly, my effort to earn $1,000 a month was a failure - assuming that the client finds my work of acceptable quality, I will receive the remaining $300 for the job I did sometime closer to the end of the week. This payment would push me over $1,000, meaning that I will have earned $1,000+ in approximately 5 weeks.

In retrospect, this could have been done a lot faster - unfortunately, a lot of offline issues came up that required my immediate attention and took up far more time than I had originally anticipated. $1,000 a month was definitely doable and is something I will try to achieve next month.

In the meantime, over the coming days, you can expect to see a post-mortem of my project highlighting the lessons I learned as well as my successes and failures. I hope you will find it as informative and beneficial as I did.

Yesterday, I received another $210 for writing online (the earnings counter at the top of the page will be updated later today when I get around to it the earnings counter has been updated accordingly). The next and final payment - assuming that the work is of acceptable quality of course - should be $300, pushing me a bit over the $1,000 goal that I wanted to earn this month.

Also, I’ve decided to cheat a little bit here - since February had only 28 days this time around, I’m going to give myself a few extra days to make it a full 31-day month. Therefore the new deadline is March 13, 2007. In retrospect, $1,000 could have been earned in 28 days - even less, actually - but the sheer number of things I unexpectedly had to deal with precluded me from giving my full attention to the work at hand.

Closer to the end of the week you can expect a post-mortem on my project - an examination of what I did right, what I did wrong and some general reflections on my experience of working online so far. I can, however, already state that I have no intention of stopping at $1k a month, so there’s a fairly good chance that my next goal will be to either earn $1,000/month consistently or to push it to a grand total of $2,000 in 30-31 days!

Either way, stay tuned - if if I should reach the $1,000/month goal by March 14, this blog isn’t going anywhere (in fact, this is really just the beginning - though I’m not sure how accurate the $1k Blog name will still be - I like the possible brand power and sound of it, though).

Yesterday I made another $100, which puts me well over $500, so I’m more than halfway to completing my goal of earning $1,000 a month online. Now, since I started this blog on February 12, I guess that gives me up to March 12 to pull it off. Can I do it?

Well, alright, maybe no, not really - at least not at my present level. But it is still serious enough to have earned me another $200 a few hours ago, from a pay-as-you-go contract that I am currently working on. And just in case a doubting Thomas comes a long to visit my site - God knows the Internet has many of those, and I was one of them up until a few weeks ago myself - below is a screenshot of the transaction (you’ll see two $200 entries - the February 22 one is for the first payment that I received but never screenshotted):

Well, $191.90 after PayPal tooks its transaction cut - but it’s still nothing to sneeze at given my current financial situation. Finally, however, I’m able to cover all my bills - not only the oustanding ones, but also the ones coming up in March. It’s such a relief to no longer have to dread the moment when you open your Credit Card/Mobile Phone envelope containing the bill.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of updates - I’ve been terribly busy with an extensive writing project (for which $200 is only the first payment). It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever had to work on as an article writer, and, though I’m very excited, it also takes up a lot of my time.

No rest for the wicked - I just received another article writing contract that I will be working on effective immediately. It’s a very exciting - and profitable - assignment, one that I’m eagerly looking forward to. It should also be a very interesting break from the normal article writing stuff, as this contract will be focusing more on helping create a product rather than a set of thematically-related articles.

Also, I think I should take this opportunity to clarify some of the confidentially rules that I am bound to. Under no circumstances will I ever reveal the name of my client, the exact number of articles that I’m working on and, most importantly, their topic. Profitable niches are some of the most valuable commodities on the Internet, and I will not jeopardize my client’s trust by revealing the focus of their activities for everyone to see.

With that said, I will still be happily posting screenshots of PayPal transactions as the main proof that I am indeed earning what I claim to be (it’s not a lot, I know) and not just pulling a fast one here.