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.

As the title says, I am going to try doing some crack later tonight. I got enough stuff for only $47 to last me a few days, and I’m really expecting great results. As I’ve never done crack before, this is going to be a very unique - and, hopefully, positive - experience.

…

Ok, on a more serious note, I am going to try applying Andrew Hansen’s “Niche Marketing on Crack” tonight to see whether it can really be leveraged into as profitable a business as he claims. Although Andrew’s method is not as automatic as I would like it to be (every site you setup will require maintenance and updates every two weeks or so - and although both are minor, they can become somewhat time-consuming, especially if you have hundreds of websites to deal with), it still sounds rather good and offers a rather unique spin on bum marketing.

As usual, I will be documenting my experiences and progress as I grow and expand my virtual real-estate empire. At the moment, I would not go as far as to endorse and recommend Andrew’s report - it sounds good and a lot of what he says makes sense, but I will not make any recommendations until I have actually applied it and seen the results for myself.

Yesterday, my PayPal account had about $77 on it - which is more than what my bank account had just a month ago, before I started writing articles - and I realized that I have to spend it on something. Online business, just like its offline counterpart, requires investments - and, in my case, I settled for an investment into acquiring new skills.

After much deliberation, I grabbed a copy of Andrew Hansen’s “Niche Marketing on Crack”, which talks about developing an automated bum marketing empire that supposedly can earn you up to $3,600 a year for every website you set up.

I’ll be going over it, as it sounds like a great way to get some passive income streams up and running. Andrew’s e-book has generated a lot of rave reviews on WF, so I have very high expectations of it. I’ll let you know if it’s any good - for $47, it had better be!

Well, I just received the remaining $300 from my client, finally pushing me over $1,000 that I have worked so hard for (as you can see from the counter at the top of the page, PayPal has pocketed about $120 in transaction fees all in all, since the total I received was closer to $1,200).

As you can imagine, I’m pretty happy about myself - and just in case you don’t believe me, I should be posting the screenshots of all the transactions leading up to $1,000 so you can see that I am, indeed, for real!

On an somewhat ironic related note, I also got robbed today on my way home. There I was, cheerfully minding my own business when I was suddenly approached by four rather unsavory individuals, one of whom was wielding a knife (which he pointed at my throat for greater emphasis) and started yelling “Argent! Argent” (which is French for “Money”). Luckily, when he saw me take out my wallet, he was stupid enough to reach and take the cash, as opposed to grabbing the whole wallet, complete with credit cards, and, worse still, a picture of my girlfriend. The sad part is that this unfortunate incident happened in Geneva - generally regarded as one of the safest cities in the world - at 23:30 local time, close to town centre and on a crowded street! Unbelievable - I was assuming I’d get robbed in Belarus, I was pretty much expecting to get robbed in Poland, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d get robbed in the heart of Geneva on a busy street!

In one day, I earned $300 and got robbed of about $50 - life sure has a sense of humor!

Sorry, folks, though I was planning to have the next part of my post-mortem  up and running today, I won’t be at home for most of the time to get it done (in fact, I don’t anticipate I’ll be around until tomorrow morning). I’ll post an update tomorrow as well as answers to some of the comments I received over the last few days.

Well, the spam on this blog has been getting rather cumbersome lately - you probably haven’t noticed it, but I did, as I manually moderate all comments to prevent you from having to find out where you can buy viagra at discount prices. Anyhow, I fired up Akismet today and we’ll see how well it performs - Mike Arrington, at least, claims that it does a great job of filtering out all the spam that TechCrunch must be receiving, and that’s good enough for me, I suppose.

It seems that no matter what I do, me and FeedBurner just do not get along at all. Over the last week or so, I noticed that my number of subscribers was gravitating around 9, which is an unusually low number for me. I haven’t had much time to look at it during the week, but now that I went over the subscriber records, I noticed that the problems seem to have started after I updated WordPress to whatever latest version I’m using now. I checked the plugin I was using to redirect my feeds to FeedBurner - one made by Ordered List - and voila, it was giving me an error.

Updating to version 2.2 of the plugin appears to have solved the problem, but if you are a subscriber to my blog feed and experience any problems with it starting from tomorrow (which is when the feeds should be updated), please do not hesitate to let me know and I’ll see what can be done.

…as you will no longer need it to read $1k Blog! That’s right, folks - after fooling around a little bit with template CSS files, I was finally able to increase font size, as well as switch to a slightly different font - hopefully, both of these changes make my blog a little bit more readable. Now, if only there was an equally easy way to fix my literary style…

I just added some categories to make my blog easier to navigate. “Article Writing Techniques” is pretty much self-explanatory; “The Money Trail” will include all posts documenting my progress to hitting $1,000 a month (and hopefully, one day, more!), while the “Personal Experiences” are just general commentaries and observations that I have come up with while working as an article writer.

I’ll be adding some more categories for SEO, Keyword Research, Copywriting and Marketing in the future as I actually get more involved in this fields.

I’d like to apologise to everyone subscribed to my feed, as, due to the way the old content of the blog was restored, you’re going to end up with 20+ blog entries all made in one day. This is unfortunate, but it was the only way I could repost all the content.

Please bear with me and my apologies for the inconvenience I know this will cause you.