Saturday, October 30, 2010

Success is Contagious

Like I predicted, I am drowning in homework. I'm taking 5 art courses and each class has one art project, one reading response and one critique due each week. Some classes have exams due every two-three weeks. It feels as if I'm always doing homework and I'm still behind on some of my classes. I haven't done any of the reading for my web design class. My rough draft is due in two days and I don't know anything about HTML. I'm going to be doing a ton of reading tomorrow while watching the Vikings game. I'm also behind on all my bills and I've completely ignored the new health blog I started.

The only reason I'm going back to school is to make my parents feel better that I'm actually doing something with my life. It is buying me time to build a passive income. If I wasn't going back to school, I'm sure my parents would have kicked me out of the house by now. By the time I get out of college, I hope to be making a full-time living from Info Barrel (and a few other passive writing sites - I won't put all my eggs in one basket). Then I won't have to get a job in web design (I don't really like it all that much). I will be able to spend my time doing what I want to do and not what my parents want me to do.

Because I was spending all my time working on homework, I was starting to wonder when I would have time to work on writing for Info Barrel again. I'm never going to build a passive income if I don't work at it. I was reading a thread on the Info Barrel forum titled "Getting to $100 a month...how much content?" Most people agreed that one would need 150 articles to make $100 a month. If I could get to $100 a month, then I could easily get to $200 a month and then $400 and so forth. I figured that I need to write 3 articles a day to get to 150 articles by the end of the year. I made a list of 300 low competition, high paying keywords that I can write about. I'm going to go down the list and write a 1,000 word article for each keyword - hopefully writing 3 articles a day. I really want to get to $100/month by January 1 (also happens to be my birthday).

Here are the articles I have written in the last two days:


Top 5 Hand Held Vacuums
Top 5 Hard Floor Vacuum Cleaners

*Notice that they are all top 5 lists. My highest earning article is Top 5 Zip Line Kits for Children so I know Top 5 lists work well. People searching for specific products will find my articles along with people looking for a general review of many products in a specific category. All the articles are about vacuums. I'm going to write 10 articles related to vacuums and link them together. The next 10 articles will also be centered around a specific category and linked together. This way, I'm hoping to get more views from one person. The more they look at my articles, the more likely they will see an ad they want to click on.