August is almost over and I feel like I’m starting to get the groove of this whole work from home thing.  Not completely, but starting to.  I want to finish off the month with a bang so here are some goals (and I’ve only chose 5 because there are not a lot of days left!):

1. Complete at least one blog entry per day – reach for two though because that is what I’ll need to finish the Ultimate Blog Challenge.
2. Get up early enough to treat myself to a nice walk before I settle down for the day and start writing.
3. Write one article per day for myself to submit to Triond or Bukisa.
4. End each day with a list of things that I am going to do the next day.
5. Track time – the time tracking thing needs to get a whole lot better!

When I first started this blog I gave myself a 30 Articles in 30 Days Challenge.  Well, I ended it because I didn’t think it was really worth it.  But I’ve been reading a lot about others’ successes and I think I am going to give it another try.

I’ve mostly been doing passive income at Bukisa and since I last talked about it I have hit payout twice.  Only $20 but it’s better than I was doing before.  I know I need to be a little more focused.  I was just randomly putting up articles before and that doesn’t work.  So, I’m going to put a little more thought into it by being more niche specific.  I haven’t decided on the niche I want to work though so I obviously need to get to work on that.

I’m also going to try Triond.  I’ve heard some good and some bad but mostly good.

There are other ways to make a passive income though.  I still have plans to work my e-book plan and hopefully some of you will be joining me.

So, if you have advice about building a passive income leave me a comment.  And yes, you can leave links to your blog posts or e-books or articles in my comments.  As long as you’re contributing to the discussion links are good.

After reading Deb Ng’s post on Make Sure the End Justifies the Means I started to think about the time I was putting into writing articles for Bukisa.  Now, I didn’t write loads of them like others have – I think I had 26 up all together.  But was/is it worth the effort?  For me, I decided no.

The first reason was that several of the articles that I published there at the beginning were gone.  I emailed customer service and got no response.  I noticed that they are finally back but it would have been nice to have a response saying it was fixed or that they were working on it.  The second reason is that I logged in today to find that my earnings have actually gone down by about a $1 since the last time I was there.  Perhaps just a glitch but still…

And the bottom line?  If I have nothing better to do I can write articles and sell them on Constant Content or I can sell them as PLR content or I can sell them exclusively at webmaster boards.

So, the 30 articles in 30 Days Challenge is officially over.  I’ll leave my content up that is already there because it is good for samples when bidding on jobs but I won’t spend more time writing there.

I’ve heard of other writers doing similar challenges – writing a certain amount of article over a small period of time so I decided it is time for me to do a challenge of my own.  It’s an experiment in article marketing I guess.  And also to try to build up my casual income.  I’m going to use Bukisa.com because I’ve already got some articles up there and I’d like to see what might happen with a lot of them out there.  I want to see if it can turn into a nice little income stream.

So, 30 articles in 30 days.

I’ve already put together a list of articles I can write.  I was originally going to send them in to Constant Content where they could be sold but I’ll leave that for another time.  I’ve had two articles rejected there and I was looking at the forum and it seems like that is pretty common.  I’m not going to sumbit articles and then guess at what was wrong with them only to have to re-submit them over and over again and potentially not get very much for them.  Maybe I’ll put a bigger effort into that at some point in the future but I think for now I’ll see what I can do with Bukisa.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with Bukisa you can check it out here and join my network (yes, you will be me if you join my network so that’s up to you.  If you would really rather join without helping me just type in bukisa.com in your browser, but I really think it would be more fun to work together.) .  Perhaps you’d like to take part in my challenge with me?  If you do, please drop me a line and I’ll check in on you from time to time.   In a few words, the way Bukisa works is you submit articles or topics on your knowledge and every time someone clicks on your article you get paid.  Not a huge amount.  Right now the Bukisa index is 3.42 which meanst that you get paid $3.42 per 1000 views.  With the articles I have on there now I am sitting at $5.68.  So, my first goal is to hit payout ($10, which is not bad considering most of them are around $25).

So, today is the first day of the 30 Articles in 30 Days Challenge.  Join me and leave me a comment to let me know.

BTW – I can’t take credit for the idea.  I’m borrowing it from Dana Prince at The Writer’s Blog.