I know there is no excuse for not posting on here and reaching my goals as stated, but my part time job has started to overwhelm me a little bit.  I’m still aggressively paying down my debts, but I have not been able to get the time to sit down on the computer and write my brains out as much as I would have originally wanted.  I still plan on hammering this out with Infobarrel, but it may take me a bit longer than originally projected!

I have only got one more article written since I last posted, which is quite pitiful, but there is another in the works, and if I can get the time today, hopefully I can squeeze out two!  I’ve only had two zero dollar days since I last posted and one monster day rocking out over $2.  

I’ve decided that I’m going to post my monthly debt dumber at the beginning of each month.  So in a few days you should be able to see how much debt I’ve hacked out.  With the way things are going, the total number should be moving down by at least $2000 a month, albeit that includes my mortgage as well.

 Anways, onto my Infobarrel numbers and my attempt to build a passive income to become debt free!

Oct 19: $0.26

Oct 20: $0.32

Oct 21: $0.64

Oct 22: $2.97

Oct 23: $0.00

Oct 24: $0.10

Oct 25: $0.00

Anyways girls and boys, I’m going to go write at least one more article here and try to slowly get this rolling to the point where I’m pulling at least $100 each and every month!

So, like usual, I get rediculously busy on the weekend.  Good news though, I managed to save $70, to pay off $700 off my car, $300 off my debt to the government and $125 off my $5000 Visa.  On the other hand, I wound up spending way too much money this weekend again.  I spent about $50 going out for dinner, $30 on a hair cut, and $70 on clothes.  I’ve got about $90 to last me for about 12 days.  Going to be pretty damn tight; looks like I will be avoiding any sort of daily coffees or snacks.  I guess that is part of killing off my debt!

The article creation process has been a bit slow the last few days.  Between working during the day, and working at night, it doesn’t leave much time for me to write.  Even though I have limited time I’m still going to do my best to have at least 30-50 articles written by the end of November.  Anyways, you are probably wondering what the earnings have been like?  I had my very first zero dollar day, oh well, it is going to happen!  If I can get 10 times the articles up I should be able to knock out at least one debt payment a month.

 Anyways, on to my earnings!

Infobarrel Earnings:

Oct 15: $0.33

Oct 16: $0.17

Oct 17: $0.00

Oct 18: $1.16

As you’ve read, I’ve been rediculously broke for the last couple of days.  Outside of the fact that I have a huge mound of debt, the keys for my car broke a few months ago and my car finally decided to reject my current key and refuse to start my car because of the immobilizer. To make a long story short, it was an unexpected $250 cost that I wasn’t planning on having, and well I paid for it out of my pocket (not on a visa) resulting in me having much less gas money/spending money.

Lucky for me, today and tomorrow are both pay days; they are both pay days because I have two jobs.  I did really well on my sales job over the last few weeks so I will have a little extra money to pay back some of my personal debts like my dad and a buddy I owe a few hundred bucks to, then its back to hammering away at my big ones.

This paycheck will wind up knocking out about $700 off my car debt and another $300 off my debt for taxes in arrears to the government. The end of the month will be my mortgage, and dealing with the line of credits.  As big of a pain in the butt as it is, I got myself into this mess so I’ve got to get myself out.

Infobarrel Stuff

Even though I worked nearly 13 hours yesterday I still managed to sneak in 20 minutes to write another 500-600 word Infobarrel article. I’ve also managed to continue on with my success of generating earnings every day.  Hopefully I can create enough content in the next month to never see a 0 dollar day!

Oct 14/2009

Total articles written: 6

Earnings : $0.63

Luckily tomorrow is pay day as I am absolutely broke.  I was driving my girlfriend to meet her car pool this morning with my gas tank on empty.  After dropping her off I was having a panic attack that I wouldn’t make it to the gas station to drain the remaining $12 from my bank account.  Luckily I made it and put $10 of regular gas into the Hemi that should last me until tomorrow when I get paid.  I’m happy about it being the middle of the month as my debts will drop by a little over $1000, which gets me a bit closer to being out of this giant debt hole I’ve built for myself.

More Infobarrel Tips:

Since I’ve been lucky enough to have received clicks every day since I started this conquest on Infobarrel, I’ve decided to post some more tips.  Today’s tip involves setting up twitter to automatically post your personal Infobarrel feed.  If you don’t have a twitter account yet, set one up, it takes about 30 seconds.  Next, signup for http://www.hootsuite.com, hootsuite is an awesome set of twitter tools that allows you to track how many visitors you send to your links and gives you the ability to plugin an RSS feed.

 Once you’ve got Hootsuite setup, add an RSS feed in the settings panel.  Tell it to post your latest post every hour.  Random people who are interested in the topics you are posting about will start adding you.  If you like any other blogs, try adding them to your hootsuite RSS feeds as well.  The more you post, the more likely you will be to get more followers.  I have a friend who started with no followers, did what I outlined above and gets about 80 clicks a day now to his RSS posts.  Not a bad way to get extra traffic for free that only takes a few minutes to setup huh?

Infobarrel Earnings:

Most of the days so far I’ve only been receiving one click per day, however I’ve had a few tripple click days… too bad the tripple click days weren’t very valuable!  I managed to write another article last night and I’ve already found it ranking on the first page for the title which is great news.  I plan on writing at least one article a day over the next three days.

Day 10 - Oct 13/09: $0.58

 Interesting Video Clip of the day: 13 year old 6 foot 6 basketball prodigy.. OMG

Hey guys,

Again I need to apologize for having pretty much no time over the last 5 days.  I’ve been busy working 13 hours days, working all day on the weekend, playing hockey, going to a Canucks game and having Canadian Thanksgiving.

 I will do my best to avoid missing too many days in a row like this in the future.  Because of all the holidays, sports, etc I’ve managed to make myself completely broke until the 15th.  I have $9 for gas in my Hemi powered car; I’m glad I don’t go very far!

 Because I’ve been so busy, I’ve been unable to add any more Infobarrel articles as of yet, but I’ve had a few really solid days.  I plan on writing a few tonight which I will update you with tomorrow.

So, how are my Infobarrel earnings going?

Let me show you!

Day 5 - Oct 08/2009: $0..08

Day 6 - Oct 09/2009: $1.16

Day 7 - Oct 10/2009: $1.25 <– Record day!

Day 8 - Oct 11/2009 $0.01

Day 9 - Oct 12/2009 $0.35

So, I’ve asked around to a few people and I think I’m seeing very good earning for the fact that I only have three articles.  I’ve written on three completely different niches, so I’m in the midst of testing the waters on what converts the best.  I’m going to continue to write on a handful of topics until I find one that is consistently lucrative. 

My Infobarrel Keyword Selection Process

One tool I’ve been using is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool , what I do is I put in key word phrases until I find one that gets about 1000 searches a month.  I then take the phrase, and put it in Google with quotes around it, for example "This is a test phrase".  If there is less than 10,000 results I know that I have a pretty good chance of ranking for it.  I plan on repeating this process hundreds of times until I reach my $1000 a month goal that I announced a week or so back.

Like anything, you are going to have your good days, and you are going to have your bad days.

 Yesterday was a bit of a bad day for me.  I never went out and randomly blew money on anything expensive, but I was so busy I did wind up eating out a fair amount.

I was so busy yesterday due to numerous client meetings which resulted in me going out for lunch, buying a coffee and grabbing a burger from KFC.  I also met up with a friend after work and spent $10 on beer.  In total, I wasted close to $40 that I could have easily kept in my bank account if I wasn’t so rushed.

 As another result of being so busy, I never had a chance to post on here, or write any Infobarrel articles.

While I’ve only got a couple of articles published, I continue to make a bit of change every day.  I see some massive potential with this, I mean, if I’m getting these sort of numbers with 3 articles, what would I get with 1000?  Definitely enough to destroy my $1000/month goal I’d imagine.

Infobarrel Stats:

Infobarrel articles: 3

Adsense Earnings for Wed: $0.12

I will be posting another update tonight for Thursday so stay tuned!

Funny Video: Giant Spiderman!

Today is going to be a really quick post as I’m about to go from my day job to my night job (to the sales gig).  Last night I had a work meeting at my sales job and found out I won a free Palm Pre Smart Phone because I had the most sales in BC for the month of September.

Since I already have a Palm Pre, I’m going to be selling it and putting the money towards one of my debts.  I forgot that I owe my father $300, so I will most likely just use the money to pay him off.

So good news in that regard.  I’ve managed to only spend about $4 on drinks in the last two days which is a lot less than my typical $5/day I was spending previously.

I also managed to write another article last night when I got home from my staff meeting brining my Infobarrel article count to 3!

Day 3 Stats
Infobarrel Articles: 3
Adsense Revenue yesterday: 0.19

Interesting Article of the day: Family Guy Banned in Venezuela!

Hey guys,

While little things like Coffees, bottles of Pepsi’s, snacks and fast food might not be the reason I’m in debt; they definitely have not helped contributed positively to my financial situation.  In the past, I would never pack my lunch, instead opting to eat out every day.  Whether I ate at a fancy restaurant or at the local fast food joint, the fact of the matter was I was burning around $10-20/day in food expenses alone.

Add those extra food costs up, and that is around $300-600 a month being blown on food I could have easily prepared at home for a fraction of the cost.  I quit eating out for lunch daily a few months ago but still randomly find myself going to get fast food when I’m dong my sales gig because I was too lazy to prepare some grub the night before.

 Next, we have my coffee and pop addiction. 

Currently I buy a cup of coffee aftger my morning workout at the gym, then I proceed to buy another one on the way to work, and I have a Starbucks drip coffee between noon and five.  Sometimes I replace the Starbucks coffee for a bottle of diet Pepsi. 

Regardless lets add up the costs:

Morning Coffee: $1.30

Gas Station Coffee on the Way to Work: $2.09

Afternoon Starbucks/Pop: $2.09

Alright, so adding these all up we have $5.48/day in wasted money or roughly $164.40 a month that I could be applying to my debt load.  I can easily replace all this expensive store bought coffee simply by brewing my own coffee at home for a few cents a cup.

While I don’t think I can completely cut my coffee out right off the bat, I think I’ll hold on to my $1.30 coffee first thing in the morning and try to stop having my other two coffees of the day.  After all I am human, and I usually spend some time socializing in the morning with my cheap AM coffee.

For the next month, I’m going to aggressively practice buying all my food and reducing the amount of coffee I drink to see if I can end the month we some extra money in my account as opposed to scraping money together to cover my bills.

 Infobarrel Progress:

I managed to write another article last night on Infobarrel and I actually got my first click.  I posted my first article on a few social sites to help speed up how fast Google indexes my content and it seems to have worked as I’m already ranking.

Total InfoBarrel Articles: 2

Yesterday’s Earnings: $0.80

Video of the day: Caffeine is the most widely used Psychoactive Drugs!

Today is a good day, today is the day I begin my journey to alleviating myself of the massive debt I’ve managed to acquire over the last two years.  Between making some bad choices and the economy really doing some major damage on my monthly income I’ve manged to accumulate quite a bit of debt.

About me

Before I go too far into detail, my name is Steve and I’m a 28 year old male.  I am a full time marketer and do sales thirty hours a week on the side to help make ends meet.  I live with my girlfriend and we own a house in beautiful British Columbia.

My Debt

Now that you know a wee bit about me, let me give you a little insight into my debt:

I have a credit card balance of $5000

A line of credit for $12,000

Another line of credit for $10,000

Owed Taxes of $3700

5 Lease payments totaling $3500

A Mortgage of $478,000

My total bad debt $34200

Total debt including good debt (mortgage): 512200

Current total monthly payments to cover this all: $5300

What do you think? Pretty impressive huh?  You are probably wondering how I manage to afford such a ridiculous amount? Like I said above I hold down two jobs and my girlfriend has one as well.

 How do I plan to become debt free?

 Since I’m currently working around 70 hours a week, I plan on continuing with both of my jobs.  I’ve been doing it for eight months now and have become accustomed to not having too many personal days off!  Aside from slowly hammering away with what I’m currently doing I plan on using an online platform called Infobarrel.com to slowly build an additional income stream.  Between my girlfriend and myself we plan on writing a few articles each and every day until I’ve managed to amass at least $1000/month that I can apply towards my monster debt pool. I read about Infobarrel on a guy named Ben’s blog about Making Money Online.  Ben has been making around $300 a month using Infobarrel so I figure it has to be worth a shot.

If I can get to $1000 a month, combined with my existing payments, I think I should be able to knock out all of my bad debt within two years.

I will chronicle my journey to become debt free on this site, and will provide daily updates (or at least semi daily) updates to show you what can be done with some hard work and perseverance.

You are more than welcome to join in, comment and hopefully follow in my footsteps to making my debt a thing of the past.

And just to keep things light (because we all know debt is such a heavy topic), I will try and end each post with some sort of humor, whether it be a funny video. a funny picture or a joke to lighten your day!

Day 1

Total Articles: 1

Todays Earnings: $0

Funny Video of the Day: Kitty fail