the richest man in atherstone

I've been neglecting my journal quite a bit lately! My time has been taken up with working on a few different projects for future and taking a nice long holiday

Earlier today, I was checking out a few of the affiliate networks I am a member of and was pleased to discover that I've reached my $200 threshold limit for Clickbank, which means I should receive a cheque from them sometime soon.

And that was when I thought that I really should update my blog and let you know how the Bum Marketing Method I experimented with last year has earned me over $200 from Clickbank.

Towards the end of last year, following a few successful sales of The Complete Ragdoll-Keepers Handbook, I decided to expand on my work in this niche. I bought the domain name ragdoll-cat.info and set up a quick website using drupal CMS. I added all the Ragdoll Cat articles I'd written as part of the Bum Marketing Method as well a few pictures I'd found on the Internet (with the kind permission of the photographer). I also wrote a quick review of the e-book I was trying to promote and, of course, the obligatory privacy policy and website disclaimer. All in all, it took about 2 hours.

At the beginning of this year, after a number of sales, I noticed from the search terms people were using to find my website that many were looking for breeders and catteries in their area, so I created a simple breeder list. I then emailed as many breeders as I could find in Internet Land to populate the directory. I also added an option for visitors to sign up for a newsletter and wrote a few more articles. This was about another 6 hours of work.

Since then I've pretty much left it alone. There's quite a lot I would still like to do in this niche (the cat-folk I've communicated with are lovely people) but unfortunately I've been busy with other stuff.

Since it's inception, the website has sold 18 copies the Ragdoll Cat e-book with no refunds. Each book earns around a fiver, so a total revenue of around £190. Subtract the cost of the domain name (around a tenner) and that's a net profit of £180 for around 8 hours work.

Don't believe me? Here's the proof

Yeah, I know - Not as impressive as the screenshots from other websites but I'm only a beginner and at least it's not photoshopped

I'm still of the view that Bum Marketing probably isn't worth the time spent on it but I can't help but think that if I kept at it maybe one could possibly earn a small fortune.

I have long been an admirer of cashback websites such as Cashbin, TopCashBack and LineMyPocket - I find them to be a nice easy way of earning a little extra fun money (take a look at my article on Quidco gambling).

In a nutshell, these websites can save you money by giving you a certain amount of cashback when you buy from certain shops (usually a percentage of how much you spend). This can be very useful in itself, however it is possible to earn more cashback than you spend - for example, when joining bookmakers or bingo websites you may be offered £20 to put just £10 on a bet. And there's also the option of earning cashback without actually parting with so much as a penny - by applying (and being accepted) for credit cards.

At the start of the year, I set myself the goal of earning £100 in cashback by applying for as many credit cards as I could in one evening. I made the decision to do it all in one evening to ensure I was accepted for as many credit cards as possible. This is because every time you apply for a credit card, your credit rating is checked and every time your checked, it is logged in your credit rating. If a lot of checks are recorded, it adversely affects your chance of getting credit, so my thinking was that if I applied for them all at around the same time, my credit rating would not have been updated therefore giving me more chance of being accepted by the credit card companies.

I should add that one of the downsides of this project is that I have screwed up my credit rating for a while but as I don't really need credit at the moment and don't envisage I will in the near future, it wasn't really a big deal.

Anyhow, I found the following credit cards that offered a nice amount of cash for simply filling in a form:

• Goldfish - £41
• Post Office - £20.50
• Natwest - £24
• RBS - £24
• HSBC - £20
• GM Card - £22
• Vanquis - £20

The plan in place, I spent an hour and a half on the cold, winter evening of the 14th of January applying for the credit cards online (via cashback websites, of course). Goldfish and GM refused my applications, however I was accepted for the remaining five.

Over the next ten days or so, I received the paperwork and cards from the five credit card companies that had accepted me and phoned to activate each one - it took about 20 minutes. I'm not sure if the credit cards had to be activated to receive the cashback but I thought I'd be best to do it anyway to make sure.

I also checked that my applications had been tracked by the cashback websites and was happy to see that I would be receiving payment for all of them.

Well, here we are in July and I've finally received my final cashback payments and achieved my target of £100 (actually, I earned £108.50). HSBC and Vanquis were the first to pay up in March, followed by NatWest in June and The Post Office and RBS in July.

It's been a nice little earner (over £50 per hour for exceedingly easy work) and I've earned enough to take the family out for a few "free" meals. However, it's not something that can be repeated as I can only receive cashback from a particular company for a particular product once. As I said earlier, chances are that my credit rating is screwed for a while but as I don't need credit I'm not particularly bothered. It's also quite a slow process waiting for the merchant to pay the cashback website and the cashback website to pay me but as it didn't cost me anything, I was more than happy to wait.

Now, I just need to call up the credit companies to cancel those cards...

After much deliberation, I've finally decided to try out PayPerPost as a source of revenue for my journal.

PayPerPost is a network that brings bloggers and advertisers together, however instead of selling advertising space, the blogger sells posts on their blog, the article you're reading now being an example.

The interface, or 'Blogger Dashboard' as they call it, is very user-friendly and easy to use. I had no trouble navigating around, editing my details and looking at the opportunities available. There are two ways of locating advertisers. The first is to include a 'badge' on your website that invites advertisers to contact you directly and negotiate a price. The second is to look at the 'Open Opportunities' section and reserve any that take your fancy.

With the latter, each opportunity displays the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for your post as well as what is required from you. Requirements include the number of words you write, whether it must contain a link or an image and whether your post should reflect positively on the business/product/service or can remain neutral.

I initially joined PayPerPost back in the Autumn of last year after having seen a number of my blogger friends using it but I had doubts as to whether being paid for my posts would taint my views and be detrimental to the website over the longer term. After a lot of thought, I decided that I would experiment with PayPerPost for a couple of months but set myself a few rules to adhere to:

• Sponsored posts must fit in with the theme of the website (e.g finance, money-making etc.)
• My posts will continue to be 100% honest (meaning that I will not write sponsored posts about something that I do not truly believe to be good value)
• I will only write one sponsored post for every three or more normal posts (to stop the website becoming saturated with advertisements)

On the whole, I think that the idea of PayPerPost is a great idea and I am looking forward to giving it a try. Bloggers get to cash in a little on their hard work and advertisers gain relatively cheap exposure for their business/product/service. I'll let you know how it goes

I experimented with the strategy of Stoozing at the back end of last year. Here's my report of the experience.

What is Stoozing?
In a nutshell, Stoozing is a method of making a bit of extra cash from credit cards. A number of credit card companies offer interest-free introductory periods, whereby you can borrow money and not pay any interest on it for a limited time. The idea is to bung the money from the free loan into a savings account and earn interest on it, remembering to pay the minimum payment each month and the whole of the remaining capital when the introductory period ends.

My original Stoozing article goes into a bit more detail and explains how I got started.

Did it Work?
After transferring the £2000 to my A+L Premier Direct Account at the beginning of October, I started to earn interest on the cash. Each month, the capital reduced by about £50-£60 as I paid the minimum payments, however this was offset by my bank account bumping up it's rates by 2% about halfway through the experiment. The interest I earned was:

Nov...£3.04
Dec...£8.56
Jan...£7.60
Feb...£7.79
Mar...£7.98
Apr...£7.93

Total...£42.90

So that's a £42.90 profit for about half an hours work.

Summary
I was pleased with the result and eager to transfer the balance to another 'free money' credit card at the end of the first's introductory period. Unfortunately, I couldn't get another card for a number of reasons; 1) I tried another experiment at the beginning of the year (I'll write about it soon) that involved a large number of credit searches, which probably reduced my credit rating, 2) There aren't a lot of suitable Stoozing credit cards on the market and 3) The credit crunch is making lenders more fussy about who they accept.

So towards the end of the term, I simply paid the balance off on the card.

I enjoyed this money-making experiment and will probably use this strategy again sometime in the future (perhaps in a milder economic climate). If you want to find out more, visit Stoozing.com to get all the info and if you're unsure about anything, don't be afraid to ask on their friendly forum.