Well actually, it has evolved from a book into a course.

It is called Small Business, Big Ideas and is designed to help small business owners understand and apply the fundamentals of marketing. It covers some very basic stuff, but in my experience that is what small businesses most need.

It has gone out for review with a bunch of friends, business owners and other interested parties and I’m waiting for their feedback, before launching it on the unsuspecting public.

More news on this soon.

I am pleased to report that I have achieved my target of competing the Lieurance-King article challenge, by writing and submitting my 30 articles in just under 20 days and shortly afterwards hitting my personal target of having 100 articles on Ezine Articles.com

The challenge was inspiring and meant that I produced much more than I would have done otherwise and it has now inspired me to an even greater challenge.  My new target is 100 more articles in 10 days!Am I crazy? I don’t know - it seems like a huge mountain to me, but I know that the real article marketing pros achieve this kind of production level, day in and day out. We’ll see.

As you know Article Marketing is one of my core strategies for building traffic to Money and Mind my website and recently I’ve been taking part in the Lieurance-King Article writing challenge to write 30 articles in 60 days.,

The challenge has really inspired me to up my production rate and I’m glad to say that I managed the 30 articles in about 15 days. The real reason for that was that I also had a personal goal to get my number of articles on EzineArticles.com from just over 50 when the challenge started up to 100 by September 21st, which will be 3 months from when I first published my debut web article.

So what’s that got to do with being high-fived by a guru? Well, if you know anything about the article marketing scene then you’ll know that one of the most well known and successful advocates is Jeff Herring - so successful at it in fact that he is known as The Article Guy.Jeff Herring has been in the game for a long time and has thousands of articles on the web continually bringing him fresh and highly targeted, free traffic.  He offers brilliant courses in article marketing on his site and also runs a series of Free Training Teleseminars to anyone who wants to dial in. You can even get Free Article Templates from him.

Yes, I know I still haven’t answered your question - I’m nearly there.  Jeff publishes most of his articles on Ezine Articles and I noticed the other day that in the Goal Setting category, he was pretty near the top of the top 10 authors with the most articles on that subject. But to my amazement, I was only a couple of places behind him. Now of course Jeff has literally thousands of other articles on other subjects and is way ahead of me in every other respect.

BUT - it suddenly made me wonder what it would be like to beat a guru at his own game, in some small way. So that’s what I’ve done. I sat down and wrote enough articles on Goal Setting to get me past Jeff’s total. They’re not all approved yet so if you click on The Top 10 Authors in Goal Setting now, the numbers will still show me behind, but in a few days I’ll be there.

Hang on, hang on, yes I know I haven’t told you how he came to be congratulating me yet. I’m getting there, I promise.  As soon as I submitted the article that took me past his total, I sent an e-mail to the LK Challenge Group, crowing about my success and gloating at how I beat The Article Guy.

You can imagine my surprise and embarrassment when I got an e-mail back from the great man himself, who unbeknown to me was a member of the LK CHallenge forum.  Ooooops!!!!

Jeff congratulated me and toldme that I had inspired him to write some more articles on goal setting. Me! Inspired him!! What a great moment.

Of course that means he’ll just sit down and write about a thousand articles and win his crown back again, so my glory will be short-lived, but Hey, it was nice up there while it lasted.

I also set myself another record for the fastest article I have yet written.  11 minutes from idea to submission.  Phew - and I think it’s one of my better ones too!

Better than that though, I’ve been getting some great input and inspiration from some of the other writers taking part.  Such as Linda Della Donna and Dan Goodwin. Thanks guys.

I have also been inspired to start some joint promotional efforts with other article writers in the same niches  as me and will be firing off a couple of begging e-mails later today to see if I can get a little piece of someone else’s list in return for some content or a broadcast to my list.

I am using Adwords to drive traffic to those pages and it’s been interesting watching how it develops. I am still paying more to Adwords for the traffic to get there than I am getting back from Adsense, but for some reason that I don’t understand, the gap is closing every day.

In the first couple of days, my Adsense revenue was only covering less than 10 percent of my Adwords costs, but this has steadily climbed, till yesterday, when it reached 75%. What is weird is that this has entailed no intervention from me whatsoever. I haven’t changed the ads or the content or the bid price or anything. It just keeps climbing.

Now of course it may plateau out shortly, but I will keep it running each day and see what happens. If it starts to show a profit, you will be the first to know.

The challenge began on August 1st (but it’s not too late to join in) and runs till the end of September and it is simply to write and publish 30 articles within that period. That’s only one every two days, so not a huge task. However, if you’ve tried doing that you’ll know that sometimes it can be really tough. To help with this, Suzanne and Kristen have set up a great forum for discussion and encouragement, where everybody can share ideas and keep each other going.

I’m using the challenge to keep me on track for my own personal goal which is to have 100 published aarticles out on the web by September 21st - my score currently stands at 52.

Join the challenge here.

It will take a month or two to get back to where it was before, but I can now see that the slow and steady approach using articles and press releases, definitely does work.

The steady rise of my Alexa ranking has slowed as well, as I knew it would, but I’m still proud of my score at 849,345.

As it turned out, my traffic has fallen by about 90%, which was such a shock that I almost turned Adwords back on again. However, I decided to hold my nerve and interestingly, it looks
like my signups have only fallen by about 50%, which proves the theory that organic and/or article traffic is much better quality than paid for.

After the initial sickening drop, daily traffic has held steady, so I’m going to stick with this for a while longer and hopefully shortly I’ll begin to see it slowly rising as more articles gain wider distribution.

My Alexa ranking also continues to rise. Well it falls really but the lower the number the better. It is now at 1,074,136  It may fall through the one million mark soon which will be an excuse to crack open a bottle of mineral water (well, it’s a pretty small milestone). However,
there is a big BUT here as it’s based on one week and 3 month averages - so the traffic drop won’t have been reflected yet and I expect it to start to move out again in the next couple of weeks.

I will create a web based business which generate a revenue of $10,000 per month.

It will be based around Money and Mind my existing site, but will have additional content and sites added on, to build multiple income streams.

I will complete and market my first e-book.

My sites will be based around the two main areas of my interests: self development and small business marketing.

I will derive the majority of my sales from zero cost traffic building methods, particularly blogging, article marketing and viral traffic.

I will be able to support myself and my family from my web marketing efforts alone.

This is my mission.

Signed Andrew Grant – July 23rd 2007.

So of course, the immediate effect is that my daily traffic is down by 60%, which feels a bit like somebody cut off most of my oxygen, but I am challenging myself to get the daily stats back up to the pre cut off level in one month’s time. My aim is to deliver something every single day, including the days when I’m away on holiday for a week.  Deliverables including submitting an article per day to the major sites and a blog post every day at least, as well as any activity that creates additional links 

By the way, if you haven’t checked out the new Special Content sections on my site covering Goal Setting and Positive Thinking, then do so now.  (That was a sneaky way to get more traffic by the way). I’m also going to publish a mission statement – which you are welcome to read – in fact it will be my next post.  I figure if I put it out there, then I have to work harder to live up to it.