I was on my usual lookout for profitable ideas and real life stories that might inspire me to keep on persevering with my goal. Once in a while I really need to read success stories like this to motivate me.

A profitable internet business does not happen overnight unless you happen to find a perfect niche that has a hungry crowd for your product or service that you happen to target on your first startup business attempt. Otherwise, it’s always an uphill climb especially if you don’t have a method or system to follow.

Here’s a simple story that I found in http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1161509 about a guy named Jose Armando. He started out just like any one on the internet wanting to earn money working from home. For about a year, he and his brother hacked and plowed their way to reach his goal of earning $100/day until finally, he achieved it!

What method did he use? It was a simple method pioneered by a guy named Travis Sago. Travis called it “Bum Marketing” or simply article marketing, i.e. submitting written articles to popular article directories such as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com that included a sig file to his homepage or blog containing his affiliate link for the product or service that he was promoting. Coupling that strategy with PPC, Jose Armando managed to reach his goal in a year’s time. Does it still work today? Not really sure, I really think it will all depend on the niche, traffic and conversion but I’ll surely give it a try!

Here’s Jose’s formula for success:
Jose didn’t do it all by himself. He had help form his brother and most importantly, he asked advice and got the right answers from people who already had success with the system. In his early months he had no sale but that did not discourage him. He kept on going.

This brings me to similar situation of a question I asked on a forum. I got a safe calculated answer, a moronic answer and a fairly decent one that pointed me to one strategy. I’ll probably rephrase my question addressed only to successful marketers so that only those qualified will be giving me the right advice to solve my problem.

Jose also learned how to use PPC. It’s one of the fastest ways to test if your market will respond favorably to your ad or not but the only drawback is that PPC can be expensive if you do not know what you are doing.

And the last important part of his formula is that he was able to find a niche that was not too crowded (in competition) and had the capacity to buy. He tested if the market will convert using PPC, kept the ones that did and threw the ones that didn’t. All he did was just rinse and repeat until he reached his goal. He did that with so much persistence and tenacity that in a year’s time he was able to achieve his goal.

For experts on internet marketing, they can easily earn Jose’s monthly income in a day or week but for newbies, it’s a steep hill that seems to go on forever without an end in sight. But not all is lost though, if we follow Jose’s formula for success, it will be just a matter of time before we can achieve success for our next business startup ideas .