Early last summer, I was making a serious effort to find a way to pay the bills with my writing. I sent out a number of query letters (which were mostly ignored), started writing for a couple of websites, and – six months ago today – I joined The Keyword Academy.
I’m normally pretty skeptical about the “make money fast” claims; TKA, however, is pretty much the opposite. It’s a “make money slowly through lots of hard work” method. They also offer a month-long free trial, during which you have access to everything…which makes it easy to take a look. I wasn’t really expecting much, but I figured I’d subscribe for a month and see if I learned anything interesting, then cancel the subscription.
Once in, however, I liked what I saw. This wasn’t a make money fast scheme; their formula was “simple strategy + LOTS of work = money”. Additionally, they had a number of tools to help with the work, all of which were included at no extra charge. It made sense.
The stated goal of The Keyword Academy is to get 1000 members to $1000 per month in earnings by June 2011, which sounded like a pretty good goal to me. At the time I joined, I believe 17 people had made it; that number now stands at 105.
As for me? Well, life has gotten in the way a bit – I was busy and stressed last year from looking for a job, and I’m busy and stressed this year from HAVING a job – but I am seeing some progress. I was hoping to hit $50 in passive income last month, but I ended up missing it by a penny. Maybe I’ll get there this month.
Right now I’m in (hopefully) the most challenging part of the training for my new job, so I can’t devote a lot of time to anything else. Once that’s done with, however, I’m still (unfortunately) going to have a number of evenings free before my wife makes it out here. When I’m not working on my dissertation, I think I’ll use them to see if I can get closer to being one of the first thousand..