jammy, i'm afraid you don't understand what cycling is.
in your water already are bacteria. these are good bacteria, but they are in VERY small quantities. these bacteria eat up deadly ammonia and nitrite from fish waste and decaying plant matter and food and turn them into much less harmful nitrAtes. but these bacteria will not begin to grow a colony (at least 90% of the colony will be in the sponges in your filter) unless they have food, which is ammonia.
so unless you have fish in the tank producing ammonia from their pee, or are dosing bottled ammonia, you do not have a cycled tank. the bacteria suppliment you added, even if it had been viable when you added it, is now dead because it had no food.
the best route to go would be to go to walmart and look in the cleaning aisle. there you should be able to find a bottle of "clear ammonia" and it should contain NOTHING but "Water, ammonia, chelating agent" anything else will kill your fish when you put them in.
you also will need a test kit. everyone here will reccomend you get a liquid test kit. they are more accurate, and last about 10 times longer than those little dip strips.
http://www.petsmart.com/global/prod...<>ast_id=2534374302023693&bmUID=1133632283063 go to the above link, print out that page, and go to your local petsmart and have them price match the "Aquarium Pharmaseuticals freshwater master test kit" it is about $25 in the store, so that will save you about $10.
now, once you have the ammonia, and the test kit, start adding ammonia a TEENY bit at a time. i would add just about 10 drops with a dropper of some kind, let the tank run for about 15 minutes, then test with the ammonia test.
keep adding ammonia until you reach a level of 3ppm ammonia.
then you wait. keep testing the ammonia and the nitrites until you start to see the ammonia drop, and the nitrites rise. this means that the first kind of nitrifying bacteria are beginning to form their colony. when the ammonia drops below 2ppm, start adding a little bit of ammonia to keep it somewhere between 2 and 3ppm. keep testing and monitoring. if the nitrite starts getting too high, you can do a partial water change to keep the nitrite below 5ppm. keep dosing ammonia.
then you will see the nitrite start to drop. this means the second type of bacteria are beginning to form. the first kind processes ammonia into nitrite, and the second kind processes nitrite into nitrAte.
nitrate is the end of your cycle. when you can dose ammonia up to 2ppm and it is gone within 24 hours, and there is 0 nitrite as well, your cycle is finished. do a large water change to get the nitrAte below 20ppm (nitrate should always be kept below 20ppm through regular weekly water changes) and add your full stock of fish all at once.
once your cycle is finshed, DO NOT replace the sponges in your filter. depending on what kind of filter you have, it should have two different kinds of sponges. one is "mechanical" filtration which removes larger particles and debris from the water, and the other is a biological filter sponge where the bacteria colonize. you can replace the mechanical filtration as often as you want, but do not ever wash or throw out the biological filtration or you will have to start your cycle over.
the process described above is called "fishless cycling" and is much more humane than using cheap hardy "throw away" fish to cycle a tank. because there are no fish in the tank, it doesn't harm any, and when you finally do add your fish, you can be assured that they won't be stressed from ammonia and nitrite spikes that can cause permanent damage to their gills and immune system.
