I was recently looking through my old blog ‘At Last I’m Free’, as I am planning on taking it down very soon and am seeing if there is any content I can salvage.
After reading through my posts and thinking back to early this year when I started, it came across that my main aim was making money! That really was not my main aim but for some reason I believed that talking about it was an interesting subject
It was interesting to see where I was and where I am now and I thought I would publish my first post for you guys to see before I take it down forever.
It was called ‘£0′ and was published sometime in April 2007
£0
LOCATION: UK, Train between London and Hastings.
So here it is! Hopefully the start of my new online life. I’m going into this blind. If the stories are to be believed alot of hard work will eventually pay off with the possibility of earning an income online.
I’m 25 now and have been working since I was 16 as a Graphic Designer for print work and have only briefly scratched the surface of anything web related. Obviously like most 20somethings i’m fairly addicted to checking my email and surfing the net. My dream is to find a way of working from the internet with no office, no one to go and see and no ties as to when I work. I hope that I will be able to take my work anywhere where a wireless network or internet cafe lurks. The streets of Bali, a North American Lumberjack town or a sleepy Somerset village. I no longer want constraints of where I work but I am willing to work.
So I know I now have an extremely steep learning curve. It’s going to be in my nature to steer towards ideas that somehow relate to imagery and graphics but I am hoping to try out various different money making strategies and hopefully put fingers in several pies to try and spread the chances of hitting on something good.
I guess my aim will be £1000 per month, if I reside at my mothers house in Liverpool (uk) then this should be enough to enjoy travellinga around and give me the freedom I crave. If I can acheive this (ever) I will have amazed myself but who knows, you just have to try these things. For now i’ll make my next few weeks an aim to get something above £0.
As you can see this blog needs a lot of formatting and designing to make it more than just the template and that will definitely be one of my first jobs. I’ve also been surfing around the web and on first inspection it seems that Google Adsense seems to be the number 1 earner for most people so i’ll be looking at incorporating that into this site and hopefully any other sites I start working on. I’ve also made a promise that wherever I feature money making advertisements I will always feature a free advert to one of the charities that I care for.
So, How exactly am I going to start. I have a swarm of various ideas blowing around my head and have been reading snippets here and there. So firstly I need to nail down a few serious ideas and start implementing them.
One of the first ideas I will work on are a few designs on a site called cafepress.com. Cafepress let’s you sell merchandise featuring your designs and place a mark up on there product. They give you the webspace, print and distribute your items for free or a small premium cost depending on what kind of service you want from them. I particularily have one T-shirt design in mind but will try and find a few others around the theme and upload them, then start the promotion. Actual earning from this site seem to be sketchy from reading testimonials but if it’s a few dollars as a start and becomes pretty easy to maintain then it will be a start.
I also have an idea for a links website for which i’ll post more details later. This will be a basic site manually run by me at the start and featuring Google Adsense and a few other affiliate and pay per click schemes if possible. Details will follow when I have purchased the web address and started putting everything together.
Right now, i’m full of all the enthusiasm and none of the knowledge! Research will be key to this being a success and hopefully if anybody else reading this is interested in pursueing the same destiny then maybe my coming posts will be a help and maybe they can point me in the way of some helpful information. I will also be searching around and linking to other blogs and articles that I find helpful.
Wish me luck!!!!
Forest.
(bad spelling and grammar has been left in tact!)
I guess my aims and intentions are still similar. Things are going more slowly that I first imagined they would and I am less focused on money making. I also think th naivety has worn off.
Wow I said ‘I’ in this post more than ever before. I am so selfish!
12. November 2007 at 10:46 pm
Hi Forest, if only u truly believe it and hold on to your dream, it will surely come true. Guess what, i have been working in the corporate world, and decided to leave it after 7 yrs of working. Now i am doing so fine (working from home) and never looking back since then.
All the best to you, and hey, thanks for dropping by my blog with your mosquito experience
chin nee
http://www.demoments.net
14. November 2007 at 6:58 am
That was really interesting and revealing. You can definitely make 1000 a month blogging. You may need to have a few more blogs but it’s entirely possible.
I’m glad you shared your story!
16. November 2007 at 9:18 pm
Thanks guys, like I said making 1000 is less of a priority now as I just want to blog and be good at it.
The dream is still alive though and it’s just starting to become real!
19. November 2007 at 5:00 am
I have never been ‘gainfully employed’ in the traditional sense. I’ve always been a freelance designer, but I share some of your goals. I think making money online is as noble a goal as any and the added freedom it can provide is something to aspire to even for career freelancers such as myself.
You have some very good ideas in your original post. I think you just need to actually pursue some of these and you will be on the right track. When starting out, we all underestimate the amount of work and time required for these things (or we simply fall for all the “in a matter of minutes!” hype fed to us by some successful people
), but as long as you stick to it I’m sure you will see the results.
Best of luck on all those fronts.