How I started

We all get into different kinds of jobs or businesses, often completely unintentionally.  How many of us actuallly work in the industry that we were actually educated in?  I mean, when we went to college (those of us who did) and studied Engineering, or English, or whatever, very few of us actually work in the field that we were educated for.  That just happens over the years.

I never finished college.  It bored me, so I quit.  Frankly, it is a decision that I have never regretted.  I am kind of a free spirit, I like to do what I want to do, and that varies.  Sometimes I do a certain type of work, then I get bored with it and move on to something else.  It’s just my nature.

Because of my free nature spirit, I have gone through many jobs over the years, and even many niches within the same type of work.  I’ve been earning money online for more than 10 years now.  I have earned my living exclusively online for about 6 years now.  But, how did I get started in earning online?  Let’s have a look.

In 1997, a friend e-mailed me and told me about eBay.  I had never heard of it before, they were still relatively new, so I went and checked it out.  Wow, it intrigued me.  I started buying a few things on eBay.  I learned the ropes of how eBay worked by buying on the site.  I bought quite a few things there, because I found it convenient, and also I was intrigued at being able to actually buy things on the Internet, something that was almost unheard of in those days.

Being the entrepreneur that I am by nature, it didn’t take long and I had the itch to sell on eBay.  I had to learn how to do that, but I didn’t consider that a hurdle.

During this time, I didn’t have too much money, I sort of lived paycheck to paycheck, but I was happy.  It happened to be May of this particular year, and I had just gotten a very nice tax refund, around $5,000.  Feyma and I went to do some shopping at Costco, mostly for groceries.  While there I saw a big pile of REX organizers, from Rolodex.  I had been wanting one of these things, it was a credit card sized PDA, and I wanted one, but they were too expensive for me at that time.  Online, you could buy one for about $150 in those days.  At Costco, they had them for $49!  I couldn’t believe my eyes, but I didn’t buy one.  Too conservative with my money, I guess.

When we got home, Feyma told me that she was surprised that I didn’t buy a REX and try to sell it on eBay, after all it was 1/3 of the normal price!  Oh, wow, this was a business opportunity.  I went back to Costco to get a REX to sell on eBay.  Hmm, I thought… how many should I buy?  Two?  Three?  Well, I remembered that I had that $5,000 tax refund in the bank.  When I got to Costco, I bought 100 units.  That’s right, I blew my entire tax refund on REX units.  What if they didn’t sell?  Well, Costco is very liberal about giving refunds on unused products, so no biggie, I would just return them if they didn’t sell.

I got home, and got busy, started listing my new found product on eBay.  When I woke up the next morning, I already had bids for higher than I had paid for the units.  By the time my auction ended, I had sold the REX for over $100, so I more than doubled my money!  I started listing 3 or 4 REX’s on eBay at the same time, with auctions ending at different times, different starting prices, etc.  I sold out of the 100 units in a week or so, and went back and bought another hundred.  Sold all of them too.  I made between $25 to $80 per unit.  I made less on the units sold at later dates, because others started finding the deals, and were in competition with me, but still, $25 was a nice profit, and I was happy with it.

I made a nice chunk of change from selling those REX units.  It only whetted my appetite too, because from that day forward, I have made money online in one way or another ever since.  It was a great way to start!

Do you have a story on how you started earning money online?

What? You are not yet making money online?

What are you waiting for?

How are you doing?

Remember, earlier this year, I wrote a series of articles on my new project, $1 per day?  I encouraged you to come up with a new project that would earn you an extra $1 per day, every day of the year.  I’d like to revisit that and ask you a question.  How are you doing with the project?  Several people told me that they were “game” and were going to come up with such projects.  It’s time now to go back and look at our progress.

I, myself, started two such projects, hoping to start out by earning an extra $1 per day, and building on that to make it a nice contributor to my income.  In looking back and reviewing my level of success on this, I must say that I am pretty happy with the level of success achieved.

One of my projects involved selling a new product which I did not have in my product mix before.  I actually set up a brand new website for this, and sent out promotional e-mails to my existing customers of a related website.  I am happy to report that the site has become pretty successful.  In only about 6 months in business so far, the site is doing gross sales of about $120 per day, with a net of about $50 or so!  For only 6 months in business, I am very happy with that!

My second $1 per day project involved a completely new venture, which I started about 4 months ago is returning a net profit of about $50 per day too.  This particular venture requires little work at all, although there was about one month of 40 hour weeks up front.  So, for about 4 weeks, I devoted 40 hours per week, and it has been netting me about $50 per day since then, with less than 5 minutes per day of work after that initial burst of work.  Now, that, in my opinion is a great success story!

How about you, have you got any success stories from any $1 per day projects that you have started this year?  If so, why not share your story with us by leaving a comment below?  I am sure that there are some really inspirational stories out there, and our readers would enjoy hearing them!

By the way, I have a new $1 per day project that I just recently embarked on.  It involves revamping a number of my blogs (still ongoing), including this one.  It’s my goal to increase the income I am earning from these sites.  I’ll be reporting more information on the level of success as I progress.

You can do it, but only if you try!

With friends like these…

I love my friends.  I have lots of them, and they enrich my life a lot.  Of course, some friends are closer than others, some are basically just acquaintences.  For a lot of my friends, I do things to help them, when it comes to earning money, especially making money online.  I give advice to them, tips, even help them set up things.  For some, this is very helpful, for others it doesn’t seem to help that much, because they don’t follow through.

Over this past week I have had experiences where two of my friends could have had a seriously negative impact on my ability to earn money online.  I want to advise my readers that you cannot always help your friends, especially it is very important to not let your friends do things that could limit your ability to earn money.

The first incident happened with a very close friend.  I am willing to do almost anything to help this fellow if he is in need.  Almost anything.  But, this week, he asked me to do something for him that could cost me around $1,000 per week worth of business.  Sorry, I can’t do that.  What did he ask me to do?  Well, here is the story:

This fellow is in a bit of a financial jam right now, due to circumstances.  Some of the circumstances are beyond his control, some are not.  This fellow has some money in his Paypal account.  He recently tried to withdraw money from Paypal into his bank account.  Somehow, some trouble came up with the transfer, and the money never made it to his bank account.  He tells me that due to this transaction, Paypal has put his account under investigation.  Now, I don’t know the details of this investigation, but just the fact that there is an investigation worries me.  Next, my friend said that he wanted to send me about $500 from his Paypal account to mine.  I would then withdraw the $500 to my bank account, and give it to him.    Red lights started flahsing!  With this guy’s Paypal account under investigation, I don’t want to have any connection to him.  If money is moving from his account to mine, it is very possible that MY account could soon be under investigation.  I sure don’t want that.  I make significant money through the use of Paypal, and I would not want to jeopardize it in any way.  In the end, I loaned my friend some cash, and told him that he needed to work out the problem with Paypal, but not to include me in it!

On another front, I got an e-mail from a reader of one of my blogs.  He had a proposition for me.  He would start doing unethical things on my site that would cause me to earn money.  In return, he was asking me to do the same.  Hold on!  No way would I become involved in this.  What he proposed could have cost me more than $1,000 per month.  If he did what he was proposing, I might have made an extra $5 per month, but endangering $1,000 per month.  Not a good idea.

My whole idea here is that if you are experiencing some success with online money making, don’t let other people jeopardize your ability to keep that money flowing!