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!

Read, read, read

Have you ever heard the saying that you don’t have to “re-invent the wheel”?  It is so true.  Maybe you can innovate the wheel in some way to improve it, but the wheel is something that cannot be improved upon too much.  It’s been around for a long, long time, and would be hard to improve on.

The same is true, although not to the extent of the wheel, when it comes to making money online.  You don’t necessarily need to come up with something totally new.  Look at models of what people are doing now, and figure out how to adapt those models to your own situation.  You have a product that you want to sell online?  Well, there are dozens of online shopping cart solutions available, you just need to choose the one that fits your needs.  Want to write a book about your subject of expertise?  Well, lots of people are writing and selling e-Books, and you can too.  Honestly, there are thousands of ways to earn money on the net, and there are thousands of “wheels” out there for you to emulate.

What you need to do first is to choose some good blogs about how to make money, and read them.  Read them everyday.  Read them more than once per day, if you like.  But, read them regularly.  If you don’t, how serious can you really say you are about earning a living online?  Yes, I would be happy if you decide to read this blog regularly, and I would thank you for doing that.  But, I am far from an A-lister when it comes to this niche - how to make money online.  I earn a nice living online, but others have much more experience than I do.

For me, the best source of information on this niche is Darren Rouse, the Problogger.  Darren writes several articles every day, usually 7 days per week.  When it comes to blogging, Darren is the best source for how to make money.  How about affiliate marketing?  If you want to learn about that, Shoemoney gets my vote for the best source on Affiliate Marketing.  In my case, I have made money in many different ways.   I have made money blogging, sales through my online stores, selling on eBay and other methods.  I would say that the niche that I try to fill on this blog is not the huge “make money online” niche, but rather “make money online while living in the Philippines” niche.  It’s a different niche, believe me.

Anyway, the place I am going with this is to choose a half dozen or more sites that are about making money online, and read them religiously.  If you are serious about wanting to make money online, reading these sites is part of your work for the day.  It is just as important as picking up the hammer and swinging it, if you are a carpenter.  You will pick up a lot of new ideas and methods by reading sites like these.

Another tip, very important - beware of which sites you are using for your research.  A lot of people put up sites about how to earn money online.  The problem?  A lot of these guys who put up such sites have never earned any money online!  Have you ever heard the old saying - “Those who CAN do - Those who CAN’T teach.”  Make sure that you are learning from one of those who “Can,” and the best way to know that somebody can earn money online is that he/she IS earning money online.

The beauty of earning small amounts

$1 per day.  It’s not much, is it?  It’s not hard to earn $1 extra per day.  Hardly anybody would have a difficult time earning $1 per day, if they decided to do it and put in a little effort.

When people think about earning money online, they almost always think that they will get rich in an instant.  Will that happen?  Probably not.  Almost certainly not.  But, can you make enough money to become independent?  Yes, no doubt.  Can you quit your job?  Probably not right away.  Maybe you can in a few months or a few years, though.  I’ll stick my neck out and say this - if your goal is to quit the job that you have now, you can almost certainly do it within 2 years by making an effort to replace that income through the Internet.  I would say, also, that you don’t even have to work very hard in order to achieve that goal.

I am sure you are asking, though, “how will $1 per day really help me?”  Well, think about it - I am not encouraging you to settle for just $1 per day in earnings for the rest of your life.  If you did that, you’d get pretty hungry.  What I am encouraging you to do is to find a way to earn $1 per day off the net each week.  So, your project that you complete this week will bring you $1 per day for the coming years.  After you complete next week’s project that you choose, you will get $1 per day from that too, thus making your total earnings on the net at least $2 per day.  Remember, those $1 per day projects might start earning more than $1 per day as time passes!  They probably will.  So, if you can keep coming up with ideas that are worth just $1 per day to you, by the end of the year you will be bringing in $52 per day, and can continue to add to that.  So, even though you are earning small amounts of money on each project, they all add up, and can accumulate to a nice income.

I am sure that another question that is coming to your mind is this - “If I have 52 different projects going on, how will I have time for them all?”  Well, what I am encouraging you to do is to find things that you can do the work one time and they will keep producing money.  For instance, the other day, I told you about a plug-in called “aLinks” that you can add to your Wordpress blog.  You add that one time, configure all the keywords and you don’t have to worry about it again.  It will hopefully keep  making money for you for years to come.  Maybe you will need to spend 5 minutes a few times per year adding new links to new programs that you have joined, but I am talking about very minimal time that you will need to spend to keep that $1 per day coming in.

In my case, I honestly only work about 2 hours per day.  Some days I work more, but only if I feel like it, and want to take on new projects.  If I just wanted to keep the ventures that I already had, I would have no need to work more than 2 hours per day, and could probably do it in 1 hour.

Another good thing about earning small amounts from many different sources is that if something bad happens and basically shuts down one stream of income, it won’t hurt you badly.  If you are self employed and have just one source of income for your business, if something happens that stops your ability to use that source, you are in big trouble.  If you have 100 different income sources, though, and one of them goes bad, well you will want to look for a replacement, but you will also still be able to eat dinner that night.