Always Learning and Searching for New Opportunities
The thing I have discovered in my six years of working online is that it is really a journey. Whatever you do, there is always more to learn, and new opportunities coming along.
I started earning money on the Internet by selling on eBay. I was listing a minimum of 50 auctions a week and at one point reached silver power seller status. This was very useful for me as I could do eBay at home in between looking after my family. Selling on eBay and making money from it is not an easy thing to do. It took two or three years of selling before I really felt like I was achieving some success. But I learned so much. I had to find stuff that would sell, write auctions, take good photographs and learn how to list them properly and then market what I had to sell. And if you’ve ever sold on eBay you’ll realize that shipping a parcel the quickest or cheapest route is far from a simple thing to calculate.
So, just as I started to feel I was earning a decent income from selling on eBay, I discovered online writing. This seemed a great way for me to write and earn money without having to ship any parcels. At the same time eBay was becoming more difficult to earn a living and that is why earning money by writing online appealed to me. I could keep earning money in the spare hours that I had, in between looking after my family, and without leaving the house.
Like many other people I started writing on HubPages, then soon after InfoBarrel, Best-Reviewer, and other revenue sharing sites. That is where I learned about SEO and how some topics earned more money than others. I started to earn money on HubPages with Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliates.
But the success was not to last for long. In June 2011 a law was passed that meant, because I lived in California, I was no longer able to earn money with Amazon Affiliates. This was a huge shock to me because at the time most of my earnings were coming from them. What it made me do was look around for other ways of earning money online.
So, in the summer of June 2011 I wrote my first book, HomeschoolingBoys – Gaining Maximum Success from Minimum Cooperation and started four blogs. Since then I have written other e-books and started many blogs and websites. With another change of law in October 2011 I was then able to resume earning money with Amazon Affiliates. But from then on I determined I wouldn’t have one major source of income. I now aim for five separate streams of income. I reason that if I lose one stream, I would still have the other four. I currently earn money from Kindle books, Amazon Affiliates, ShareASale, Google AdSense and off-line work. For a while, I also earned some money with Fiverr.
The whole process of learning to earn money online has been, for me, a journey. I have had to teach myself everything I needed to know to run my blogs and websites and to publish my e-books. To do that I read a lot of articles, books and watched many videos on YouTube. The skills I learned in marketing when selling on eBay came in very useful when I had to promote my articles and books.
When Pinterest was new, I learned how to integrate it in my business to help promote my websites and thus earn extra income. When the next new thing comes along I’ll learn how to use that.
Life online is changing every day with new sites, new rules and regulations and it is my job to work out how I can earn money not just from current sites but also from sites in the future too.