Yup you read that right- if you are desperate to make an income right now. You have been told your job ends in two weeks and you don’t know how you will make next month’s mortgage repayments – then making passive income online won’t help you – yet. I have been playing this website building game for two years – my income still fluctuates – I wrote that in July I had made $2000 online- I am yet to get past that approximate figure again – in fact my passive income was significantly down in October – but overall I was up because of a domain sale and some more freelance work. It swings-and-roundabouts – it doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But it might – soon. My partner’s contract finishes at Christmas and we are moving back to New Zealand. My income suddenly becomes our only income – at least for a while – the pressure is definitely noticeable i.e. my partner now asks every month how I am doing LOL – see partners are interested when the money starts rolling in – or not! So what do you do if you really,really need the income and you [...] Read more »
End of Month Update on Progress and a Business Plan
OK we are third of the way through the year – lets see where Lis Sowerbutts is doing , original goals in italic from January for the first half of 2009: Progress Against Original Goals Get more organised and focused on the important stuff so that I can achieve the following: Read more »
2009: The Year I Make it?
Time to take stock: the back story is here if you care from when I started this blog in April. What have a learnt in the last year Read more »
On-Line Income Cash Flow is King
Since February I have been working 3 days a week for a small mineral exploration company. They have some great prospects but as of about a month ago we had to cancel drilling because of the inability to raise money anywhere off or on the stock exchange. My hours were cut from 3 to 2 days a week. You know what my reaction was? I was pleased that I have more time to work on-line – I’d rather be building my business than trying to look busy at a company who is in trouble for reasons that neither I nor the directors can do a lot about at the moment. Sure the loss of income just before Xmas when we are about to go on an expensive income and my partner won’t get holiday pay is inconvenient. But I immediately turned around and started replacing that cash flow with freelance writing. It made me realise that I have so many more options than I had a year ago. I have finally learnt not to be dependent on a employer but discovered, at least to a small degree, how to make money online in a recession. The trouble with building an [...] Read more »
Freelance Writing Really Taking Off
Is it just me or are there are freelancing writing jobs all over the place at the moment? I just picked up another on-going writing gig. In fact its my first as a “normal” ghost writer ie. I am given that article’s title and write a piece based on the title. Its a lot easier than coming up with new blog posts all the time and making sure I am not repeating myself or neglecting part of the topic area of the blog! Again this was a job I got not from advertising or via my under-developed portfolio site. It was someone looking for writers at HubPages. The initial job wasn’t that exciting pay wise but I have since got better paying work from the same person. Getting paid to produce a service be it writing or something else on the internet is the same as in the real world. If you can prove your ability (in my case I have nearly 100 hubs at HubPages) but possibly even more important prove that you can communicate and deliver then you will get work and you do NOT have to work for 1c/word on the crappy freelance bidding sites. How do [...] Read more »
Getting Paid to Blog
I have been having fun over at a newish website which is offering free WordPress blogs – a bit like the free wordpress.com site really. But not. WordPress.com you aren’t allowed to make money so you can’t link to evil, wicked money making sites, which means that when you do blogs often get shutdown. But of course some of us crazed money making types are always looking for new place to develop my own backlinks. So when I heard that a new site was offering not only free blogs but also offering a $1/post I got interested – the rather long review is my blogging for $1/day hub but the short version is: get approved (live in the right country the usual suspects plus Australia/NZ/Western Europe/India), write a post 100 words minimum, original content, not illiterate, get paid. Get second blog, repeat, get paid a total of $2/day. I It won’t last for ever, eventually you will have to get some traffic to continue being paid but its a nice little business model – from my point of view anyway! Now $2 is hardly a massive income: but the cool thing is this: the links are do-follow and you can [...] Read more »
Freelance Writing PAYS! Me Even!
Well its a curious thing when sometimes something you aren’t looking for suddenly starts working! After months of getting increasingly frustrated with the whole online marketing game an opportunity appeared from left field! Origami dollar t-shirt Originally uploaded by Vaguely Artistic I am on record for saying that content isn’t king but oddly enough I now have people wanting to pay me for it! Its all Mark Knowles’s fault, he employed me to post regularly on a couple of blogs about luxury destinations and Australasian Property Investment On the back of finally getting a positive balance in my paypal account I looked again at freelance writing opportunities. I’d initially thought about making money as a writer online but figured out that in Australia I could make more money cleaning than I could by writing for 1c/word which seemed to be the going rate on the well-known freelance writing sites. I kept looking though and found some other options. I’ve now sold a couple of articles at Constant Content and today had an article accepted at a travel site: so if anyone wants to hire me as a writer please drop me a line! Read more »
How did I start Blogging
Sharon over at Get Paid to Write Online asked how I started blogging: here’s how. I started blogging on blogger – then I moved everything over to my own site continuing adventures and now I am back writing on blogger -why you may well ask? Well Continuing Adventures was started when I was trying to figure out how to escape my corporate IT career and planning a camping trip around Australia. I started blogging in August 2006 and from March to September 2007 we were on the road around Australia. I already had my own static site: Midlife Travel but of course found that blogging was so much easier to keep updated. These sites were of course supposed to make me money and keep us travelling – well it didn’t quite work out that way – first off we got tired of camping before we could afford the $200,000 motorhome to make it comfortable. Oh and of course my sites never made me any money either – not even enough to keep us travelling in Asia never mind Australia. Continuing Adventures was basically a journal with photos – don’t bother looking the photos are MIA since I moved hosts – [...] Read more »
Where to publish your best content
I’ve been focusing very much on learning a whole lot more about SEO and winning the Google game to get myself ranked. One of the “light-bulb” moments I had as that content isn’t king and writing good content is not, in its self, enough to make you money from your own sites. Another of those “oh God its obvious now” is that content is important: but not so much own your own site or your target money maker. Instead your best content should actually be in guest blogs, or articles or hubs or lenses that you write elsewhere. Why? Because these backlinks sites serve too purposes: to get backlinks; to drive targeted traffic to your site. Now sites such as Quassia basically provide just a backlink, no traffic. However sites such as ezinearticles or hubpages can provide qualified traffic looking for whatever you are selling. Read more »
Q10: A Retro Text Editor
OK I guess this is kinda going to show my age. I learnt to type on a typewriter: not Newsletter Originally uploaded by emsef even an electric one. I had a PC before there was windows. The first word processor I used was WordPerfect 4.2. What you got with WordPerfect: you got a black screen and a blinking cursor: hit crtl-C to copy ctrl-V to paste and F7 to spell check. Remember? Well recently I have had a few problems focussing on writing: I typically have a Firefox browser with 6 or 8 or 10 tabs open, several other programs, 5 or 6 documents open, and a directory or 2! Surfing the internet, while I was supposed to be writing, I found something rather cool: a simple text editor which eliminates distractions – sound familiar? Remember in the old days when you could only run one program at the time: well just like that! Well Q10 (cryptic – think scrabble) is a back to the future text editor. It is a “full-screen” editor: that’s right no tool bar, no windows bar nothing: just you and a black screen. I am absolutely amazed that it actually does make a huge difference: [...] Read more »
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