There are SO MANY PROGRAMS online urging you to join them, spend some money and subscribe…  I refuse to say they are all scams. I think there are a lot of people out there making money from ‘people who subscribe’. And there are a lot of people who “subscribe” who actually end up making money!

I subscribed to different programs and didn’t make any money, but it wasn’t the “programs” fault, in most cases (or all cases) it was my fault.  One of the main problems with someone wanting to start out with internet marketing is that they have no idea where to begin. Thus a prerequisite for any program is that it is geared towards beginners and that it does not progress at too fast a rate. It is also important that a good program does not overwhelm a beginner or introduce too many new concepts too early in the program.

I signed up with a few ‘free’ programs but they went too fast for me. Then I signed up with “Wealthy Academy” for a month or so. It was okay but very impersonal and I felt it was attacking on too many fronts at once. I couldn’t really get a handle on anything. Some people really took off on it, and my hat goes off to them. I was not one of those people.

I was also reading a lot of free money making blogs and I came across one guy who was teaching the most incredible stuff for free. He was also teaching you how to make money online without investing any money at all. He has since gone under the radar, but at the time he was publishing regularly he really opened my eyes to how simple this whole thing could be.

For those interested in a structured course he recommended some friends of his.  You know me, all for structure!  I checked it out. It is the Keyword Academy. First month $1. If you like it you stick around, if not cancel your subscription. When I joined it was $33 a month, and I am still paying that now.  (Recently, after about one year and the addition of many new internet marketing aids, the fees went up to $69 or so but anyone who signed up at the ‘old’ price stuck with that.) It is worth every cent.

I could extol all that I like about these guys here, but I already have  on my hub about how I was about to increase adsense revenue with the Keyword Academy training. There are training videos, an excellent and very active forum where you can get a lot of help, support and answers to your questions, and quite a few programs that aid you in your marketing. I do not think I would be where I am at now without the additional support I received, but even without it, it is possible to still ‘make it’.

One other reason that I have stuck with this particular program is because I was fairly isolated in what I was doing, especially in my neck of the woods!  Not a lot of people understand much about it and people tend to look askance at me for doing it. It is important to have some support when undertaking any new endeavor as there are definitely ups and downs and times you want to throw in the towel. There are also times when it seems everything is going wrong, and you don’t know what to do. That’s where being able to get some support from those who have been doing this a long time helps. They assure you that ‘it has happened before, it will happen again, just keep working away at it’, which is probably the most sound advice I received in this regard.

I am going to put up some links to some of the things I have written previously about making money online for anyone interested in browsing. If you are not interested, don’t read!  It’s really as simple as that.

As I have had to explain myself a few times, I have the general gist of the questions down now. I have to say that I have been impressed with how everyone has been fairly open minded to it. At first I was hesitant to say much about it as I was fairly certain everyone would think I was involved with some online scam that was draining money or some such thing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have been doing this for over one year now and while I have not yet met my major goal of being able to totally pay for all of our home expenses with my online earnings, I have certainly met all of my intermediate  goals, and am ahead of schedule on many of my major goals.

Here is how I am currently making money online:

1. I write a lot of articles for other people, via article writing agencies. It is not super well paying, as there are people working in developing countries doing the same tasks for much less pay. In other words it is highly competitive for not that great pay. If I worked really hard I could pull in about $80 a day.  I do not do that because I am also working on my own websites.

I chose to do this because it is immediate income. I can stay home and work, be here when the kids get back from school so that I can referee all arguments, etc. I enjoy writing and I am pretty fast at it now.

Eventually I will phase out of writing for other people, and instead I will be in a position where I have other people writing for me. Can’t wait!

2. I am building Wordpress blogs and putting Google Adsense on the blogs. Every time someone clicks on one of those ads I make money. At around 20 blogs, I have about reached my current limits — I write all the articles and do all the work involved myself.  Income is increasing every month. I have hit the 12 months plus mark, which is when magic starts to happen with your sites if you have done things properly.

3. I do some affiliate marketing. Heard of Amazon?  If I advertise Amazon products on my sites and people buy those products I get a commission.  Christmas was good! I am just dabbling in this presently so it is not a major earner but every little bit helps.

Why am I doing this?

I want to make money from home. I feel it is important to base from home for the kids’ sake. If I were teaching (I do a bit of that, incidentally) I would have to spend lots of hours away from home.

I am fascinated with what I do. It’s all about statistics and math, and averages and WRITING. It is also like a big game. There are variables, there are constants and things are always changing. I love the thrill of it. I enjoy the fact that a lot of the reasons things happen are predictable but there’s that element of chance. Basically it is a composite of everything I enjoy doing.

I am constantly learning something new.  There are always new horizons, new challenges.

Hey. I just like what I do.

Reality Check

It is hard work. I really do put in the hours. I have to study and learn. I make mistakes with what I do and have to start all over again. If you think you can make money online in, what, “ONE WEEK”, “ONE DAY”, “MAKE MONEY NO WORK”, you’re probably kidding yourself.

There are people online who do this, but they try to cheat the system. They are spammers and scammers. You know all those weird comments you get in your spam folders, or your “spam” comments section on your blog.  They come from those people. They are called “black hatters”. They do all the things that give people involved in this business a bad name. They try to cheat “the system” or “game the system”.

My friends and I are “white hatters”.  Other end of the spectrum. We do things properly, follow the rules, and put in the hours.  It is just like starting any business. You have to work pretty hard at first but then it gets easier. It is a lot like any other kind of marketing actually.

I am planning on passing on more information on how I started, what has and has not worked for me, tips and ideas for anyone who is interested.  I do not expect everyone to be interested in this aspect of my life, which is why I have sectioned off my blog in the way that I have. If you do not want to read technical stuff about what I am doing you do not have to.  If you are interested in this side of things, keep checking in. I am going to post more.

It is a speech recognition program, for those of you who are not familiar with it. A large part of what I do on a daily basis is write.  I hear it, “But you LOVE writing, don’t you?”  Yes, and no.  Yes, I love the creativity of writing. No, I hate the monotony of writing.

Part of what I am doing to help earn our living is internet marketing. I end up writing a slew of articles all about one topic. It is not fantasy. It is not fiction (well…sometimes, maybe it is a little bit. I’ll tell you about that later.) It gets downright boring at times. I mean, how many words can you spend writing about doggie strollers?  After a time you actually do run out of things to say, especially if there aren’t any newly released, six wheeled doggie strollers to post about.  I don’t know how many words a day I would end up typing, maybe an average of 3,000 or so, with that number sometimes going up.  Now, that’s fine for a Nanowrimo month, but day in and day out, it translates into a fair amount of pounding the keyboard. Right now my “N” key is taking a bit of a beating, and it is fading.

Enter a dictation program called “Dragon Naturally Speaking”.  I speak into a microphone and the computer types out the sentences.  I am going back and forth with using it, sometimes I am more inclined to do so than others. I do end up with some odd word combinations at times as it does have a tendency to misunderstand words at times. You have to train it to understand what you are saying, and that can get a little tedious. On the plus side, it has helped me to churn out some great, longer articles and has given my poor fingers a break from typing.

I am not convinced that I will use it all the time, but it is both a time saver and a finger saver at times and it relieves the monotony of typing everything. Plus, I also seem to be a bit more creative when I am speaking, as opposed to when I am merely typing.  (Right now I am typing, not speaking.)