The story of how i earn money online is well
documented but I have been thinking recently that what is not so well known is
all the things I tried and ‘failed’ at before starting making real money online.
I was thinking this in particular because I have had a few
emails from people that
1) Assume I am some sort of overnight success,
2)
people who had become disillusioned with their lack of online success.
So in this post I am going to discuss some of my earlier
online (and ‘failures’) and what I learned from them.
Of course my definition of “Failure” may well be different
to most people. You see, I see failure as nothing more than a learning
experience — and if you have always learned something, how can it really be
failing?
If you are going to give up at at the first hurdle or when
your first blog doesn’t turn out as you hoped then you may as well not start in
the first place.
In this post I hope you will see that I am anything but an
‘overnight success” as I explain just a few of the online efforts I ‘failed’ at
before launching making money. You may also discover somethings about me
that I am no longer that proud of.
eBay Business
Yes, my first online business was an Ebay one. A simple
strategy – buy low and sell high and I sold pretty much anything I could get my
hands on.
Ebay really started to go somewhere for me when I played an
online fighting game called Runescape. (I am sure some of you have heard of it)
On Ebay I noticed there was a market for Runescape Gold (The
better the player you were the more Gold you earned in the games — and the more
Gold you had the more difficult it was to beat you – the better you could Arm /
Protect yourself in the game) Because of this a market existed on Ebay for
“Runescape Gold”
Not being modest — I was GOOD, so I started playing Runescape
more in the evenings, winning lots of battles and earning more gold. Then in
the morning I listed what I had won the night before, on eBay. Usually you
would get around £40 per 1 million gold, usually breaking it up into smaller
deals like 100,000 gold for £7. One guy I played with was quitting because he
was going off to university and wanted the extra cash, so after some
negotiations, he let me buy his account for $200. To most that would probably
sound like a lot of money and a silly thing to do but when I tell you that he
had around 400 million gold and the account was actually one of the best in the
game you will now be thinking, WOW what a deal. I managed to in the end break
down the gold into small portions and probably sell it for over £2000. (about
$3200) Not a bad return for a $200 investment.
I decided to keep doing this with other people who were
quitting the game for various reasons but after a while Runescape clamped down
on this trade (as IP owner) and it was no longer allowed to sell Runescape Gold
on Ebay.
Not so proud of it now — but that didn’t really stop me,
indeed I got banned a total of 5 times before realising enough was enough.
After Runescape i sold all sorts of stuff, including wrist
bands, remote control cars and Lacoste Polo shirts. After doing a few
transactions here and there, I got a phone call from a friend who was selling
on eBay, he told me he was getting out of the business and wanted to sell his
stock. He had several hundred items, mainly Lacoste and Abrocrombie and Fitch.
I paid him £2000 ($3200). I was foolish not to go through the stock before I
bought it. I had presumed that because he was a family friend that it would be
all great quality. Turned out around 30% was unsellable because it was factory
seconds. Also most of it was silly sizes like extra larger and extra extra
large but in the end this actually worked to my advantage because it seemed
larger sized people went online to buy instead of going to shops.
The main downside of this business was that I had to
constantly be packaging products and going to the post office, it was also more
responsibly then I wanted as I had to make sure it got into the post right
away. Often I would forget or leave it for days and end up sending two products
for the price of one to make it up to the buyer.
Biggest Lesson Learned: Customers want it now and if that
doesn’t work well with your work hours, then you will disappoint and they will
leave negative feedback. I also found that there was a lot of things I could do
to improve the result of auction, for example if I ended the auction at the
busiest time of day in terms of Ebay traffic, I would likely make a lot more
money from the sale then if I did it at say 10am.
Webdesigndev V.1
A web design site seemed a nature transition from a design
forum, I already knew quite a lot about the niche and wanted to give a website
a try. I was using a forum called Pixel2Life at the time where I found a young
programmer aged 13. At first I agreed to pay him $30 to code my design and as
we started talking I found out that he knew a lot about programming and we
added really cool things such as a CMS to easily add content (basically like
WordPress but nowhere near as good), a custom Newsletter (not compliant with
spam laws) and a bunch of other cool ideas I had.
When I launched the site I added Adsense to the sidebar of
the site and above each tutorial, I saw that I was earning around $5 – $10 a
day and was mildly impressed with myself but knew I had to do more so I could
make more money to expand my business. I researched how others in my niche were
making money and they were all using Adsense as well but the difference is, they
placed images next to each Adsense text listing – in a similar way to how they
also listed their Tutorials / main content. This made readers think the adverts
were real content.
So I did the same as these other sites and in no time at all
my earnings with Adsense jumped from $5 – $10 per day TO $50 per day
I should point out this ‘trick’ is no longer allowed by
Google but it was at the time. I didn’t feel bad about it at the time because
the advertisers were getting targeted traffic from me – It was just one of the
Tricks that online entrepreneurs were using just a few years ago. That said, it
does not make it right and I am glad that Google clamped down on it.
After that I still thought I could do better, I went to my
good friend, eBay and bought around 2000 website templates for £5 which
included resell writes so I could sell it on. I created an advert to drive
traffic to the page on my site where I was selling the templates and managed to
increase my daily earnings to over $200 with the help of advertising.
Webdesigndev.com grew to over 100 tutorials and 200,000 monthly visitors in
weeks and I was managing $1000 advertising deals – all at the age of 16.
It didn’t last long though, first came the bad news from my
host, having a 13 year old program your site meant that he may know a lot about
programming, but didn’t actually mean his code worked well. They told me it was
badly programmed which caused huge issues with my server and finally they shut
us down. After moving to a new host, I found I still had the same problem and
shortly after that I got contacted by Adsense, telling me that the site was
banned from the program. (poor quality traffic apparently). Then there was a
decline of interest in the template pack so in the end I decided to shut down the
site down and begin on my next project.
Biggest Lesson Learned: It is well worth the money hiring a
professional. I decided to hire a 13 year old programmer who was cheap but
lacked the skills to create a robust website that could handle a lot of traffic.
In the end this ‘cheap option’ cost me a lot more then what a good programmer
would have.
After all of that i tri adf.ly, this site is for link shorteners... i send to my friends to open this links, i send e-mail's but i earn 1-2$/mounth... very low :(
One day, one friend told me about
Purebits.net , a PPD
Network, where u put some content with link lockers, Widget and more.. and
promote them to social networks, forums, blogs and anywhere else possible.
I wanted to try, everything seemd ok, i started to make this
but after 2 weeks no earnings :( after some time, one members of purebits
contacted me asking if there's any problems and if he can help. I start speak with
him on skype and he helped me to start making some money.
First week i made 20-30$, after another week 60$, after 2
month i started to make 600-700$ per month. I was very happy so i started to
work more and more and now i make 1800-2200$ per month.
On my next post i will share u one of my methods how to make
real money with PPD Network, until then you can join www.purebits.net to know
more about them!
If you don't want to register under my ref join here:
www.purebits.net and you wait until i post some methods!
If you want to make money online you need to work 4-5h/day
at the begining, all depends on how much you want to earn!!
Good Luck my friends!!