The decision to quit my real trusted online money making setup didn’t come very easy as I was earning enough dollars to live a very comfortable life.
Now I am making this post just before we enter 2023 year. However, this story is about a little more than a decade old.
Best feeling is to make money online
Making money online as a teenager is the best feeling in the world and especially knowing that you’re earning more than an average office-goer does.
I remember how long it took me to make my first dollar – less than 2 months, from the inception of the curiosity to receiving money in my bank account.
Turning $1 into $100 and then into $1000 took me a year or so. It wasn’t easy. It was very demanding in the beginning.
I remember getting up in the morning, straight away switching on the computer as I was always very excited about checking my emails, website analytics, sales I had made etc.
The best time of the year usually was the last quarter of financial year as we would approach the holiday season.
Different things I did
I have sold contact lenses for Halloween to games that needed pre-ordering. I also ran a team of people who worked closely with me.
There wasn’t any one thing that I did to make that $1000 a month. It was a combination of different things that I did online. However, much of the money came from freelancing and writing for others.
My first dollar came from writing content and the highest I have ever made online also came from writing. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way close to intellectual people with great grasp on language and writing that is sophisticated.
The thing was that I had already started learning about Search Engine Optimisation and how content plays a big part in it. All the content I wrote was SEO’ed, which guaranteed better placement in the search ranks.
Over time, some of my friends got interested in learning about this way to earn money.
We were all studying at the time – young, wild and free. We had time on our hands.
I had my ongoing contracts with clients from around the world from whom I’d receive orders and my friends, who worked with me, would help deliver those. Before sending back the final product, I’d further SEO the content to ensure that it all aligns with client’s objectives.
To make money online at that time was as easy as chips.
While everything was going alright, life took a bit of a turn
I moved to New Zealand and studied there for a year. New environment and the pressure of studies and to deliver had starting to get to me.
(Also, a little off topic, New Zealand is such a beautiful country!)
It became challenging to maintain quality work, while I was studying full time in a new country where my expenses had almost tripled. They had tripled because I was now paying rent which was/is very high in New Zealand. I also wasn’t eating at home because I didn’t know how to cook lol. True story.
I needed something that would instantly provide me with income that would support all my expenses in the new country, which would have amounted to roughly $2500 a month at the time. I was making less than half of that money.
To bring my online income up from roughly $1000/month to $2500/month would take some time and effort – which is what I didn’t have at the time.
While this dance went on for a few months, I took a firm decision to stop my online revenue streams and completely quit them so to work in a ‘real’ job in New Zealand that would support my expenses and give me enough time to study full time too.
And so I did.
Was I sad about it? Hell yeah.
Could I have continued to keep working online still? Perhaps.
Do I regret quitting making money online? Almost every time this topic comes up.
Not giving up
I would definitely try my hands at it again. I have done it once before and I know I can do it again – well I sure do hope so.
Where I lacked was that I didn’t push myself to make more than $1000/month. If I had done that then perhaps I would have never really needed to quit my online revenue streams.
I am taking up this challenge to make money online in 2023. First goal would be to make $100/month.
Over the next few months, I will update my blog here and you’ll be able to see my progress, whatever it may be.