Mid-March: A Slump, Of Sorts

It's halfway through March, and a full two weeks since my last post.  In that time I've done considerably less than expected, which is disappointing.  I wanted to hit a goal of $200 in earnings for the month of March.  Here we are smack in the middle of the month and I've earned only about $20 so far.  I'm hoping things will pick up this week so I can meet my goal.

Mechanical Turk has had very little work available.  I've only been able to really work one day, netting that $20 worth of earnings.  I try to math out the rate per hour of the HITs I work on by estimating the number I can complete per minute, multiplying by 60, and then multiplying the total by the payment per HIT.  For example, say I'm performing a task that pays $.05 and takes me 20 seconds to complete.  That's 3 HITs per minute, so:

3 (HITs per minute) x 60 (minutes per hour) = 180 (HITs per hour)
180 (HITs per hour) x $.05 (price per HIT) = 9 (dollars per hour)

$9 is above minimum wage, so I'll gladly work HITs at this rate for as long as I can.  If this same HIT only netted 2 cents each, that'd only be $3.60 an hour - so generally not worth the time.  Under most circumstances, I'd choose to avoid HITs that pay below minimum wage so I could feel like I was maximizing my time.  This month I've had to perform lower-paying work just to have some earnings under my belt.  I'm not too happy with the Turk at the moment, but I'm confident it can still help me hit that $200 mark.  Considering there are 16 days left this month, I'd need to make $11.25 per day to meet my goal, or $20 per day for 9 days.  Still doable, but pressuring nonetheless.

I haven't written on any kind of real scale this month, though I'd hoped to.  My computer is right in the center of the action at my house - directly across from the front door and only about 5 feet from the living room.  This positioning makes it difficult to concentrate as people come and go or watch television.  My sister was sick this week and we had a run of bad weather, so the family were in my way more than usual.  I did write a few articles, but eHow is having publishing issues (again), and am still feeling out the other sites.  I've continued to do research on things that will help me earn money online such as SEO and backlinking, so my time hasn't been completely wasted.  I've got a few ideas in the works and have gotten started on 3 other sites, which will earn me a minimum of $10 extra by the end of the month.  I hope to have a few productive writing days before March wraps up, working on about 10-20 more pieces.

All in all, I don't have too much to report for this month so far.  Like I said, I'm kind of disappointed at the lack of work I've put out this month.  I'm still just as passionate about meeting my goals - especially with my vacation looming at the end of May.  There are still two weeks to pull myself out of this slump and that's exactly what I intend to do.

February: Month In Review

February was the first partial month of my online earning and debt relief journey.  I spent a lot of time this month reading up on various methods of earning online, some of which I hope to start putting into practice soon.  Here's what I earned this month...

Mechanical Turk: $151.60
eHow: $1.35

The money through eHow is not enough to make payout (minimum is $10), but it's still earnings.  This month I'm going to go at it more actively.  I plan to write more articles, branch out to other potential income sources, and continue to learn as much as I can.  My goals for March:

Mechanical Turk: $200
eHow: $10

Plus whatever else I'm able to earn from other income sources.  Here's looking forward to a prosperous first full month!

Testing New Sources of Income - and an Update

Despite my ongoing research on how to make money online, I'm pretty confident there's still a lot I don't know.  I'm very curious what other sites and methods there are out there for earning that I:

• can do - no graphic design for me, thanks!
• don't know about.

I feel like I've been mentally cataloging all these places... "Oh, Odesk is a freelance site," "Xomba is a writing site," "Squidoo's what you use when you've got your niche all set up," etc..  It would take quite a while to get established on all of them, and who knows if it'd be worth the effort?

I plan to find out in the weeks to come.  I'm going to branch out a bit more in March - which will be my first full month trying to earn money online.  Since I've found out about all these other places to potentially earn a buck, I figure I owe it to myself to at least test them out.  It may turn out that I come right back to only using eHow and Mechanical Turk, but I find it difficult to believe that those will be the only places I like to earn money.  Whatever the results, I'm sure I'll have something to report here.

I'm very eager to get started paying off my debts.  The smallest one I have floating around is for just over $600.  I'm going to be going on vacation for nearly a week in late May, and I'd like to have earned enough to pay off that debt by then.  Since I wanted to wait to purchase a domain name and set up a niche site until after I'd earned at least $500, I think it will work out nicely.  Hopefully I'll be able to pay off this particular debt, have my vacation, and then come back and get started with the site.

Despite not having a full month of earnings for February, I've managed to earn about a quarter of my $600 mini-goal.  On Monday, I will post with my complete earnings listing for the month and make an earnings projection for March.

Writing - The Icing On The Cake

A lot of potential opportunities for success ride on my ability to write.  Well-written articles on eHow could yield me better ad revenue.  Having a strong writing voice could help me land a guest post on a high-traffic blog.  When given the opportunity to market things, being able to do so in a way that grabs the potential customer's attention is very important.  Last but not least, my writing here is important to me too.

Reading back over the posts I've made here so far, I'm a little discouraged at the quality of my writing.  I think I still get the basic point across most of the time, but my copy isn't what I'd consider compelling.  I guess this is proof that finding my voice is going to be more difficult than I thought.  I sound a lot more formal on here than I do in person, I guess out of a subconscious desire to sound professional.  But combined with how much I harp on about how I'm not an expert on any of the stuff I talk about, I don't sound professional at all - just insecure and slightly robotic.

I've also noticed a lot of what I write is too dense.  I've noticed while reading other (successful) people's blogs that they make their paragraphs short and direct.  Even in very long posts, the information is doled out a little at a time.  They still manage to be informative and funny, just in much smaller bites.  That's one area where I know I need some editing.  Hopefully knowing really will be half the battle here, and noticing my own writing flaws will be enough for me to fix them.

I admit that I've mostly been writing by the seat of my pants.  I had ideas of how I wanted to set up these first few posts - talking about the various methods I've used or am learning about to make money, and then using those posts as a jumping-off point.  But since I am new and inexperienced, I felt the need to try to shove as much potentially valuable information in front of the reader as possible - as if to say "I'm good enough, subscribe to me!"  In trying to jam-pack so much of the information swimming around in my excited head, I edited very little.

So now I plan to step up my game.  Trying to come across as the likeable human being I am when I write.  Writing things that won't hurt your eyes to read.  Deleting things and choosing better words.  Starting with this post, I'm working on becoming a better writer.

Image courtesy of Stock.XCHNG.  http://www.sxc.hu

Affiliate Marketing - Another Brick In The Wall

Affiliate marketing is yet another way of earning money over the internet, potentially without spending a dime.  It also seems like it could be great for people like me, who might like to sell stuff without actually, well, selling stuff.  I don't know if I've got what it takes to write an e-book or create any product for that matter - and with affiliate marketing, I don't have to.

If you're not familiar with affiliate marketing (I've also seen it referred to as affiliate selling), here's an overview of what it's about:  Say you have a blog about running.  On that blog you might talk about various things that associate with that hobby, like nutritional supplements, pedometers, windbreakers, and most of all sneakers.  Maybe you discuss the products you've tried and really liked, such as a pair of Nike sneakers.  If Nike has an affiliate program, you can sign up with them before you make your post, and link to your sneakers through a specialized link instead of just a link to their shop.  While this still takes the reader where they want to go, if they purchase the same pair of shoes based on your recommendation, you earn a commission.  Pretty simple, right?

Another consideration is that this is another free tool to use for profit.  Every affiliate program I've looked at so far has been completely free for the person doing the marketing (i.e. you or me).  The percentage of a sale you'll earn on commission varies depending on the seller, but getting commission at all seems pretty awesome.  So far I've joined 2 affiliate programs to test the waters, though I don't expect to see any commission for a good long time.  Like earning money from AdSense on my blog, this is something I kinda set up "just in case" and to see how it works.  Any commissions I receive are pure bonus, I'm absolutely not counting on getting any anytime soon.

The main affiliate program I decided to participate in on this blog is through Amazon.com, and that's for several reasons:

• I trust them.  In the 7 years or so I've been purchasing things through Amazon, every order I've made has been flawless.  My items have arrived on time if not earlier, well-packaged and undamaged.  I haven't ever had to return an item purchased on Amazon.
• They sell everything.  I've bought hair appliances, DVDs, digital cameras, jewelry, hardware, skin care products, clothing, food, and lots of other stuff over the years.  With the exceptions of certain beauty products and fresh food, they carry just about anything you could want.
• Their prices are great.  If I want to buy something online, I always comparison shop with Amazon.  I've noticed they're often cheaper than competitors, and offer better shipping options.  Most, if not all, items purchased directly through Amazon (rather than one of their "Marketplace" vendors) are eligible for free shipping on orders over $25.  I am a total sucker for free shipping.

Basically, I am a total Amazon fangirl.  Even before I found out I could make money from them on Mechanical Turk, I've always loved their site.  I've mailed gift wrapped presents to people on the other side of the country through Amazon that got there flawlessly.  I did about 80% of my Christmas shopping there this year.  Their product recommendations after seeing what I've purchased or rated as something I like have been almost eerily spot-on.  Last but not least, but something I really love about the site is their built in review interface.  Lots of online merchants have spots for reviews, but they're usually scrunched up in some out of the way box you need to click on to even see.  On Amazon, they're right there on the page, along with star ratings - every effort is made to tell the customer whether they'll like a product or not.  If you're a regular Amazon user, you've probably spotted lots of other little features throughout the site that make it more engaging and enjoyable for customers.

Since I already love Amazon so much, deciding to be an affiliate marketer for them was a very easy choice.  I assume it would be very difficult to market something you don't think is a quality product or service, and I really don't have any interest in doing that.  Despite my focus on online earning opportunities, I don't want to cheat anyone in the process.  Just in the interest of complete transparency, let me say this:  whether through Amazon or any other company I might become an affiliate with, I'll never link things just because I want you to buy them.  If I link something (and I've linked 3 things here so far - WriterGig's e-book, a Wii, and a treadmill), it's because I think it's awesome or useful in some way.  You don't have to agree, and you certainly don't have to buy it.  Yes, if you do buy something via that link it will benefit me, but I'm not here to try to sell you on anything except online entrepreneurship.  This policy doesn't extend to ads served through AdSense since I have no control over those - but if I'm linking something, don't get all uppity.

Back on topic - A last, cool feature of the Amazon affiliate program is that Blogger has a widget for it built right in.  If you're an affiliate and have it synced up with your blog, there is an Amazon box right next to where you type in your post - making it easy to look up product links if you so choose.  Not really useful for me on this particular blog, but a nice bonus feature nonetheless.  I'm pretty sure there is something similar for Twitter users, but I don't use Twitter so I don't know for sure.

Despite my gushing, there are still two potential drawbacks for interested would-be affiliates:

• If you don't have a bank account - or aren't comfortable sharing your banking information with Amazon, you can only be mailed a check after you've earned $100 - and they'll charge you $15 of that to cut the check.  Just like with their Mechanical Turk program they do NOT pay via PayPal, so be aware of that up front.
• They don't pay as high a percentage per sale as some other affiliates.  They do have a tier scale - so if you make a lot of sales in a given month, your commission percentage will be higher that month too.  This really isn't that big of a drawback when you think about it, since they don't "cap" your commission on high-ticket items.  Since they sell items that cost anywhere from less than a dollar to well over a thousand dollars, that small percentage could still equal a large commission.

What puzzles me is that more people aren't involved with affiliate marketing.  As I started reading up on the subject, almost every piece of information I came across talked about how something like 95% of people who sign up as affiliates never make a sale.  Those aren't exactly good odds.  I don't know if people sign up thinking it's something else?  Maybe they just don't want to do any legwork to increase their rate of sales?  It could also be that 95% of the people who sign up are nobodies like me, who join the program but have no readers to click through their links.  I looked around a little today at some of the blogs I read regularly that would be easy places to earn affiliate money....and none of them participated in any affiliate programs from what I could see.  I would think that if you already have a high-traffic blog focused on some aspect in the consumer culture oeuvre, affiliate links would be a natural way to earn some extra cash.  I was also surprised to see that so many businesses I like dealing with online offer affiliate programs.  If it's something lots of big companies are set up for - and that you can make money with painlessly, why aren't more people doing it?

I'm planning to start an experiment on affiliate marketing in the next few months.  I have a lot of interests that fall into potentially marketable niches.  One interest in particular I was thinking of starting a blog in eventually anyway - sort of a fluffy, fun departure from all the serious money-strategizing going on here.  So I'm thinking that once I've gotten up to $500 worth of total earnings, I'll bite the bullet and set up a site.  The articles and such I've been reading on affiliate marketing suggest that you market to your own interests anyway - those are the topics you already know about, know the uses for various products, etc..  Like with any blog the main focus is on good content - you want to build your readership based on knowing the topic and writing to that audience.  On my experimental site, I plan to use an update schedule to post on specified days - so I can manage things in advance if I need to.  I will probably also be more aggressive about getting my site in front of people who I think will want to read it.  Last but not least, I'll probably go for at least a month of regular posting before starting to link aggressively.  Hopefully by the time all this goes down I'll be able to do it in a savvy way that will actually work.

I think there are a lot of ways that affiliate marketing programs can work for different people/niches.  Like with anything else, you want to know your product and know who you're marketing to.  I'll need to experiment a bit to see if it'll wind up being profitable for me personally, but I definitely think it has potential.



Image courtesy of Flickr via Creative Commons license. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robh/ / CC BY 2.0

Blogging

Blogging is another component to my earning strategy. Though I don't expect it to generate a large stream of income, I consider it to be free advertising for my other online endeavors, a way to connect with other people trying to do the same thing I am, and a place to test out what I learn. I know that using Blogger for a monetized blog is considered a bad idea. In fact, almost all of the information I've read about profitable blogging encourages you to stay away from free hosts like this and wordpress.com in favor of your own site. Sound advice, but I decided against it (at least for now) for a few reasons:

• Blogging on your own site, while a nice idea to drive brand-based traffic, costs money. About $10 for the domain registration, plus monthly hosting fees. I don't have any money to funnel into this enterprise right now, so that's out of the question.
• Even if you have the money for upkeep of your site, you'll need to know some basic HTML or CSS to get it running - or pay someone else to do it. Whether that means hiring a graphic designer or just buying one of the many templates available, it's more money I don't have. I know there are a multitude of free options out there, but if I were paying for a site I'd want it to look as good as possible - and the free templates I've looked at have been largely unattractive.
  
• I kind of like the idea of a bare-bones approach since that also means I have no overhead and can blog purely for enjoyment.  If I were planning to use my blog to draw in clients for an existing business (and therefore affect my livelihood), I'd probably be a lot more concerned about going about it professionally. For right now though, it's more of a fun way to showcase the other things I'm doing for money. If it incidentally earns me more money, wonderful - but I don't expect the blog itself to be the feather in my online-earnings cap.
• I only expect this project to last for 2 years. Even if I gain a large readership, I assume that a lot of those will come based on the countdown involved with my goal. With that taken out of the equation, there may be less reason for them to continue visiting. Why come to my site and read my amateur tips and lousy writing when you could go to Brian Clark or Darren Rowse any of the other experts out there?  At that point, my domain and hosting costs would just be for vanity's sake - but with Blogger, I could keep my content up indefinitely for free.

That's not to say I wouldn't love to garner a large enough audience (or enough profits) to justify migrating to an independent site.  I'd love to be one of the lucky few who gets to blog for a living.  Setting your own hours, never having to get dressed for work, not having to deal with all the crap that goes along with working at a traditional business - traffic jams, layoffs, water cooler gossip, or (most of all) a boss.  I don't think it'd be a walk in the park by any stretch, but being 100% responsible for your own success still seems nice.  As I said about the successful eHow writers making $1,000 and up every month, knowing there are people out there blogging for a living is inspiring.

I've read that it takes most people at least 1 year to start seeing an upswing in readership and earnings from a blog.  It seems to me that there could be a variety of different reasons for this, or I guess a combination of things.  It makes sense that a year of regular blog posts would lend you more credibility with the reader, and therefore make them more likely to value what you have to say.  Plus, a year gives you a long time to really figure out your "voice" and hit your stride in terms of your writing style, paragraph layout, etc..  Little tweaks like those over time may help teach you what does or doesn't attract readers.  In my case, I hope that this first year will give me time to better understand my subject matter.  Right now I'm very passionate about what I'm learning about the different aspects of online money making and business strategies.  But that passion is all I've got - no formal training or education, no proven track record, not even a full understanding of what I'm talking about since I'm so new to this.  I'm hoping that after a year I'll at least be beyond the novice stage, and can begin to really offer my readers valuable content instead of just dorking out about how this or that works.

Another point of consideration in building a popular, profitable blog is in the hands of the search engines.  I'm still very fuzzy on how a lot of this works, but as I understand it your search engine "page rank" and visibilty improves based on how many unique visitors you receive.  I know having links to your site from more popular ones helps somehow too, but again I don't quite understand the equation.  Things like proper keywords and page titles help you get seen for the "right" searches, but receiving a certain number of visitors pushes you up the search results.  I don't know if who gets the #1 spot for any given search is based on the number of views that page has already received, or a level of "trust" in that content provider based on their site's rank, or what.  I assume that with a larger subscriber base, unique views to your site would go up - but I am not sure if your subscriber count itself improves your visibility.

This may be inaccurate too, but I've read that if your blog is through a free host (Blogger, TypePad, etc), Google will only index and rank a few of your pages - therefore keeping you at the bottom of all but the most obscure search results.  I don't know if it's possible to have a free blog with a high search engine visibility, but I certainly can't think of any off the top of my head.  That's one issue that makes me question if a free blog is such a great idea after all, but sinking $50 or more into a domain and hosting for a year still isn't something I feel prepared to do right now.

I've already accepted the fact that I'll probably never make any money with my blog.  If that's the case, it doesn't necessarily matter if I'm pulling in more viewers from search engines.  That seems to be a way to generate more money after you've already become financially successful with your blog to some degree.  I'm hoping to generate views more from the back-end I guess - having viewers find me not through search engines, but through word of mouth and other ways of linking to my content.  I could be going about that all wrong too - but if I'm not expecting to earn with this blog either way, does it really matter?

This post wound up being a way bigger mouthful than I thought it would be.  That's kind of how the range of information about blogging has proved to be too.  Initially, I thought it was a pretty straightforward sort of thing - you log on, you write about yourself or your dog or whatever your topic is, you log off.  I realized there were sites that could be put under the "blog" category and still be lucrative, but I thought of them as sites rather than blogs.  Maybe it's utilizing that kind of response in the viewer that makes a blog successful?  The more I learn, the more involved blogging seems to be.  Hopefully when I've learned more I can revisit this topic with better strategic information.


Image courtesy of Stock.XCHNG.  http://www.sxc.hu

Earn Easy Money With Mechanical Turk

The source of active income I've been using so far - and in fact, what got me started on this whole "trying to earn money over the internet" thing - is Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Yes, that Amazon. I'd never heard of it up until about 3 weeks ago, when I stumbled across this article about making money on the side (or in my case, without a real job). Since it's free to sign up and run by everyone's favorite online retailer, I figured I had nothing to lose.

Mechanical Turk (or Mturk, for short) is touted as a 24-hour, on-demand workforce - which is pretty accurate. It works sort of as a freelance employment service. You do as much work as you want - at a non-negotiable, bid-free rate - whenever you want. Most of the tasks are very quick to do, but there are some more complicated things available. You also have the opportunity to view the details about any given job before you decide to do it - letting you know if the money involved will be worth your time.

Mturk's unusual name is based on a chess-playing robot from the 18th century, who went around winning against notables of the day such as Benjamin Franklin. What they didn't know at the time is that the machine wasn't winning at all - there was a chess player hidden in a box beneath the chessboard, controlling the robot's movements. The idea is that there are still some tasks that man can perform more accurately than machine, and most of the jobs available on Mturk are based on this idea. Things like matching the most similar or different faces out of a set of images, proofreading classified ads to make sure they're correctly categorized, or updating contact information for businesses are all common jobs to be done on Mechanical Turk. The job listings are referred to as HITs - short for Human Intelligence Tasks.

The work doesn't pay very much, usually anywhere from a single penny to a few dollars. There are some items I've seen that have offered up to $30, but these were obviously scams since they asked for your email and contact information - which is prohibited (and reportable) on Mturk. The most I've earned so far for a single item was 3 dollars, to transcribe 5 minutes of an audio interview. Other things I've done include participating in university research studies, categorizing a set of sounds by emotion, and matching a photo of a product with the correct description. Very simple tasks that just about anyone could do, and the time given to do each task is usually quite generous - so it's easy to do a little work on the site while browsing the web, watching television, or doing anything else that allows you to multitask. I'd estimate my total time spent working at between 8 and 10 hours so far - which is a very generous estimate considering how much of that time I was surfing the web or doing other things. While payment for accepted work is guaranteed, the jobs come from a variety of employers (referred to on the site as Requesters) so there is varying lag between when you complete a job and when you get paid for it. As of this writing, I have several items awaiting approval and once I've been paid for all of them (as I assume I will be) I'll have earned about $130 in those 10 hours worked.

It benefits you to read the instructions carefully and make sure you can do the job as specified before accepting. Requesters can reject your work if it's not done to their specifications, which reflects negatively on your approval ratings. Some jobs have restrictions on them, and approval rating restrictions are the most common - usually requiring you to have 85% or more approval on the HITs you submit. Other restrictions may require you to take a test ensuring you're qualified to do what that Requester is asking before you'll be permitted to accept their tasks. These are generally pretty simple, but worth doing to increase the number of workable HITs you can see at any given time. If Requesters really like your work, they can also give you a bonus at their discretion. I don't know how common receiving a bonus is since I've only earned 31 cents in bonuses so far, but I'll gladly take any extra money someone wants to throw at me.

While Mturk is available around the world, only workers from the United States and India are able to be paid in cash - deposited straight to your bank account rather than via PayPal like many other online workplaces. You also have the option to be paid in credit/gift certificates to Amazon.com if you so choose, or if you're from a country other than the US or India. The presence of worldwide competition for the jobs listed on the site may also be what drives the price paid per job so low, since the living wage is so much lower in some parts of the world. I don't think it would be possible for an American to make a full-time living from Mturk alone, but for the time being it's proved to be a nice and easy source of income. If you're not interested in making actual money from it, it could also be a nice way to earn enough money to buy a high-ticket (and potentially frivolous) item from Amazon that you wouldn't purchase otherwise - like a video gaming console,or a piece of fitness equipment.
Or, if you're more practical, you can buy diapers, food, deodorant, shoes and whatever else you and your family might need with your Amazon credit since they sell just about everything.

The thing about Mechanical Turk that got me interested in seeking out other ways of making money online was a HIT that asked for a short article to be written. I submitted one - about hard-boiled eggs - and made 2 dollars for the effort. That got me thinking about where else I could sell writing without being a professional, which eventually led me to eHow and started this whole crazy idea. While I don't know if it'll be worth keeping up with in the long term - since there aren't always worthwhile jobs listed when I go on there looking to work, it's a key part of my earning strategy for now. I'd recommend it to anyone trying to make an income over the internet, it's definitely something to do while you're waiting for all those passive/residual income streams to flow in.

Image provided under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/people/plutor/

Earn Passive Income With eHow

The first source of passive income I'm learning to use is the freelance writing website eHow. As one of the most popular sites of its kind, eHow draws in millions of viewers daily, who want to learn - as the site's slogan says - "How to Do Just About Everything".

Given the popularity of the site and my inexperience using it as a source of income, I'd be hard-pressed to include any information that hasn't been said before. In fact, a quick search on Google including only the words "eHow" and "money" yielded almost 2 million results. What I can talk about is potential, and eHow's got that in spades.

When the thought to look up freelance writing opportunities came into my head, I started to search. Almost immediately I found a page about WriterGig, one of eHow's most successful writers. She's written the book on eHow success (literally) and is currently earning over $1500 a month from her articles there. Of course, she's been writing on the site for a few years and is now an expert on optimizing traffic to her articles, but she started off as new and unsuccessful as anyone else. The thought that there are people out there making a living from this really inspires me to become one of them.

On eHow, writers earn their income through the site's Writer's Compensation Program (or WCP). Through a somewhat secret formula, writers receive a share of the ad revenue generated on their articles' pages. This service is not automatically turned on when you create an eHow account, but it's completely free to use. When you activate WCP on your account, all your articles - including ones you may have written before activating it - will be eligible for program earnings. To get paid for any given month, you'll need to earn at least $10 with the program. If you don't earn enough to meet the minimum payout, your earnings will "roll" over each month until you've earned enough to be paid. Payments are distributed via PayPal - so if you don't have a PayPal account and you'd like to write for eHow now is a good time to set up an account.

As of this writing, I've earned a total of 29 cents with eHow. Due to a recent bug on the site (which has since been corrected), I was only able to publish 2 articles. Each has gotten less than 50 views so far, and are for very niche interests, so I don't know how they'll perform in the long-term. But since I am now able to publish again, I'm hoping to start producing quality articles that will pick up a lot of views in the near future.

It definitely benefits would-be writers to get comfortable with SEO and choosing the right keywords to draw in views, as well as choosing appropriately popular topics. It's important to hit a sweet spot - go for too popular a topic and your article will never be seen, since more popular or more qualified writers have already covered it. But write about something too obscure and you won't get views simply because no one's looking for it. Properly setting up your articles seems to be a fine art, but seemingly once you've mastered it you'll greatly increase your earnings per article. A great feature of eHow is being able to go back and edit your articles after they've been published. That way if your article is poorly keyworded or includes information that's become outdated since you published it, it could become profitable with just a few easy tweaks.

As I said, the ins and outs of earning on eHow would be best explained by people other than myself. Check out WriterGig's ebook (which guarantees success), or scour the internet for quality information from the site's many other successful writers. From what I've seen so far, there appears to be nearly limitless earning potential if you're willing to do the legwork. I'll also be happy to share what I learn along the way, since I plan to make passive income from eHow a big part of my earnings during this experiment.

Image courtesy of Stock.XCHNG. http://www.sxc.hu

My Plan

Making $25,000 in just over 2 years isn't going to be easy. As of today, there are 864 days between me and my goal. Dividing the two, I need to make about $29 per day to complete my goal on time. If going by months, I'd need to make about $900 per month in the 28 months until July 2012.

I don't doubt that this goal will be difficult, if not nearly impossible. Still, I hope that with hard work and soaking up as much information as possible, I'll be able to make it. I know that for at least the first few months, if not longer, $900 is far too high a monthly goal - meaning that I'll have to make even more than that per month in the later months to stay on track. So how am I going to do all this?

My plan is to use a combination of active and passive income. Active income is what you earn doing any regular job. Punching a clock, exchanging goods or services for money - all of these are examples of active income. You're getting paid to "do" a particular job - and if you aren't "doing" what you're getting paid for, then you'll lose your job and source of active income.

Passive income on the other hand, lets you continue to earn after you've done the work. Collecting royalties is a prime example of this. Receiving royalties for music you've performed, books you've written, or articles you've published will all grant passive income. While this method of income can be more "hit or miss" since you're doing the up-front work for free, it can also provide a steady stream of income for months or even years later - without you lifting another finger.

In my research over the last two weeks, I've uncovered several potential sources of both active and passive income - and some that seem to require a mixture of both. Some of these are dependent on skills, while others can be done by just about anyone. In my search, I've also found a wealth of helpful information and tools on how to make these methods work for you. It's becoming more and more evident to me that it really IS possible to earn money online, if you're willing to put in the time and effort.

So far, I've only been able to test-drive a few of the things I've found. Using one source each of active and passive income, I've earned over $100 towards my goal in a two-week span. I'd estimate my time spent actively working as 10 hours or less, not counting time spent reading or researching various opportunities. Over my next few posts, I'll discuss these sources in detail and talk in depth about what I'm planning to try next.

An Introduction

It seems like every good story starts with an introduction. I'd like to be thought of as a good story someday, so here's mine.

My name is Jillian. I'm a 27 year old woman from Pennsylvania, and I'm unemployed. After being forced to drop out of college and move back home due to the economy, I find myself wondering what's next. I've been unsuccessful in finding work so far, and won't be back at college until Summer 2010. This leaves me with a lot of free time on my hands.

I'm trying to keep busy in a number of ways: losing weight, doing lots of reading, and slowly paring down my possessions. One thing I'm not doing is making any money. I have some mounting debt I'm unable to make payments on right now - college and living expenses from when I still had my apartment halfway across the country. With no job prospects on the horizon and debt looming over my head like a thundercloud, there must be SOMETHING I can do. Which is where this blog comes in.

About 2 weeks ago, I read an article promising ways to make money on the side (or in my case, if you can't find a "real job") which had a lot of good ideas. Many of them are specific to the NYC area, but the article proved to be food for thought nonetheless.

Since reading the article, I've found handfuls of seemingly legitimate ways of earning money online. I've even made a little so far - a little over $100 at the time of this writing. I'm hoping to make enough money online to pay off my debts - $25,000 worth. I'm giving myself a little over 2 years to do this, which would make me debt free when I hit 30.

So from now until July 1st, 2012, I'll be researching and testing out various methods of earning money over the internet and documenting my progress here. I'll talk about what works and what doesn't, and how far along I am on my goal. I plan to also post here and there about things like personal finance and SEO marketing that will (hopefully) help me get out of debt a little faster.

I don't expect to be unemployed for the next two years. But having a job comes with its own expenses in the form of work clothes, transportation and so on, so I don't expect to be able to put a lot of what I earn towards my debts either. For the time being, my plan is to use ONLY what I make online toward my debts - and put any excess money from a job into separate savings. My hope is that, even if this experiment fails, I will accrue enough savings from work to become debt-free by age 30.

As of this writing, I'm not an expert on earning money online. When July 2012 hits, I probably won't be either. But I hope to learn enough meaningful information to become unburdened from debt, and to provide tips helping my readers do the same. It would be great if this became a two-way street, with readers helping me find new opportunities or telling me what has (or hasn't) worked for them.

I welcome comments, so long as they're constructive in one way or another. You don't have to agree with me - and I hope you'll point it out when I'm dead wrong, but I ask that you be respectful towards me and other readers. I also welcome email, so please feel free to contact me at undebting@gmail.com.