Tuesday 15 March 2011

Making Money Online - 4 years on...

I don't really have anything as grand as a strategy, but the scatter-gun approach I had at the beginning of my quest to make money online has become a little more refined over the years.
Also trends change, and what worked once, often starts to lose momentum (as I am finding with Adsense earnings at the moment).
My current 'business plan' consists of having a steady but small income from paid posting, usually made up entirely of opps from 'PayU2Blog', added to which a combination of fixed and contextual adverts pays me about £20 a month.
This fairly regular but small revenue is supplemented by my mail-order service (converting tapes into CD's) which is extremely variable - anything from about £10 to a couple of hundred is possible. I have one or two other insignificant 'strings' to my revenue bow, which includes eBay partnership and one remaining survey company. I had decided to cease doing surveys altogether, but I think I may well keep the one remaining survey company (YouGov) as out of all the survey companies, I find they pay the best.
For the future, I have plans to extend my money-making base which will give me reason to drop some of the less well-paying (and more time-consuming) schemes. My future plans are geared mostly towards passive income, as this is the type of project that makes the most sense to me in the long-run. It would be nice to be able to sit back and watch the money rolling in without having to make any effort - I'm sure most people can see the sense in that!
Currently, my best months are those where I get a good number of cassettes to do, and when I get 'extra' opps from PU2B. If you fulfill your quote of opps quickly with PU2B, you frequently get chances to complete extra opps that have not been completed in time by others. Right now, I have about 13 posts to complete of this type which will be a real boost to earnings. I am well aware that the time spent doing these could be spent completing outstanding projects, but I am using the 'bird in the hand' philosophy - ie. I can make money now, and worry about progressing projects when there is no money to be made by other means...
In the next few months, I need to be close to gathering my last remaining site under my one 'umbrella' multi-site hosting plan - this will mean that I must be doing a bit of work in the background, but the benefits in saved hosting charges will be tremendous - this represents a major re-working of how my cassette to CD operation works, but I fully intend to use the opportunity to open up more avenues for passive income.
It will mean buying more domains, but for the savings I will make in hosting fees, I can afford to buy plenty of domains...
I will be posting more about my 'unlimited' hosting plan in future posts as this will soon become the central hub of all my sites (apart from the blogs, for which I am grateful to 'blogger' for their free hosting).

2 comments:

Rachel said...

I have also come to the conclusion that PayU2Blog and YouGov are the best companies to keep going with. My Adsense earnings are slow too but then I am not promoting my sites or doing much at all to encourage traffic. I would love some more passive income too, but at the moment I only have premium bonds for that!

jay said...

You do pretty well with your premium bonds. I am looking to affiliates and adwords for future passive income - but I make a lot more from PU2B and converting cassettes... which are a bit more 'hands on'...