For those of you wishing to leave your full time job for a wonderful online career that you can do in the comfort of your own home (even in your dressing gown if you like), I thought I’d review the ups and downs of the last three years of trying to make an online income.

A little background

I left my job three years ago, to get married and raise a young family. This meant a single income, which wasn’t very much. I was determined to use some of my skills I had learnt over the years to get a decent online presence and earn some money.

My first website

It seemed web design of sorts was the way forward, with the high publicity across the Internet of the Google Adsense programme, I was convinced I could write an interesting website that people would visit and I would earn some revenue off Google. I picked a topic that is passionate to me (I won’t go in to great detail, but it was an animal related site), did a little bit of research about the things I didn’t know, then I went ahead and started creating pages of content for my new site. I wrote over 150 before I published the site, and it didn’t happen over night, it took me six months to write all those pages.

The website revenue

So I published the site, and sat back to wait for the money to roll in, just like all these people who are making loads of money promise you. Did it make lots of money? No, it didn’t. So I left it to get on with other ventures.

The next online venture

After leaving the site, I went on to ebay. I’m a very crafty person and I love to create things. I had just been purchased a new sewing machine, so I started to sew evening gowns and sell them on ebay. Was this successful? Actually yes it was, I received well in excess of £80 ($160) for each dress. The biggest problem was the time element, it takes a long time to make a dress and I really wasn’t getting a good hourly rate. So dress making went to the bottom of the pile, although I do still make them when I want a change.

Back to the website

Quite some time went past, about a year. Before I went back to the first website to see how it was doing, and to my surprise it had actually made a little money. And when I say a little I mean about $5 in a year, nothing to shout about. I decided to do some research into getting traffic to my site, and it turns out there are many effective methods out there, even for people who hobby sites. I found the best for me was article marketing. The idea is you write an article on a subject related to your site, and then you submit it to an article directory with a link to your site. It gets published and then you get back links to your site and hopefully some visitors.

It was amazing; in the first month of article marketing I made $20 through Adsense on my site. I didn’t keep it up for long, then I left the site again, as we had to move house. About 3 months later when every thing was sorted in the new house I went back to my site, I was amazed that it was making $40 a month with no updates and no help from me. I could see something happening – I was actually starting to make a profit!

What happens next?

I can’t foresee an animal related site ever making thousands of dollars every month; it’s just not the right topic. But I’m not one for writing about something I don’t have an interest in.

So I decided that I would start to create some more sites just like the first one, but on topics that I find interesting. The plan would be to develop them in to sites that will bring me a nice income each month. Will this happen? I’m not sure. It’s taken me three years to get to this point. So perhaps if I spent much more time working on these sites I would be more successful.

The biggest problem I am facing is my other commitments. You can’t care for a young family and write website content at the same time; you’d have to pay for childcare, which defeats the aim of being at home and working.

So meanwhile, for my first site, now 3 years old I get a check once every few months from Adsense. It’s not a lot compared to others, but it is encouragement enough to keep going.

Would I recommend earning online?

Yes. If you have the time and the dedication it can be very rewarding, and eventually very easy. The biggest problem is the initial time it takes to set up, then getting people to visit your site. But if you have the time you could make a lot of money!