Thursday, July 22, 2010

Journey to Steady Online Income

Finally After Two Years & Two Months: Steady Online Income

After only two years & two months we have a steady stream of online income.
The slow and persistent path always works. 
It may always work but the pressures of missed goals and learning curves are brutal.
The living expenses never stop, the self imposed isolation keeps you wondering if you're doing it right.
Well, as it turns out, you are doing it right. The, keeping on keeping on, doing what you're doing is the right way.
Of course, you need to be able to see what is working and what is not working. Than you adjust your focus accordingly.
But that is how we established and are growing that all elusive online income.
We now have drips and drabs of income coming from several streams.
Below I  will run down the streams and try to keep them in chronological order as I remember their genesis.
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Journey to online income for a rain gutter installer of  30 years.
Rain gutters was the home improvement type self employed business I ran most of my life.
We intend to list the steps and streams of online income we have established to this point  (note to reader: when I use we in this article I mean Me) Hi I am Bill Welcome to my Journey


1. First income stream started after we learned what an online presence was and how easy it is to start one. Being a self employed type entrepreneur for the last 30 years I am fortunate enough to have many acquaintances that are self employed or own their own businesses.

Of course some knew they needed to get online so they were the first income stream. I put up a blogger.com blog for the first client/friend. They paid what I ask for. (one time payment)
As we learned more about online presence, social media jumped into our view as a free traffic source. So we concentrated on organic traffic only. (Organic=no dollar cost, Only time and effort cost)

Twitter, Facebook, Mysapce, Youtube and Linkedin were all studied. Studied in this case means we set up an account for free and learned what we were doing as we were doing it.
These social media platforms are used for directing traffic to the blogger.com blog among other uses. Trial and error is the only way we learn so we did a lot of it.
But it is free and all the knowledge needed for all of this is free, online. You just have to learn how to find the best sources of this free info.
Google account is our best source for any and all info on any and all subjects. Google alerts, included with a google account, are what you set up to get fed the articles you are looking for on any subject. FREE FREE FREE  Google accounts take care of all your online presence needs. Email accounts (each client),alerts(info), folders (organize) and a lot of stuff  we don't know of, yet.

2. Second income stream started after we learned what is and how to use Twitter & Facebook. We developed a package deal for offline businesses wanting to get online.
Bars need to be online, like every other business in the world.
Being a former great beer drinker I know a lot of bar owners.
Well they started to buy our package of  Twitter, Facebook page and Blogger.com blog. This package cost us nothing but time and effort.
We charged a set up fee and a daily fee to keep the sites current and updated as needed. This wasn't a lot of money but it was enough to pay for our next step into some much needed Hosting.


3.Third income stream came from all the twitter accounts and other social networking we had accumulated for our selves and our clients. Sponsored tweeting is a free way to have the advertisers give you money when they need to get the word out for one of their products, services or events. There are many companys that will pay you to tell your followers on twitter or facebook and throughout your whole network about their designated product, service or event. These are all free also. You get paid by the tweet or how many times your followers click on the tweet.

All you do is establish a twitter account, or many, on topics that you're interested in. Some of mine are Relationships, Alternative Energy and Mind Journeys.
Each account should be focused on a limited subject area to make it more easily seen by the advertisers looking to share a product in your niche (your targeted market).


4. Fourth income stream is really many because this stream includes the many affiliate products and services that we put on our blogs and websites.
Affiliate products are the ads you see on sites with banner ads or links embedded in the text of an article. The links are how they know you are the one that got that person to click on their ad.
All the good affiliate programs are free so don't pay to join any of them. FREE FREE FREE
The best thing about affiliate programs is that after you join you will get the commission from your own purchases, if you need their products.
Many commissions are 50% or higher. The good affiliate programs also have their own training for you to learn the system.
Once you learn one affiliate system you will find the rest are much more easily integrated into your network of online presence. They all are very similar.

Well that just about covers the main events of my online income journey.
Thanks for letting me share the highlights with you.
Please leave any comments or questions you may have at the designated area.
The Journey is all we have so as in life Have a great one
Your friend
Bill

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