Making money from the internet

Phew, my little tiger has finally dozed off giving me a small window to put in an article.

It is really amazing how demanding little babies can be. The challenges I've faced being home alone with little Ethan actually had me toying with the idea of blogging on parenting, it's trial and tribulations, but I've thought better of it! I might pursue it as a future project ;-).

But honestly, I had so much planned to do (link to a sketch by Lev Yilmaz, I really enjoy his work) and got none of it done! The lil' critter was up at 5am and remained relatively active for most of the day. Everytime I thought I had a chance to do some work (primarily concentrating on college assignments) the lil' critter always found a way to grab my attention.

 

photo by daveynin

Anyway, on to the subject of this post. I have been assessing my goals and 'debt reduction' is currently at the top of the list. I feel the plans put in place are achievable and that I will attain my goal of being totally debt free (with the exception of a mortgage, should I chose to take one) within the timeframe set out. I however got to thinking on the subject of money and a conversation with an acquaintance came to mind. He spoke about how a regular job was a disadvantage in that you had to turn up and do the work in order to make money whereas owning your own business did not necessarily require you to be present to make money. The current approach I've taken on debt reduction is based on saving and reducing costs.

photo by photos8.com

In addition to reducing expenses and saving , debt reduction can also achieved by increasing revenue streams. This got me to thinking about the internet and how it must be possible to earn an honest income. When I first started writing this blog I subscribed to AdSense and amazon associates (and now infolinks) which I'd hoped might make money from the clicks generated. Unfortunately, I've only just started blogging hence do not have much of a reader base. Also, the ads from Google AdSense tended to clutter up the blog so I've unsubscribed.

Other interesting potential sources of online revenue I've found include Elance (you can be a freelancer, in a variety of jobs), Freelance switch, Mechanical turk (which pays for doing HIT tasks). There are also a number of other avenues revolving around selling advertising space on your site, subscribing to an affiliate program such as Amazon e.t.c. Having looked at these alternatives I felt it best to lay them aside for now. I plan on building a web server in the near future and such ventures I feel will be better explored on sites I host myself.

So  for now, I think I'll focus on freelancing (Elance), in particular writing jobs and human intelligence tasks (Mechanical turk) and see how that goes. Elance is also particularly interesting in that I could look into programming jobs (Java and Python), but I'll have to see whether I have the time to invest.

Anyway the lil' critter has just woken and is fighting for my attention.

Catch you later!