One thing I have learned about people is how much time and energy is wasted in wrong action. I still do alot myself but I am better than I was and getting better. Take my step daughter for instance, she is doing a photography course at college at the moment, but is not really enjoying it. what she does enjoy is socialising with her friends and partying. One way to socialise and party is online partying via sites like Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. So much so that it has interfered with her college coursework resulting her not doing it, then panicing she will get into trouble so to avoid trouble, she skives! Then she gets college ringing here so the cycle starts all over again.
The amount of time her and her friends spend online is massive, now there is nothing wrong with this at all. But couldn't they be putting this time and the internet to good use while they are doing it? We are currently living in the best time in history for earning easy and passive income thanks to the internet. If done right, there is no need for many of us to need a job, do a 9 to 5 or become a wage slave.
Her and her friends really do not want to work, and I understand that, neither do I! Working becasue you choose too and having a job you enjoy is alot different from having to work which is what most people do. The majority of people work to earn money to live. My step daughter and her friends know on the surface that life, socialising and parties cost money. To be fair to trully enjoy life requires lots of money. I am aware that somewhere in some back hole of Canada you may find a spot of land where you could pitch a handmade wigwam and live a life free of costs but even then, you may need to rent the land, or pay for some food, or buy a solar panel to power your electric toothbrush.The simple truth is You Need Money!
So to earn some money my step daughter is working as a cleaner in a school and a cafe at a carboot on a sunday. The school is a special school for children and young adults with learning difficulties, I know full well that some of the older horemonal autistic boys do not just use the toilets for toiletting!! She is cleaning floors, hoovering and polishing classrooms and cleaning out the toilets each evening for possibly £5-6 an hour. On Sundays she comes home stinking of chip fat! Not a smell I often see bottled and on sale in Boots, maybe Sarah Jessica Parker could front it and call it hmmm, Tasty!
Now don't get me wrong, I am very proud of her because she does work hard and do a good job, she is not sitting around scrounging from the Goverment or us but, you still have to ask, why?? She is a photographer! she could be using one of many sites to upload and sell her photos online for web desingers orgraphic designers to use for websites or magazines. She could have her own site set up for as little as £50 a year! I did pay out £30 and set up a shop for her on Cafepress, selling notebooks, bags, tee shirts , posters etc with her photos on them. We had business cards made so she could hand them out. She could have been making a wage from home as she chatted on Facebook to her friends, with her ipod playing in the background but alas, it was too much hard work. With Cafepress, all you do is promote your shop, they take the order, print the item, and post it. Then if you have made enough over the month once they have taken out their material and admin costs they post you a cheque. She sold a few items but not enough in the first month, maybe she was expecting a cheque to come in with thousands but she became dis-heartened. I told her that she needed to send traffic to the site, people cannot just land there and buy, some might but many won't.
She could be running a blog or many blogs discussing topics that they talk about on Facebook and with links to her Cafepress shop and othersites. At the same time she could earn a small living from google ads placed on her blogs and sites. She could also promote affiliates items through her sites and blogs increasing sales and income. But it saddens me that they moan and complain about the shit jobs they have, that they are not earning enough and they have no money or time to socialise or go online. Thats the life you made! The potential, the possibility, the answer is there, right in front of your eyes!! The internet, reaching all around the globe. 6 billion potential customers! 500 million in the English speaking nations alone, right there at your fingertips! These days you do not need a computer or laptop, there are people running internet businesses from their mobile phones while sat chilling in bars or on beaches in many wonderful locations! Bit different from my dad's day selling stuff out of his corner shop.
You can run a money making venture from your bedroom, with your fingers while you enjoy all that you have around you, Facebook, TV, cups of tea but instead the younger generation seem not to want to put in that little bit of extra work to get it going, the time is often spent filling in pointless and predictable questionairs or waiting for someone to 'comment' on a self taken at arms length mugshot that looks like all the other thousands of self taken at arms length mugshots on these profiles. Ironically it seems they would rather go out, put in hours of time sapping, dull, repetative, boring, dirty, annoying work like cleaning shit and spunk covered toilets.
Hmmm they say youth is wasted on the young, thank god intelligence isn't!
Thanks for reading and until next time, Have fun.
Andy
Friday, 19 June 2009
Friday, 12 June 2009
Cutting The 'I Can't Afford It' Crap
We all want more than we have, but oddly, it is us who stops us getting more of what we want. Even worse is that most of the time most of us doing it don't realise it is us stopping us from getting what we want. I used to do it alot when I was younger, now things are different, I am forever popping £2 coins into my special 'website pocket', loose change into my 'online bucket' and stopping myself spending money on things I don't really need so I can use it on things that I really do want.
Over the years I have done many festivals, some overseas, I have visited Thailand, and Australia amongst many European countries and have just recently returned back from a chilled trip to Ibiza. I didn't make it to Cafe Del Mar to see the sun set over the sea but we did manage to see it set to a soundtrack of laidback blissfull chillout beats over the San Antonio bay in a really cool Dutch bar called 'De Tulp'
It was magical. i couldn't wait to tell friends about this bar so should they go to Ibiza they would hopefully experience it too, but nothing winds me up more than speaking to people who say things like "wish I could afford a holiday," or " I have always wanted to go to... but never had the money" I can't help but ask why not? the answers I usually get are, "well it's this goverment, all those bloody taxes" or " the cost of living is high and we have no spare cash" etc etc etc. I do sympathise with these folks but... It is the same for us all.I am not yet a multi millionaire and do not have oodles of spare cash myself, but when you delve deeper and ask more questions the answers that come back to you get even more frustrating...Recently one guy told me he has always wanted to go downunder to Australia since he was about 16, he is now 35. How has he not been able to afford to go to Australia in 19 years? If he saved only £2 a week for the last 19 years he would have enough for his flights and accomodation. No, but he has found the money to go drinking regularly and smoke 10-20 fags a day. Lets not forget the kebab or pizza on the way home from his nights out in the local. He must be spending an average of £30 a week on the same old thing, to be fair as I think about it more, the cost of beer, fags and pizza is possibly £30 a night or more. I dread to think what he does spend a week. I am not saying that you cannot enjoy life or that you must save stupidly and not enjoy the money you do earn but please wake up and realise that you can do more of the things you really want if you cut out some of the things you regularly do but not need to do. One nightout less, or 20 fags a week less, maybe 5 beers less a week and he could be on his way to swelling out a holiday fund. Depends on wher you drink or what yu drink but 5 beers at average cost of £2 each is £1o a week, 52 weeks a year thats £520! 19 years and never been to Australia... I could have done it in 2maybe less!
Times are hard but I want to set up online businesses that will hopefully earn me money in the long run, I do not have a large lump of money spare so I save £2 coins when I recieve them in my change and cut out on things now and again to fund web hostings and domain name registration etc. I also put in an extra hour or two a day if I can or if not at least a week working/reading or learning on how to generate extra income. It really is not that difficult when you consider what crap there is on TV these evenings in the UK. Eastenders, Coronation St, Emmerdale, BigBrother, The Apprentice...Loads of spare time!! How many of you have met people who have not only moaned that they have no money, no spare time and then lit up a fag for the umpteenth time that hour only to say that there was crap on the telly when they got home from work?!?!? I do my t shirt wrapping or screen making for my tee shirt printing business when the crap is on. Gives me a spare hour in the day before or after I print to focus on my internet stuff when I am alone at home.
So imagine what you could achieve if you cut down a bit on certain things and spent an hour or two on maybe setting up an Ebay shop, doing a carboot or something. You will be suprised at what happens. It would help if you wrote down on paper what it is you want and how much it will cost, then try and figure out how to do it. That is as they say half the battle won. since I wrote down what I wanted my mind has become more focused. I know I will get what I want. Because I will make it happen.
Thanks for reading and until next time, Keep smiling.
Andi
Monday, 8 June 2009
Earn money from Google Adsense
It has been a few days since I did my last blog and that’s not good as I have really only started it. But I was away in Ibiza for a week, enjoying the sun, the food, the people and the views. I planned to do an entry when we came back but I found that the holiday settings that I had set for our online shops did not deter people from ordering tee shirts from us and I had the hugest list of orders to work through so that then came a priority. I certainly will not moan as the fact that we are here is amazing considering our plane lost a wheel leaving Ibiza and we were diverted to Manchester airport instead of landing at Leeds Bradford as planned. Reason Manchester airport was chosen we were told is that it had a longer runway which was safer for us. We landed to find all the fire crews and vehicles on standby at the end of the runway with office staff all out watching us land. That’s when we realised something bad could of happened. Once inside the terminal, after being told we had busses laid on to take us to Leeds Bradford we were told that they had chosen Manchester airport as it had 2 runways so should something have happened they could still keep the airport operational where at Leeds Bradford with the 1 runway it could have closed it down. That’s very reassuring!
Anyway back to my quest to make a million. Once I started to learn about making money online my intention is to start earning a passive residual income. That can come from a few sources; they still need some work involved but not as much as full 9 hour days in a dirty workshop. So what was my first venture into this online world of money making?Google Adsense. For those who do not know what this is then let me explain a little about Google Adsense. When you sit reading a magazine you will find it full of adverts often related and sometimes not to the magazine itself. Take music magazines for instance, they have adverts for selling instruments, studio time, how to DVDs and books etc. Now the people placing those adverts pay the magazine for them to be put into print in the magazine in order to reach a targeted audience hoping to increase sales for their company. The magazine itself needs those adverts to increase their revenue and also help keep cost of magazine down so that more people will buy it. The magazine will then need to print the magazine, distribute the magazine nationally and sometimes globally so that people can buy it. Quite a costly affair.
Now with the internet, you may not be aware of this but if you have a website or a blog, you are considered a publisher. Your website or blog is like a virtual online magazine which has the potential to receive hundreds possibly thousands of visitors a week, depending if it is good. Those hundreds and thousands of people could earn you money… I am sure you have seen websites like these
View Site
These are Google ads on one of my websites, once I built the site I set up an Adsense account with Google who then places adverts onto the website. Anyone visiting this site who then decides to click on the advert sets a wheel in motion. He is taken to another website owned by the person who placed the advert with Google. That website owner who place the add pays Google when the ad is clicked, Google then share the money they receive and pay you the website owner where the ad was originally clicked on a share of the money. How great is that? The amount you make varies and depends on the amount the ad owner pays Google, I am not sure really how Google decide what amount to pay you. I think it is a percentage. I do know that recently I took a quick look and saw that I earned around 50 US cents for a click on one advert on one of my sites. Imagine hundreds of 50 cents a week. It will all add up. So lets say you have a popular website with hundreds of visitors a week, the website probably costs you as little as £40 a year to host. The adverts Google place on your ad is based on relevance so if you have a website on football, the adverts themselves will be football related. Increasing the chance of your visitors clicking on the ads if they are selling something they want making more money for you. Great! Please, please be warned, technology is great, things are so easily automated and traceable so please do not click on the adverts yourselves that are on any of your websites. It is fraudulent and against Googles rules and you will loose your Google account. Do you really want to loose a system to make good money over time for a few pence now???
So what do you do? Go to Google and open up a Google Adsense account, Google will scroll through your website with its little virtual spiders to check that your website is suitable then they will generate a snippet of HTML code which all you do is place into your websites HTML coding or if, like me, you use webbuilderpro5 which is a HTML generator software, just simply place it into a HTML code box and your are done! Now all you need now is to direct more people to your sites. And that can be done in many ways.
Until next time thanks for reading.
Andi
View Site
Anyway back to my quest to make a million. Once I started to learn about making money online my intention is to start earning a passive residual income. That can come from a few sources; they still need some work involved but not as much as full 9 hour days in a dirty workshop. So what was my first venture into this online world of money making?Google Adsense. For those who do not know what this is then let me explain a little about Google Adsense. When you sit reading a magazine you will find it full of adverts often related and sometimes not to the magazine itself. Take music magazines for instance, they have adverts for selling instruments, studio time, how to DVDs and books etc. Now the people placing those adverts pay the magazine for them to be put into print in the magazine in order to reach a targeted audience hoping to increase sales for their company. The magazine itself needs those adverts to increase their revenue and also help keep cost of magazine down so that more people will buy it. The magazine will then need to print the magazine, distribute the magazine nationally and sometimes globally so that people can buy it. Quite a costly affair.
Now with the internet, you may not be aware of this but if you have a website or a blog, you are considered a publisher. Your website or blog is like a virtual online magazine which has the potential to receive hundreds possibly thousands of visitors a week, depending if it is good. Those hundreds and thousands of people could earn you money… I am sure you have seen websites like these
View Site
These are Google ads on one of my websites, once I built the site I set up an Adsense account with Google who then places adverts onto the website. Anyone visiting this site who then decides to click on the advert sets a wheel in motion. He is taken to another website owned by the person who placed the advert with Google. That website owner who place the add pays Google when the ad is clicked, Google then share the money they receive and pay you the website owner where the ad was originally clicked on a share of the money. How great is that? The amount you make varies and depends on the amount the ad owner pays Google, I am not sure really how Google decide what amount to pay you. I think it is a percentage. I do know that recently I took a quick look and saw that I earned around 50 US cents for a click on one advert on one of my sites. Imagine hundreds of 50 cents a week. It will all add up. So lets say you have a popular website with hundreds of visitors a week, the website probably costs you as little as £40 a year to host. The adverts Google place on your ad is based on relevance so if you have a website on football, the adverts themselves will be football related. Increasing the chance of your visitors clicking on the ads if they are selling something they want making more money for you. Great! Please, please be warned, technology is great, things are so easily automated and traceable so please do not click on the adverts yourselves that are on any of your websites. It is fraudulent and against Googles rules and you will loose your Google account. Do you really want to loose a system to make good money over time for a few pence now???
So what do you do? Go to Google and open up a Google Adsense account, Google will scroll through your website with its little virtual spiders to check that your website is suitable then they will generate a snippet of HTML code which all you do is place into your websites HTML coding or if, like me, you use webbuilderpro5 which is a HTML generator software, just simply place it into a HTML code box and your are done! Now all you need now is to direct more people to your sites. And that can be done in many ways.
Until next time thanks for reading.
Andi
View Site
Thursday, 21 May 2009
My Story So Far
Having spent 19 years working as a joiner/carpenter both wokshop and site based, having long days, often cold and wet on site, cold mornings in workshops or very hot and sweaty days cooped up in wokshops with the air filled with choking inducing dust and nauseating noise I realised it was time to get out! The internet was for many a way to make money without leaving the home. The first thing to try like everyone else was ebay. Selling any old unwanted or unused items or tat we had laying around the house was the introduction to the running of an ebay account. I sold the larger workshop machinery I had as I had at this time stopped working for myself and took employment with a joinery firm in the area spending 9 hours a day in a converted cowshed for a workshop. The money from my own machinery was used to buy screenprinting equipment for tee shirt printing. Graphics and art was what I wanted to do when I left school originally, that and make music..
I left school 19 years ago to go to art college to do graphic design but I took a brief summer job with my uncle doing joinery which stupidly made me come to the conclusion that I should get a trade to fall back on in case I was unable to get a job once I left art college. hmmmm that bad decision resulted in me not going to art college but spending 19years working as a joiner/carpenter either employed or for myself.
Anyway, I digress, I bought screenprinting equipment, opened up an Ebay shop called vandal-designs selling my own hand printed tee shirts. Ebay is a great spring board, but their fees can eat nicely into your profits so the next step is to have your own website. So thats what Idid. http://www.vandaldesigns.co.uk/ was born. I was now begining to see the potential of the internet. With Ebay i was selling tee shirts worldwide from my own home. Every tee shirt posted had a small brochure/leaflet with other tee designs on it directing people to our website hoping they would buy from there. The reason was that there were no Ebay fees to pay, the tee shirt prices were less on the website too so everyone was a winner. Strangely though, past customers bought more from us via Ebay even though they had our leaflet and the prices on our site http://www.vandaldesigns.co.uk/ were cheaper!
The thing that really started to sink is this... when I was self employed as a joiner/carpenter, I had a van that like all vehicles needed road Tax and insurance, I had a workshop that cost me rent and business rates. I also needed public & product liability insurance in case I somehow accidentally injured or killed someone with my work. My monthly costs were adding up... The workshop rent and rates alone were around £240 a month (that was the middle sized workshop I rented in my 19 years in the trade). Thats a staggering £2880 a year without the other costs, before I have even started to work. Then there is also machinery costs, electric costs and here in the good old UK we even have to pay for rain water to run off of our property even if your workshop is below another so you do not even have a roof. And may I also moan that unlike the council tax which pays towards the rubbish being taken away from your house, business rates, the business equivallent does not acctually do anything! We still needed to pay for our business waste to be taken away adding to my monthly overhead bills.
With the internet, a cheap website like http://www.vandaldesigns.co.uk/ and http://www.andiroo.co.uk/ cost me around £50 a year each! The domain name is around £8 for two years if it is a co.uk name and £8 for one year if it is a .com... The hosting of the site is less than £2.50 a month. That's it! fortunately for me, I Have a great close friend who owns a hosting company, http://www.lincwebhosting.co.uk/ who helped me set things up. Give it a look, he is very reliable and friendly, and his knowledge about the internet and computers makes DATA from Star Trek look like a ZX Spectrum.
So, the internet wins hands down on overhead costs, and for reaching a larger target audiance. 500 million people living in the English speaking nations, countless others speak English as a second language, 6 billion people living on planet Earth. How can we not make money online? Unlike my dad who owned a corner shop for over 30 years, I dont need to buy loads of stock and wait for the local people to come to me and Only the local or people who are just in the area passing. The WORLD wibe web is in reality my OYSTER!
Andi
I left school 19 years ago to go to art college to do graphic design but I took a brief summer job with my uncle doing joinery which stupidly made me come to the conclusion that I should get a trade to fall back on in case I was unable to get a job once I left art college. hmmmm that bad decision resulted in me not going to art college but spending 19years working as a joiner/carpenter either employed or for myself.
Anyway, I digress, I bought screenprinting equipment, opened up an Ebay shop called vandal-designs selling my own hand printed tee shirts. Ebay is a great spring board, but their fees can eat nicely into your profits so the next step is to have your own website. So thats what Idid. http://www.vandaldesigns.co.uk/ was born. I was now begining to see the potential of the internet. With Ebay i was selling tee shirts worldwide from my own home. Every tee shirt posted had a small brochure/leaflet with other tee designs on it directing people to our website hoping they would buy from there. The reason was that there were no Ebay fees to pay, the tee shirt prices were less on the website too so everyone was a winner. Strangely though, past customers bought more from us via Ebay even though they had our leaflet and the prices on our site http://www.vandaldesigns.co.uk/ were cheaper!
The thing that really started to sink is this... when I was self employed as a joiner/carpenter, I had a van that like all vehicles needed road Tax and insurance, I had a workshop that cost me rent and business rates. I also needed public & product liability insurance in case I somehow accidentally injured or killed someone with my work. My monthly costs were adding up... The workshop rent and rates alone were around £240 a month (that was the middle sized workshop I rented in my 19 years in the trade). Thats a staggering £2880 a year without the other costs, before I have even started to work. Then there is also machinery costs, electric costs and here in the good old UK we even have to pay for rain water to run off of our property even if your workshop is below another so you do not even have a roof. And may I also moan that unlike the council tax which pays towards the rubbish being taken away from your house, business rates, the business equivallent does not acctually do anything! We still needed to pay for our business waste to be taken away adding to my monthly overhead bills.
With the internet, a cheap website like http://www.vandaldesigns.co.uk/ and http://www.andiroo.co.uk/ cost me around £50 a year each! The domain name is around £8 for two years if it is a co.uk name and £8 for one year if it is a .com... The hosting of the site is less than £2.50 a month. That's it! fortunately for me, I Have a great close friend who owns a hosting company, http://www.lincwebhosting.co.uk/ who helped me set things up. Give it a look, he is very reliable and friendly, and his knowledge about the internet and computers makes DATA from Star Trek look like a ZX Spectrum.
So, the internet wins hands down on overhead costs, and for reaching a larger target audiance. 500 million people living in the English speaking nations, countless others speak English as a second language, 6 billion people living on planet Earth. How can we not make money online? Unlike my dad who owned a corner shop for over 30 years, I dont need to buy loads of stock and wait for the local people to come to me and Only the local or people who are just in the area passing. The WORLD wibe web is in reality my OYSTER!
Andi
My name is Andi and I am 35. After nearly a year of studying the internet, internet marketing, off line marketing and metaphysics such as the Law Of Attraction I am now implementing a plan to become financially free and work free so I am free to enjoy my life and travel the world. This blog is to share not only how well I am doing, how close I am to my goal but also I will use it to share for free all that I have learned about internet marketing, the tricks of the trade and also Spiritual and Metaphysical side to the Universe. I hope it helps you and you enjoy following and reading about my journey as much as I do doing it. Oh and I may now and again talk about my likes and dislikes in life, such as my love for hard dance music, chillout music and graffiti art etc. So it is not always too HEAVY a read.
Enjoy
Andi
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