Start Your Engine: Making Money Working

This guest post is by Roman from how this website makes money.

Two years ago I stumbled across the concept of blogging for money. Instantly it hit me as the perfect thing: sit behind a computer, design a site, write, be my own boss, work from home, what could be better? I knew nothing about traffic, SEO, backlinks, Pagerank, or keywords. I knew nothing about how to make money with a website. So what did I do next? I registered the domain name howthiswebsitemakesmoney.

Looking back all I can do is laugh at my arrogance. Like thousands before me and thousands who will come after me, my first attempt at blogging was a site about making money online.

Two years later, I know how to start a site, I know how to write content, I know about SEO, I know about backlinks, I know how to add advertisements … but I still do not know how to make good money online. The site makes dimes a day, not dollars.

The site has been two years of disappointment. Two years of waking up in the morning and seeing the same green egg in AdSense. Two years of waiting for a four-digit affiliate check with my name on it. Two years of working without pay. Two years of scratching my head.

So I asked for advice, and every time the reply was the same: create a site about something else. Create a site about what you know and what you enjoy. Do not create a site with the intent to make money, create a site with the intent to help people by doing something you enjoy doing.

What happened when I changed my intent

Six months ago I created a new site. This time my intent was pure pleasure.

I live in Prague and I love it here. So I made a little site about how great Prague is and what people should do when they come for a visit. It was built in a month. In a gust of activity I designed the site and wrote the content.

It was so easy. I did not agonize over what to write about. The content flowed effortlessly from my head to the keyboard. I did not have to take long walks with the dog or waste water standing dazed in the shower coming up with new ideas. I just sat down at the computer and wrote about what I know. It was so easy I actually looked forward to it.

As an afterthought, I created a simple page where people can order a real postcard from Prague. Visitors select a picture of Prague and fill out a form indicating what they want written on the postcard. After they hit the Submit button I get the request by email. I grab a postcard and, like an ancient scribe long before computers, lick the tip of the pen and write. After pounding a Prague stamp on the postcard I toss it into the mailbox on my way to work. I charge $4.00 for this five minutes of work.

I created this site with no aspirations of becoming rich, no day dreams of shaking hands with Oprah, no imagined scenes of telling my employer to find some other donkey to kick around. I created the website because it was easy for me to do and I enjoyed it. I made it because I needed a break from my ‘real’ website. I expected nothing to happen.

Again, I was wrong.

My hand is ink blue from all the postcards I have written.

I wrote a postcard from a son playing a trick on his mother: “Hi, Mom! Sorry for not calling in last few days. But I am in Prague with friends. Having a great time and the beer is sooo cheap. Say hi to Dad.”

I have written postcards to countries all over the world. Some of them in languages other then English—I have no idea what I am writing. Fortunately, the order form does not allow Chinese characters!

I get emails from people thanking me for the information they found on the site, thanking me for the postcard, asking for more information.

I feel like I am making the world a better place. I made a website about something I know about and am interested in and people are thanking me. Emotionally it is a soft, warm, fuzzy ball.

And yes, I am making money.

Intend to enjoy and you might make money

I learned a lot about making money online not from my site about making money, but from licking postage stamps.

New arrivals to the make-money-online scene go through the same initiation—they start out with the intent to make money, then fail to make more then a pile of pennies. For some it means the end and they quit, but for others this brutal introduction teaches them that their intent needs to change.

Of course, making money is about traffic, clicks, affiliates, backlinks SEO, but it’s also about finding something you enjoy doing. If your intent is only to make money the odds are stacked against you: you will probably quit. But if your intent is to do something you enjoy then you will keep moving forward until one day, you will be surprised to find that you are making money.

What’s your intent?

Roman intends to figure out how this website makes money. He has been trying to do that for two long years, so when he needs a break and do something fun he goes onto his other website to send a real postcard to his mother who misses him very much.

Moving on after divorce doesn't happen in neatly defined stages. It's an imperceptible process that happens while you're doing other things. It's halting--two steps forward one step back--one day you think you've moved on and then you regress--over and over again. The most important thing to remember is to keep forgiving yourself at each stage. If you regress and do dumb things, like sleeping with your ex (it happens) badmouthing him to the kids or making a scene at a family event, pick yourself up, brush yourself off and start all over again. Remember to tell yourself it's ok, you've been through hell and you deserve to screw up-- once, twice or a zillion times --until you're ready to stop screwing up.

One day you look up and realize you haven't thought about your ex or your marriage for a whole hour, then a whole day, a whole week, and so on. You get involved with other things; you catch yourself thinking about the project you're working on, or the guy you're involved with, what to invest your money in, how to help a friend, how your kids or grandkids are doing, redecorating your living room, buying a new house, a trip you've always wanted to take. Life, in all its complexity, just takes over. Your marriage recedes into the past, seeming almost as though it happened to someone else. You realize that you're doing things you never would have done when you were married and you congratulate yourself. The pain gets smaller and smaller, taking up less room in your consciousness.

This doesn't mean you will never again feel the pain and rage you initially felt. Triggers will come up and you'll be right back there. In a divorce support group I went to immediately after my husband left, when I was totally consumed with my own anguish and desperate for some relief, I was horrified while listening to a woman who had been divorced twenty years ago. She talked about all the old, bad post-divorce feelings coming up recently because her ex- husband had died. However, when I expressed my dismay that she still had those feelings, she reassured me that she had long ago moved on, it was just that her husband's death had brought up a lot of unfinished business and bad memories that she needed to process. I was greatly relieved but still uneasy. I couldn't imagine then how you could actually move on and be back at square one twenty years later at the same time. Now I understand since I'm in both places regularly. It's like grief for a loved one. You mourn, you move on, but when something reminds you of that person a pang of grief still grips your heart.

Abigail Trafford, author of Crazy Time says that after a long marriage it takes at least five years to truly move on. She's right on the money. It's been more than five years for me and I think I've moved on as much as possible considering that I have to interact regularly with my ex on co-parenting issues. I expect that when my daughter gets older it will get easier still. Most of the time my mind is on other things--my writing, my friends, my house, my health, my finances or lack thereof (don't get me started on that subject) not him. Every once in a while though, when he does something to really piss me off, I'm right back in that place where I feel helpless, hopeless and homicidal. Thank goodness we have finally reached a truce of sorts, where we avoid email flame wars and communicate mainly through my daughter's therapist.

You may also sink into feelings from the past when you run into him at those unavoidable family functions such as weddings, graduations etc--especially if he's with a woman twenty years his junior--but those feelings will pass quickly. When I listen to the excruciating pain of recent divorcees, I realize how far I've come. I totally empathize, but am so grateful not to be there anymore.

Erica Manfred is the author of He's History You're Not: Surviving Divorce After Forty.

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Thursday, December 9, 2010

Making Money Working

What happened when I changed my intent

Intend to enjoy and you might make money

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