How Is YOUR Economy Now? Bumper Crop on the Web!

I feel like singing!

I feel like singing!

I just can’t say enough about the increase in entrepreneurial spirit on the Internet brought on by economic uncertainties. It would seem that a number of people are taking their incomes into their own hands and creating websites to create multiple streams of income to skim over rough times nearly unscathed.

I was one of them for quite a while, and I’m continuing today, even though I still have a job and my wife has a full-time job for the time being. It all started with my gaming site, Gitr Knows WoW back in 2005. After several months, I realized that I had a voice in the community and was getting enough traffic to monetize my site. Within a couple of months things started to happen. I slowly ramped up my Text Link Ads to the point that it was and is paying for an entire year’s hosting every month. For quite a while, I was selling enough electronic merchandise that I had to claim my site on my tax return. Not bad for writing about one’s playing, I say!

Fast forward to now… zzzzZZiiiipppp!

I wasn’t getting anywhere at work and we were in the process of purchasing a house. To say we needed to generate some cash is an understatement of epic proportions. Enter the 55 hour week and working on freelance jobs in the evening and during night classes. As time went on, we realized that it was better to sacrifice a bit of together time to get a whole day’s pay ahead.

There was seemingly no shortage of money to be made for people with my skillset. Who was I to argue with common sense? It was getting to the point that I was losing money going to the office versus staying home or getting out of there as fast as I could.

Now that I’ve left Corporate America, I’m doing the great COBRA medical payment plan: give me all of your disposable income. Not that we’re in a hard spot, but it sure would be nice to have that money going into our savings account and we’ve made some lifestyle adjustments as a result.

The nice part is that the opportunities have not stopped. I took a couple of months off to adjust to working at home, but now I’ve started working at 9:00 or 10:00pm at full-blown consulting rates to get ready for our switch to a PPO insurance plan and a planned loss of a significant portion of my income next year. Here is what I’ve done to ready ourselves with multiple streams of income:

  • I’ve placed affiliate links in my forum signatures I have in various places.
  • I have made my own advertisements for the services I use that match my site and attract people and don’t detract from my design — note my iThemes ad above.
  • I am offering WordPress training via Skype in the evenings.
  • I take on small (1-3 hour) WordPress installation and customization jobs.

Put all of those things together, and I have a constant stream of e-mails going to Gorgeous letting her know when I’ll be scheduled to be on Skype and preparing to transfer from PayPal to our bank account. All of this can be done without a college degree or any startup money aside from a hosting plan, although you could get started on a free site such as WordPress.com and convert easily later, though you’ll lose traffic for a while using that method, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

I’ll leave you with this quote from my good friend, Phil Gerbyshak:

Work hard now or work hard forever.