How did YOU made your first bit of profit online?

In my case, the first gain was with a blog in which I also promoted hosting, then I did some programming work as a freelancer and nowadays after reading so much to learn and a lot of trial and error I dedicate myself to online marketing promoting Affiliate products.

Regards

My first gain was in the late 90s when I sold some astronomy software I'd written as shareware. I then rewrote the software as a much more comprehensive tool and promptly lost it all when my hard drive crashed and the backups on my Iomega Zip Drive were trashed when I tried to access them.

I could have given up there but I started from scratch and rebuilt the software from the ground up and started selling it from my astronomy site. I approached several astronomy shops to see if they'd sell it and sold thousands of copies that way over the following years.

While it's not now my prime income source, I do keep the software updated and it's still on sale 20 years later!

The success I had with that in the early 2000's led to me moving into affiliate marketing and leaving my full-time job as a software contractor. And I've been a full-time affiliate marketer since 2004.

We're going back about 20 years here - but from memory, I think the first online profit was from an affiliate programme paying commission on hotel bookings.

Shortly after that, we started selling advertising direct - (businesses sponsored individual pages about their local area on our website) - and a couple of years later we discovered AdSense.

Our business has been information publishing monetized by a mix of advertising and affiliate marketing until quite recently.

Now we're going in a new direction, teaching people how to build a successful online business of their own with our blog and other channels. We'll monetize with online courses and possibly some affiliate marketing too.

I see my experience is not as impressive as yours, I sold stuff on eBay, and at some point, I sold something every day. But then, I got bored of that so I just stopped

First profits were from big numbers of Software sales through big websites that took a big % of the sales and spent it on marketing.

Then software sales direct, selling way less numbers, but keeping keeping more of the %

Now affiliates.

My first bit of profit came from a little 13$ course i bought, that taught me how to get traffic from facebook and send that to offers.

I think the most important part, is that i had an "aha" moment, from how the course was structured, and what they actually taught you to do. And so, i had "that feeling", i "knew" it could be done. So i just went ahead and did it.

Became a testimonial for the method, and grew an audience that way. Still using it now and prefer it over paid traffic, in fact i made 350 bucks in the past 2 days with it. Nothing INSANE...but still.

It's awesome to know that i can tap into the method at any point, because of a little work i had put in in the past. Real cool

I made my first bit of profit online with a niche website. I sold an affiliate product called VIRALURL. I'm not even sure if that company is still in business. This was back in early 2010. I made like 44 bucks on that first sale. I was ecstatic. That set off a chain of events that changed my life.

I made my first $1,000 in sales online by promoting affiliate products, in the make money online niche.

You'd be surprised how many people want make money online to supplement their income, in order to quit their regular 9 to 5 job.

I made my first profit online buying items at yard sales and flipping them on eBay. True it wasn't a lot, but it did ultimately lead me to learning about affiliate marketing and selling informational products. Also, for anyone completely new to making money online, eBay is still a great place to get your feet wet.

In 2005, I was playing a videogame called World of Warcraft. I was pretty good at making currency in the game and decided to write up a quick World of Warcraft gold making guide that outlined some of the things that were selling well in the game at the time.

This guide was only four pages long in WordPad and I decided to slap it on eBay for nine dollars. I limited the quantity of guides to 500 units and sold out the first week I have been listed. After that, I went into article marketing writing up quick guides on finding specific items inside the game on ezinearticles that linked to a few different ClickBank products related to the game.

Needless to say, I've been hooked ever since.

In 1996 I started selling cut to size components online.

Then day trading Australian stock market.

It is so crazy considering back then we only had dial-up at the time.

Best regards,

Ozi

it was a wallpaper page. it was a hobby project to learn php. back then i didn't even know what seo meant. i built a script that took images, resized them to all kinds of screen resolutions and for each image and resolution it returned a website. it also created colour histograms and let you search for images with similar colours. it also had a bug and the maybe 400 original images resulted in 120000 urls. but google ate them. it was the #1 for "free wallpapers" and "sexy wallpapers" in my country. in the best month it had over 5500 visitors per day and it made me 1800 euro that month via adsense. later google implemented some changes to banners for spammy websites like mine and adsense started to complain about the sexy wallpapers being too sexy. the income dropped to 50 euro per month and then i shut the site down. worst thing is that i didnt even know about adsense and had this site running for over a year without any ads on it.

Back in 1998 I saw some "write for us" links on some sites so I wrote some articles and got mailed some USD checks.


You can still make money doing this - it's pretty easy but helps if you have specialist knowledge of a specific niche. Business/high value niches are best.


In 2002 I started my own software business. I coded my own products and must have made around $100,000 from that idea.


The software business is still immensely lucrative, although my niche was of its time and other things came along.


There are still great opportunities though. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are currently making $$$$$ from Cloud computing. I can see Google becoming a major player in the future as they will use their AI experience gained in Search/AdSense to find the most lucrative business processes to make cloud services for. But that will still leave many micro niches for us smaller players.

Bought iphone (I think it was iphone 3) locally and sold on ebay. It was fantstic moment as i made my first profit.

While building my affiliate marketing business I started networking and sold my first affiliate product by talking to someone about a product. It was a high ticket product so the return was quite a bit.

Sometimes you get breaks where you least expect it.

It was in 2009. Didn't know anything on how to build blogs, so I thought I'll make a tech website. I just copied articles from "Free article directories". Which of course is a stupid thing to do. I monetized the site with Amazon.
I made exactly one sale. It was a TV that was worth about $800. I made $42 of it. Because of the $100 threshold, I couldn't withdraw the money for 8 more years...

I believe my first dollar was from a sports site with some type of ad network (don't remember if it was Adsense or textlinkads or something else)

Tie up with some social sites. This makes your product sale better.

My first payout as a freelancer was in 2005.
-- It was €300 for 100 300++-word articles that I wrote for write4euros(dot)com across a period of 2 weeks.

On the other hand, my first direct client paid me 500 USD for a week's worth of off-page SEO work.
-- I wrote articles, submitted it to article directories and built social bookmarking links for my client's website.

My first contract for a team of freelancers I built was in 2006 with a retail software development firm in Canada.
-- This SEO, affiliate sourcing and multimedia marketing contract gave me sufficient resources right from the start to build my now 12-year old tech startup; and
-- My client gave me a sizeable deposit as they also required me to register a business, set up an office and employ 140 agents.

Other things I did online to drum up some business produced the following results:

• My first multilingual call center contract was in 2013;
• My first technology research and development grant for the disability sector from our national government was in 2017; and
• The first hackathon that I joined, where I also won the first prize, was mid last year ...

First and simplest way I made money online was selling items on Ebay and Amazon. It is the best thing you can learn with unlimited potential.

Pretty sure it was freelance writing, but really, my skills and not the income stream itself, made the dough.

I think for the first couple of bucks was from selling a gig on Fiverr, was only $4 way back in 2011, then I moved onto Squidoo and other web 2.0 sites, promoting affiliate products by blogging, which made like a few hundred a month which in the beginning was life-changing for me.

Like most marketers, I have tried most things to varying degrees of success and failure, but even the failures taught new skills and ideas.

The skills and disciplines you pick up which become interchangeable between different income models and services.

If I could go back and give myself one bit of advice, it would be to track my links.
it made it very hard to see where the traffic was coming from in the early days, so anything that made money was hard to replicate due to not tracking my links, you cannot upscale what is working if you do not know what traffic source the sales and referrals come from.

It was affiliate marketing to promote a new software that people love to buy at that time using a simple video I uploaded on Youtube. The commission was stopped as the company change their affiliate system. I even got a gift from the company as their first affiliate with biggest sales at that time (the first period of their promotion). Now, the competition is really hard. I guess I was lucky when I joined them while people still in doubt about them. Then I learned a lot about IM, and I choose to sell my own service to make steady profit from internet.

I was in college promoting a very raunchy product, but i had managed to gather 60 leads in my email funnel. I was so eager to see a sale that i offered a 50% off offer to my list. I woke up the next morning and saw 2 sales in my inbox.

Fell out of my chair and didn't go to class the entire day.

Back in 96, I read a little blurb that was on the page before the back cover of Entrepreneur magazine about a guy that was using email to generate free leads for his business.

Knowing the value of leads and that companies would pay for them, a big light bulb went off.

At the time I knew nothing about the internet or email. Which it probably took me 6 months to figure out how to do things. Once I figured out how to do everything, I contact someone I knew that had a commodities firm and they were paying $40 for TV leads. I offered to provide them with custom leads for $27 each and they were totally into trying it. Needless to say, I totally killed it and the leads were just as good as the TV leads.

Me i earn my first money with pay per download like cleanfiles by promoting hacks ,key generators on youtube

Built an email list with some SEO work and a freebie lander and sent affiliate copy daily. Was making $100 per day within a few months, was a great feeling.