How long did it take for you to earn your entire living online?

I was one like that not too long ago. Online business is fickle really, here today, gone tomorrow

in one thread? couldn't find it.

I see the self-appointed moderator moderation team has arrived.

Maybe once you have more than 73 posts, you'll share the frustration that comes with wading through the hordes of exhaustingly mundane wannabe posts that have nothing whatsoever to do with internet marketing just to get to a real discussion.

I've been here since 2005, had thousands of posts. Then in 2010 had health issues was offline for months, and didn't get back here till 2013, then couldn't remember my ID, because I had created it back in the days when all my forum IDs were different and random. Plus changed computers in 2011 and again in 2013, so no saved info to make it easy to look up. I since started using EelKat as my id everywhere so decided it was easier to just create a new account then try to figure out what my old one might have been.

So, yes, I agree, don't judge a newb by their post count, they may be a lot more experienced at WF posting then you think.

and answering the question...

I made multiple day jobs at the same time. There wasn't a point when I ever thought: "Hey it's time to quit my job!" The best way to explain that, I suppose is to just tell you what I did.

#1 The first one started in 1983 and was newspaper delivery (1,700 subscribers across 3 towns. It was the biggest route in the area.) I was the driver's assistant. By having an assistant, he was able to not have to drive on the wrong side of the road. He drove the car and I delivered the papers out the passenger's side window. He retired in 2006, and no one was willing to take on a route that size so it got divided into several 400 subscriber routes instead. And thus I no longer do this job, though had he not retired, I would have continued.

#2: Around that same time (I think it might have been 1987?) I started a door-to-door sales business selling Christmas cards from a company I found on the back of a comic book. They didn't pay in money, they paid in points, similar to Green Stamps (which I was also doing at this same time period) and when you had enough points, you redeemed them for "prizes". I stopped doing that in about 1995/6 because the company went out of business. I was hailed by the company as their best seller in New England, and I had earned everything they offered in prizes, including a bike, multiple Walkmans and several BoomBoxes. My customers used to joke that I bankrupted the card company, due to redeeming so many of the "big price tag" items.

In 1996, still burning to beat a path to every front door in the town and no longer having a card company to sell for, I started selling Avon and continued my trek around town, now toting along cases of lipstick samples and perfume demos instead of giant books filled with card samples. I then discovered there were dozens of companies like Avon and started selling those as well. In 2013 I suffered a serious injury to my back, hip, and knee, which left me paralyzed and bedridden for 5 months, several more months relearning to walk, and currently I hobble around with a lame leg, using a cane and refusing to use the wheelchair doctors say I need. As a result, I stopped selling for all of the companies, due to the fact that door-to-door sales is largely dependant on being able to walk a dozen or more miles a day, to every door in the neighborhood.

HOWEVER, I love door-to-door sales and am currently in the process of converting my motorhome into a mobile store front and in 2016, I will be back on the beat to everyone's door step, this time selling adult products, lingerie, super and sex toys....and also coming in 2016 - I will no longer be working with Avon (or any other company) because I will have my own line of make-up, my own line of jewelry, my own line of lingerie, etc.

I had a lot of time laying in bed, with nothing to do for months but think and research and make plans and I ended up getting into researching Private Label Rights to make up, and found out that most of avon's products are simply generic make-up made in China that they outsourced to and created their own label for. I have been able to track down the manufacturing sources for all of my favourite beauty product, wither they are sold by Avon or walMart, and nearly every one of them in on Alibaba. OMG! I realized I was no longer stuck make 30% commissions from these door-to-door sales companies any more: I could start my own door-to-door sales company selling my own products (which are just the same products Avon sells with different labels) and I can focus JUST on the products I want to sell, I don't have to promote side products I don't believe in, and I can keep 100% of the profits .... and I am a damn good salesmen. I can sell anything to anyone, I've been doing it for years.

So, my door-to-door sales business is on hiatus at the moment while it gets a total make-over, but it'll be back in a year or so.

#3: In 2006, with the end of the paper route job, I started temping at Macy's. I'm trained to run every job of every department, and am called a "Floater" which is an employee who is on-call and works when someone else calls in sick or takes a vacation, thus why I'm trained to work any jb in any department. I stopped doing this in 2013, same time I stopped the door-to-door sales, for the same reason (being bedridden for 5 months, is hell.)

#4: I have two hobbies that never brought in much money, but I have done both since the mid-1970s.

1. I write short fiction, often serial pulps for various fantasy and sci-fi tiny press chapbook publishers.
2. I paint and draw and colour on paper, canvas, houses, walls, cars, you name it, I decorate it with lots of wild bright colours flowers and birds and animals.

Between 1978 and 2015 I have written 600+ short stories (all in print, most in chapbooks or magazines, all now out-of-print as a result), some comic books scripts (for Disney via Egmont) and a few dozen stage plays. Over all I could expect less then $1,000 a year from this...the internet would eventually change this though, and my writing is today, thanks to IM my #2 source of income.

And while my art often gets shown in galleries, set up as business conventions, and is used at colleges... I rarely sell it. I get lots of offers, but I simply refuse to sell them. They go on display for everyone to see, I don't like the idea of my work being hidden away and no clue what became of it, thus I do not make any of my original canvases available for sale, though if someone wants to make prints of them, I allow the prints to be sold. Like my writing income, over all I could expect less then $1,000 a year from this....the internet would eventually change this as well, and my art is today, thanks to IM my #1 source of income.

#5: To get back into the swing of things after my long sick leave, I started working two full-time retail jobs: an inventory taker at RGIS and a retail merchandiser for HallMark (which has me stationed in 6 stores, including 2 WalMarts). And, I'll tell you where I am at today, in just a minute....

...first let's look at my online income...

In 1997 I discovered the internet and immediately started building websites for absolutely no reason at all other then I'm a geek and it was fun to do. The idea that I could make money with them, never crossed my mind. 200+ mini-websites later I had my own "network" of websites and still no clue the idea I could make money. I did not one thing to monetize and of them.

I was a moderately famous artist in certain circles of people who follow the type of very 1960s/1970s "hippy style" art that I do and I was putting scans of my art on lots of my websites and this would result in my being approached by the owner of a new company that had not yet launched. He had an idea, for gathering together artists and making a way for them to sell their paintings on greeting cards. He was actively hunting down artists online, and sending all of them this request: Would you be interested in beta testing my print on demand greeting card company?

I was sceptical of his idea, because it sounded crazy, but then I figured, hey, people are always asking to buy my art and I won't sell it, maybe getting them up on greeting cards would be a good thing... and then, I also had very fond memories of selling cards door-to-door all those years ago. If there's one thing I know: people buy cards.

So, I said yes and he gave me access to the then password protected site that was limited to only 100 members. We first 100 artists to join the site and take it for a test drive, had to upload our art, put it on greeting cards and then order the cards from ourselves, and each other and write reviews of the cards. This went on for about a year while the site owners used our feedback to tweak the system.

Then one day we got the announcement the site was ready for the public and had gotten the financial backing of Disney to launch it forward with an entire line of official Disney character greeting cards.

In 2004 my beta shop went live and was at that point known as Zazzle shop #12 and it changed EVERYTHING for me. In a matter of days sales were coming in.

A few months later we original beta testers were asked if we wanted to help test out the new contract: the United states Postal Service was considering POD postage stamps. We had to fill out all kinds of forms and legal contracts and then had to manually send our artwork off to the USPS for approval. It would be several years before anyone could just jump in and post postage stamps without going through this process and only a limited few artist got accepted into the program to design postage. I was one of them. From me they were interested in my local photography of my town (which has historic significance) and so the USPS commissioned me to do photography of various local landmarks, and my photo of the Old Orchard Beach Pier got picked to be in the set of the first 10 Zazzle PoD postage stamps. Zazzle doesn't do postage like that anymore today, but because I had a stamp picked for that first test run, it remains to this day my top selling item (Stamp collectors seem to be the ones buying it and buying it because of it's history of being one of the first 10 PoD stamps ever made.)

But Zazzle, changed everything for me, because for the first time my eyes were opened to the fact that: OMG! I can make money online! I wonder where else I can make online money? I soon had eBay stores and amazon stores, and because I was one of Zazzle's beta testers, I ended up be the beta tester for CafePress, LuLu, and SpoonFlower as well.

Today my Zazzlr shop has 50,000+ products being sold off of it. In the early days I was adding new products every day. But today I only add a 100 or so new products each month, usually all on a single day. My Zazzle income has now become "automated" seeing how my store eventually got so massively huge.

NOTE: I do not have a single "clip art" style image on my Zazzle products. Every image is an actual painting I made (watercolour, acrylic, pen & ink, or pastel) Zazzle has over 200 product, I have more then 500 works of art, most of them are on most every product Zazzle offers.

With the rise of LuLu I suddenly had a way to make my old out of print stories available once again and way to have new releases without a publisher. LuLu was good to me for a long time, but then Amazon created Kindle and LuLu kind of died, and so in 2010 with LuLu sales dwindling, I started moving my work to Kindle instead. With both LuLu and Kindle, I was not seeing a lot of money (at first) and so in the early days of my move to Kindle I didn't focus on it much.

I started writing non-fiction in 2006. I got into copywriting, at first offline/print, but then online, and it lead to content/article writing, which eventually lead to writing how-to guides.

Today writing how-to guides, self-help books, and other non-fiction of that nature, makes up the bulk of my income and has enabled me to not need to work offline at all.

I did copywriting for several years (2007 - 2013) and was making about $200 to $600 a month depending on how many articles I wrote and for who. I was writing about 5 articles a week from 750 to 5,000 words each (most were around 2,000 words long). It was pretty good pay, when you consider how much I made and how few articles it took to make that much. Because I'm writing full-time, it wasn't hard for me to sit down and write all 5 articles in one day and then not have to work the rest of the week, so the amount of time put in on it was good for me as well. I could easily have doubled or tripled my income by writing more articles each week. The reason I didn't write more articles is because I was also writing fiction and I was focusing more on that. The problem was fiction writing didn't pay half as much as the non-fiction copywriting did.

One thing to consider is that I am a door-to-door salesman and have been since 1996. So I also had prior experience in knowing how to "get my foot in the door" and sell an item. That really matters in copywriting, because the goal is to snag the readers' attention, so that by the time they get done reading, they click on that "buy" button.

Think of copywriting as writing reviews and then find things you can write a good hype sales pitch for. There is a product out there for every topic. I was only doing the copywriting a short time before sort of naturally flowing over to more content writing, with less ad copy. Over the years, it just kept evolving into less ad copy, and more how-to info and over time I just ended up cutting out the ad copy entirely and switching to writing how-to guides, but I don't think I would have gotten into how-to guides it I hadn't started out with ad copy first..

I was doing various topics that I had personal experience in (sewing, gardening, pets, RV living, homeless survival skills, Autism, homesteading, boondocking, camp cooking, RPG/D&D gaming, etc). I think the reason I was so successful is because I was writing about topics that I was living in my every day life. I'm a CosPlayer and sew elaborate costumes, I live full time in a motorhome, and I boondock in the wilds of Maine, so I was making the most income off of my sewing/costuming, RV living, and survival skills articles, because I knew these topics inside out. It only took me a few months to gain a reputation for being "an expert in my field" ad once I was seen as an expert, suddenly I was in demand and people were requesting articles from me. (People are still requesting articles from me, actually, and I've not been doing copywriting for 2 whole years.)

For example in costuming, I wrote an article on embroidery. It was a how-to article and it was detailing, I use blah, blah, blah's embroidery thread, look at how great the results are. Basically it's writing an advertisement for the company at the same time I was sharing knowledge of how I used their product.

To succeed in it, you have to figure out what you do really well, and then just start writing everything you know about it. For me it was costume sewing and RV living. I was able to rite endless articles on each topic, because I was doing these things every day. You got to look at your life and ask yourself: "What am I doing, that I can write about and teach others how to do?" Once you find the topic that answers that question, just start writing everything you can about it and get yourself known as an expert in it.

(The best copywriters are those who ACTUALLY USE the product they are writing ad copy for, because the company will cling to you once they know you are a screaming fangirl of their product and use it and are willing to yap happily about how great it is. Find products you use every day and start pitching to those companies, telling them how great their product is and how much you want to write for their ads.)

I was basically doing it very part time, just working one day a week at it and making fairly good money for the limited amount of work I put in. It was definitely something I could have turned into a full-time income if I'd devoted more time to it.

Unfortunately the 4 companies that paid me the most all went out of business and so I changed my writing career around after that. I got the rights back to all of my articles (more then 2,000 of them total, over the 7 years I did it) and started putting them up on my website. I got about 400 of them up on my website, and then used the rest to compile together and re-write into non-fiction books to publish on Kindle. The 400 pages on my website, act as quasi-sales pages now. The page has the article, then at the bottom asks "Want to read more? Check out these books on the same topic:" then there are my books on Amazon for them to check out.

My articles kept getting longer and before I knew it I had switched from copywriting for products to content writing for blogs and websites.

In a way I'm still copywriting, because I'm still writing those same sort of non-fiction articles, and I still tell you all the products I'm using, but I'm no longer writing for companies and trying to pitch a sale, and just now I make a short article (2,000 words) for my site, followed by a longer book (35,000 to 75,000 words) that I publish on Kindle. The pay is a lot less doing it this way, but it's more steady, stable, and long term, with a regular income coming in over and over again from the same book. So now I can write 1 article a month, write it's matching book, and then get the same income as writing 5 articles a week and hunting down places to pitch it to. Hunting down places to pitch your copywriting skills is the thing I hated about copywriting, and why I also disliked content writing for others. In both cases I wanted to be free to just publish it on my own and move on to writing the next thing, without having to find someone to publish it for me.

The reason I didn't focus on turning copywriting into a full-time income was, I was more interested in writing fiction, so I was only doing copywriting enough to pay the bills, because it was paying so much for so little time, that it allowed me to focus the rest of my week on my novel writing.

I originally started copywriting after reading this book (which was originally published in the 1990s and has gone through several editions):

How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit: Your Guide to Writing and Publishing Books, E-Books, Articles, Special Reports, Audio Programs, DVDs, and Other How-To Content by Robert W Bly How to Write & Sell Simple Information for...
I have since read a lot of other books and courses on copywriting, but that's still the best one and remained the method I used.

The other thing is, when I first started, I didn't do it for the money, either. Here's how it all happened:

I write both fiction and non-fiction.

Fiction I write because I'm obsessed with the characters and can't stop writing about them. Non-fiction pays the bills.

I'm not making huge amounts of money, but I make more then minimum wage. I don't promote my books. I just self-publish them to Amazon and then move on to write the next one. I think if I did some heavy duty promoting and marketing, I could make and up swing from a part-time equivalent income, to a full-time equivalent income from my non-fiction.

What do I write?

All sorts of stuff.

In the older days (1970s - 1990s) I did a lot of short articles (magazines, newspapers, etc), mostly under 2,000 words each. (Pay used to be good; but I've not done it in a while so, not sure what the current forecast is on it.)

I write stage plays for local theatre. (pay is next to nothing)

I've done a few cookbooks. (pay is next to nothing)

I've done a few sewing books (costume making, embroidery, cloth doll pattern book, and crazy quilting) (pay is hit and miss, but fairly low)

I've done a few travel items, but lost interest (this could equal substantial income if I put more effort into it)

MOST of my income comes from three sets/series of books.

They are a combination of autobiographical-like essay/opinion/how-to books, on three topics that I know realy, realy, realy well. (Survival skills; writing short fiction, and my culture/family heritage/traditions)

Here's what I do:

I was homeless for 9 years. Unlike most homeless folks I opted to stay on my land, (I REFUSE to leave my beach) even though it was a very rural area with no near by cities and the nearest shelter was a 2 hour drive away. I did not have access to dumpsters to dive in or businesses to panhandle in front of or a shanty communities to congregate in at night for protection (which do exist in the cities around here had I moved to live in the areas where the local homeless hangout). I was very much on my own. I became a boondocker living off the wild, building lean-tos and eating local plants growing in local forests. As a result I started a blog to keep a record of things that happened to me. I went into a lot of step-by-step detail on various things, like building shelters and cooking food and finding places to bathe, etc. That blog went viral a few months after I started it, because as I soon learned, there were some 20million homeless families in America and not one single solitary how-to guide website on how to survive being homeless. I modernized the blog with Google ads and made about $90 a month from it.

One thing lead to another and I started writing website content on homelessness and survival skills for various blogs and websites. I was making about $200 a month from that one topic alone.

Then I wrote a book (print; now out of print; never had an ebook edition) and gained a following from that. While the book didn't make much and went out of print a year later, word of the book got out a few years later and I started getting requests for a follow up part 2 of it.

I ended up on Squidoo, where I started a series of pages called "On Being Homeless" and BOOM, suddenly I was gaining a lot of fans and readers. Squidoo went offline in 2013, and now I had to figure out where to put all those articles.

Also in 2013 my blog host sold to another company and in the move, accidentally erased all the info off one of the servers, including my blog. FORTUNATELY, I had a copy of the entire thing save on 3 separate spare hard-drives...and suddenly I found myself needing a way to get all that how-to info back up.

By this time, I had saved up enough money from writing, to buy a motorhome and was now, in addition to writing about homelessness, was also writing about full-time RVing, boondocking, and homestead. Basically, I was writing stuff that appealed to preppers. So now I have developed a multiple following: homeless folks, vandwellers, vacation campers looking to rough it, fulltimers, boondockers, homesteaders, and preppers.

I talk to these people on various camper/RVer/vandweller/prepper style forums and yahoo groups, and so I asked them: How do you suggest I get this info back online?

They had a lot of suggestions, but the thing that kept popping up over and over again was: "It'd be easiest for me to access it on my Kindle." or "It'd be nice to have it on an ebook I could keep on my smart phone." Basically they were all telling me to publish the stuff on Kindle so they could have the info whenever they needed it.

So, I spent about a year sifting through the blog (which had 6,000+ posts at the time it went offline.) and sorting the posts together by topic, rearranging them, rewriting them, and compiling them into a set of, what eventually became a series of 30 books.

Each books starts out with a notation that reads along the lines of:

This book is just one author's opinion (mine) and is more of an insider's look at how I did things and what did and did not work for me. It in no way guarantees that your results will be the same as mine. Everything in this book is all based of what I've personally done and experienced, so take or leave it. Your results may vary. I'm just telling you what I've done, what worked for me, what didn't work for me, what I liked or didn't like, how I did things, how I solved various problems, etc and you can decide if any of it applies to you and your situation or not. Some of it might, some of it may not. It is in no way advice on what you "should" or "should not" do, just advice on what I recommend based on my own experiences and you can choose to consider all, any, or some of those recommendations, or you can throw them all to the wind and do completely the opposite.

In each book I strive to focus on a narrow topic, within a broader topic. I'll write, re-write and expand the book, adding more information and details until the book is 100 to 250 pages long.

So I end up with one book on how to survive being homeless during blizzards and hurricanes; one on how to build a shelter out of found items and how to maintain it for several years of homelessness; one on how to upgrade from a shanty tent to vandwelling; one on how to find safe access to food and water; one on the dangers you'll face while homeless and how to protect yourself; one on how to outfit a motorhome into a full time boondocking bugout machine; etc.

I make my goal to have all my non-fiction books at least 100 pages and more then 100 pages if I have enough to say on the topic and usually I can get a book well over 150 pages.

I brand them as a series, with matching covers, then put them up on Kindle. Books 100+ pages I sell for $2.99; and under 100 pages I sell for .99c; the few over 300 pages I list for $4.99.

In most cases, shortly after one volume sells, with in the next day or two, one of each of all the rest (30 volumes) sells as well. It is very common for someone to buy 1 volume then come back and buy the whole set a few days later. Well, most of them are $2.99, earning $2.09x30 volumes. That's $60 income in one day.

And then I have another series, done the same way, on writing short fiction. I've been writing short stories since the 1970s. I've got hundreds of them up on Kindle. There are 3 volumes out now and the set will have 25 volumes when finished. Again, each volume is 100+ pages and sells for $2.99, and when someone buys one, they often come back and buy the rest a few days later.

Then I have a third series, again, done the same way, this time on the history of my clan and it's traditions. I am the keeper of the records in my clan, I know the family history inside out. So far it is as 7 volumes published and 30 planned, again, each volume is 100+ pages and sells for $2.99, and when someone buys one, they usually come back and buy the rest a few days later.

I'm selling several a day now and once the full set of each set is up, these 3 sets of books alone will be bringing in about $500 a week.

In each case, it is me, taking some that I know really well and am on some level and expert on, and writing about it, to share my knowledge of it with others.

Everybody has something they are good at or know well enough to write about. It's just a matter of figuring out what it is you are interested in and writing about it.

And it may surprise you what you are an expert in. 10 years ago, I lived in a house and if you had told me that a major disaster was going to wash through my yard and take my house with it, and result in websites all over the world listing me as the top expert in homeless survival skills, I would have told you, you was crazy. But that's what happened. a flood took my house, and I did what I had to o to survive, and out of frustration I started a blog to vent about it and one thing led to another and next thing I know, I've got people coming from all over the world to meet me and see my camp set up in person. I didn't plan on this. I never intended to become a writer of survival books, but here I am, writing books on how to survive when nature attacks you from behind.

Somewhere in your life, you have something that has really impacted your life. It could be war, illness, natural disaster, a hobby, your job, your culture, your car, a pet, something, that you can write about and turn into a non-fiction writing career. And it may be the last thing you expect you'd ever write about too.

And I'm sure there's more ways I could spin my survival skills writing. Maybe I could write a newspaper column? Do lectures? I don't know. There's a lot of RVers out there requesting I set up a sort of "caravan tour" where I take my motorhome across the country and do lectures at campgrounds, and invite other RVers to follow me in their motorhomes. I'm thinking of doing that. Not sure how to set it up, yet, but working out the ideas... but anyways, you can see how, I started out with simply copywriting some articles on something I knew a lot about and because I knew it so well, it just exploded from there into a full time career about the topic and no longer was about me just copywriting anymore.

You want to know something funny? As a result of my writing those survival skills books, I have since started featuring homeless, vandwelling, and/or RV full timers as main characters in my fiction writing. and guess what: my top selling fiction novel right now, is the one about a guy who became homeless, lost his home and his family to a major disaster event, and just started walking all over the world, being homeless and trying to survive. a lot of that book, even though it's fiction, was based off actual events in my life. A lot of the stuff that happens to him, are things that happened to me. So, you can even take your non-fiction and write fiction based off of it.

So, yeah, that's how I took copywriting writing non-fiction and turned it into a steady income.

My current personal writing process is less organized then what most copywriters do, and is much more emotion driven, and usually follows something like this:

Disagrees with something someone said, either a news article or a blog post I read or something a reporter said on TV or something someone said during a conversation with me, etc. Or something happens to me and I'm really upset about it and need to talk about it. For example, the first time I set out in my motorhome, I had this nice set of china dishes. By the end of the day all the cupboard doors were open and smashed dishes were in the floor. Taught me two things: use plastic dinnerware in a motorhome and secure the doors with bungee cords. Well, I got several articles out of that event. It was just a simple thing, but I was: "OMG! This pisses me off so much, I must write about it."

Writes a rant on my blog, rambles on every thing that annoyed me about the issue, however it pops into my head. Ends up with a post about 2k words long.

Make a top ten list for my website (Top Ten Things NOT to take with you in your RV; Top Ten Reason Every RVer Needs Bungee Cords; etc) Make sure the Top Ten list contains a link to any blog posts and books published on the topic.

Soothes the savage beast inside me by painting or drawing and BOOM gets an idea for a book cover to match my rant.

Rushes to ChaseyDraw to create a book cover, and wonders what I'm going to do with it now that I've created it because I can't publish a 2,000 word rant with a cover.

Spends a week or so, editing and re-writing the rant trying to determine how I could turn it into a book. Soon I am picking the issue apart and writing a more organized and detailed rant on why I wrote the first rant.

100 pages of in depth rating later I now have something that looks like a book.

Re-write the whole thing into a more logical, less hysterical, stream of consciousness "here's how this made me feel and why I felt that way" sort of opinion piece, that doesn't rant as much as it did when I first wrote it.

Edit it, add the cover, slap it up on Amazon Kindle, hit publish. Done.

Look for new issue to set a fire under my rant button and start the process all over again.

As you can tell, my approach is very "unprofessional" and more "this is how I feel".

I guess you could say my non-fiction is less "expert in my field" and more "Dear Reader, this outraged me and I needed to scream at someone about it, thank you for letting me vent", whatever genre of non-fiction that may be. But then because I'm writing about actual events that happen to me on the same topics over and over again, I ended up becoming seen as "the go to expert" of my topic.

The thing of what I'm doing is, I'm NOT selling my writing, I'm selling my knowledge of how to do a thing that I'm really good at doing, and it has a group of people out there who want to do it to and are willing to pay money to learn how to do it well. That's the thing you have to focus on. Not making money. If you focus on making money, you'll fail. Instead focus on finding out what it is you have to share with others. Then find the people who want to know that information and get information to them.

In the early days I was writing content for others, but today all my writing goes 100% into my own site, my own blog, my own books, my own lectures, etc. I no longer do any outsourcing to others anymore, so I've now cut out the middleman and turned this into a business that s no longer copywriting. But copywriting for others all those years taught me how to do stuff, that I wouldn't have been able to figure out on my own, had I just jumped in and started off on my own site. I think it would have been really had for me to gain a reputation had I started out with my own website first. It was definitely because I was writing so much content for so many others, that I gained a reputation in my niche, so I definitely recommend starting out in copywriting and building up your reputation before heading out on your own with your own website.

So, yeah, that's the basic road map of my own copywriting career and where I took it and how it evolved out of copywriting for products I used, into content writing that no longer pitched products, into book writing, into a full time career about the topic itself. I never expected that taking up copywriting in my spare time, would evolve so far away from copywriting and end up becoming a fulltime career elsewhere. I completely did not plan on any of this. It just happened as one thing snowballed into another and I sort of went with the avalanche, changing to match the changes around me. I think that's the most important thing of all:knowing when to change and adapt and move away from the thing you started out with, and go to the thing that speaks to you.

So in my writing career, it's the non-fiction that was paying the bills.

I still wasn't making money with my fiction writing though and that was where my heart was. That was what I really wanted to do. Writing is what I love to do. I love what I do. It's fun to do. I've done it for the fun of doing it for years, only years ago, I had no time to do it because I had to go to work... now I get paid to do what I love and because I no longer have to go to work for money, I can just do what I love all day long. The problem is I don't write fiction in popular genres. I write Weird Tales and Bizarro and Monster Porn, most of it in short story form and a lot of it heavily inspired by Poe, Lovecraft, and Blackwood and written in the exact same 1800s style loooooooong winded slice of life monologue, endless sections of dialogue, as one character drones on for hours about doom and gloom and tentacled chaos beasts. Not a lot of demand for that. It's VERY hard to make a living writing the genre I love to write most of all.

So, my non-fiction sales march steadily along dutifully bring me money, while my fiction sales stagger drunkenly down a dark alley and then suddenly run screaming off a cliff like a herd of lemmings.

Everybody kept saying: Write Erotica! Write Erotica! It's where the money is. I wrote Erotica. Yep. It's where the money is. The problem with erotica is the first book sells like hotcakes for 1 month and then if you don't have a new book released at least once a week, sales stop 100%. That meant in order to make a livable income, I had to write a LOT of Erotica (at the expense of writing things I would rather be writing.) But then I got bored with human on human sex so, I wrote Monster Erotica, but then, I couldn't see the monsters as monsters if they weren't doing something bloody and monstruos (too my years of Dungeons and Dragons) so my Monster Erotica stories ended with the Monster eating the girl, so I was writing Monster Porn (a type of gory bloody Horror) not Monster Erotica (a type of super smexy Romance). Yeah. Not a lot of demand for that.

But then, I've just got Dungeons and Dragons on the brain, and all I REALLY want to write about is my D&D Player Character who I've played in D&D game sessions for years: a high as a kite drug addicted High Elf wizard, who IS the world's most powerful wizard, if he could just lay off the drugs long enough to his spells right and stop blowing the wrong people, or if he could stop running off to have sex with gay unicorns long enough to, you know, actually go on whatever quest he's been paid to do. It's the most insane D&D character I've ever played. He started out as a joke ( a spoof of Drizzt and Lord Sesshomaru combined), and went on to be my favorite player character. I've playing him through Temple of Elemental Evil, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Pathfinder, White Wolf's Changeling, Forgotten Realms, Neverwinter, and Dark Sun. I act him out (in costume) at game sessions and then I started putting stories about him up on fanfiction .net and that's what I do in my spare time. My social life is spent with me running around dressed up like an Elf wizard while acting him out in game sessions.

I play a very high High Elf with gay unicorn lovers in D&D game sessions and then write those sessions down and post them on fanfic .net, and then, and I LOVE this part - I go to CosPlay conventions dressed as him and my readers from fanfic .net KNOW WHO I'M DRESSED AS! This is a homebrew character and people recognize him!!!! *squeeeeee* OMG I have readers! I'm just tossing this up on fanfic .net for fun. I wasn't doing it for the money, I had no idea people were like, actual fans of this absolutely psychotic character.

And THAT was how I wanted to make money. I wanted to do nothing for the rest of my life buy play this character in D&D and then write the game sessions down. That and sit on the beach all day.

And, now... thanks to Zazzle and my non-fiction on Kindle, I do just that.

----------------------------

What am I doing now? What does my current career of online and offline income look like?

In May 2015 (yes, just over a month ago) I quit my RGIS job (which was a 40 to 80 hour a week job, and was 7 days a week, and was 3rd shift) to take those 40 to 80 hours and focus 100% of them on my writing instead.

Today, in place of that RGIS job, I write on a very strict schedule and NEVER write for fewer then 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. I make it a goal to publish the following EACH AND EVERY MONTH:

• One (1) novel of 50,000 words or more.
• Two (2) to four (4) short stories of 5,000 to 10,000 words a peice.
• One (1) long non-fiction book of 50,000 or more words OR two (2) short non-fictions of 30,000 words each.

I still work as a retail merchandiser for HallMark. I will likely have this job the rest of my life. I don't look at it as a job. For me, it's like my down time from my real job, which is writing. Writing is a solitary and isolated career. You really don't have any contact with anyone and I'm kind of a social butterfly to some extent. So, I need breaks from the solitude of writing and, working 8 to 15 hours a week for HallMark, provides me with that.

I'm not doing the HallMark job for the money (the pay is really low and so are the hours) I'm doing it for my need to just have a social life that doesn't involve the wizards and Elves that live in my head and puts me in a situation where there are real live people to talk to. I'm the type of person who, if I didn't have a job that forced me to be there at a certain time, I'd never leave the house and turn into a hermit gibbering about unicorns and Elves all day long. I REALLY need an outside job in order to keep my sanity, because my online job, while it provides income, is very socially isolating.

For me, technically, I have quit my day job (all of them) and am now living full time off my online income only, but did keep one of my day jobs as an extracurricular activity. I kept the HallMark job and not any of the other jobs, because for me, that job is the most fun to do and provides my mind with a much needed down time. It's a very stress-free, meditative and relaxing job, and I get to talk to WalMart employees who are sort of my coworkers (as I'm stationed in walMart) and I get to talk with the customers.

Hey, it's greeting cards and if you've learned anything from my post yet, it's that I really have always had good luck in the greeting card industry. From door-to-door sales of cards to designing cards for Zazzle and now stocking cards at WalMart for the world's largest producer of cards. The greeting card industry has just been good to me all around.

My non-fiction guides on Kindle and my Zazzle shop are kind of self automated now, just bringing in an income while I can do whatever I want. And you know me, I already told you what I wanted to do: I want to dress up as a High elf wizard and play D&D all day long and then write about it, while sitting on the beach.

It was a dream. I knew it was a dream. I told myself it was a silly dream and I'd never do it because it was impossible. A pipe dream that I never tried to attempt until 2013 when I spent 5 months paralyzed and bedridden, flat on my back, and couldn't do one damned thing.

And then I'm relearning to walk, on crutches for 12 weeks and, the doctor is telling me, my best bet is to get a wheelchair. And I'm like, wheelchair? I live on a freaking beach? Beaches aren't wheelchair accessible! No way in hell am I going to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. I take up physical theory on the beach and I reach the point of walking with a cane, and I can't do too much for too long. I get exhausted fast, my leg goes lame and then I'm stuck wondering how am I gonna get back before the high tide comes in and drowns me. So I wrote a story about a girl trapped on the beach in a tidal pool when the tide came in and drowned her and a merman ate her remains. I know, my mind comes up with the weirdest damned things to write about, but hey now I'm sitting on the beach writing and I'm watching people who are still able to run and play and jump around out their on the beach. I'm out here on the beach with a very bad leg and a cane...talk about physical therapy! Try walking on the beach with a cane. It ain't ain't easy, I'll tell you that!

For me, success isn't about the money. It's about taking the thing you love to do most of all and turning it into your income, so that you are able to totally immerse yourself in doing the thing you love as much as you want.

I mean, I finally had a good income coming in, but my health was shot. I can't play tennis anymore. I can't run any more. I can barely even walk. I used to walk 13 miles a day in my door-to-door sales job. I did belly dancing and aerobics and Richard Simmons Sweating With the Oldies. I was a very active and physically fit person. Being stuck on a cane and not being able to do any of those things any more was a total nightmare for me. All the money in the world didn't mean a thing if I couldn't do the things I loved doing anymore. What good is money when you can't do things anymore?

This injury really changed my perspective on money vs success. Success isn't about money, it's about reaching your goal, no matter what that goal is, and well, here I am hobbling along the beach, shifting sands beneath my feet, causing me to fall on my face every few minutes, and the cane not doing much good when you fall down on beach sand and need to use the cane to get back up, but the damned thing sinks two feet into the sand instead of being a sturdy thing you can pull yourself up with. Oh, yeah, my outlook on success was changing fast. At that point I'd of considered myself successful if I could just make it back to the boardwalk.

And I had that pipe dream in my head. The really ludacris one that I knew was utterly stupid to even try for, and I almost died, and I realized, I almost lost my chance to do the one thing that I ACTUALLY WANTED to do.

And that is when you saw me make a drastic change in my writing career. I went to fanfic .net and I deleted everything off my account. No more was I going to just write my high High Elf just for laughs. THIS is what I wanted to write. THIS was where I wanted to make my income, and by damned I was gonna do it...and I was gonna do it on the beach. I was gonna take my writing out to the beach, I was gonna walk across that beach, and I'm gonna write this thing and make money with it.

That's also when I started following my other insane dream: building art cars. I just plowed into building art cars, and dressing like a pink Elf wizard, and spending all day long on the beach, and writing really weird D&D inspired fantasy fiction.

My family was telling me I had lost my mind. Everyone thought I had lost my mind. Some people sent the police over to check me out and see if was okay or if I was dangerous and on the verge of a mental breakdown that would end up with me killing half the town (oh, yeah, someone actually called that in as a report to the police - she's gone crazy, she should be locked up, look at how she's dressed, look at those cars she built, she painted her house neon dayglow pink, she's insane!).

The beach is 7 miles long, I can barely walk and here I am trying to walk every damned 7 miles of it, so I could walk from the end of the beach I live on, all the way to the other end of the beach, just so I could sit a great big rock that shows up at low tide, and write the most scatterbrained, ludicrous piece of bizarro crap ever imagined and think it was gonna make me money.

I started out doing this with a lap top. And then I slipped on the sand, my cane did no good at all, because all it wanted to do was sink down into the sand, the tides rolling in, and the next thing I know I've got a 12 foot wave going over my head and dragging me and my laptop out into the water. No more laptop. Ever want to kill a laptop dead as doornail just toss it in the ocean and let the salt water do the rest.

Great. So now I'm roaming the beach on a cane, dressed as pink robed Medieval wizard (lots of tourists taking pictures) and no laptop to write on. (There's also an Elvis impersonator down there on the beach, tourists often ask us to stand on either side of them so they can get a picture with the crazy drag queen wizard and Elvis at the same time.) Yes, I do live a very strange life. But I did almost die, had to go through a lot of hellish surgery, spend a lot of months in bed, and had a lot of time to come to the realization that, I really needed to just do whatever the hell I wanted to do, no matter how crazy it may be, because you only live once, and almost dying really does change your outlook on life. I no longer care what other people think. I just do the things I want to do, while I'm still alive to do them.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, for tommorow ye may lay dying.

That is the motto I live by now. I got a second chance at life, a lot of people don't get that opportunity.

Your time is important. That's the point. That's the lesson I learn. Time is short, and you may not have tomorrow. So WHY are you wasting time doing a 30 to 40 hour a week job that you hate and find a drudgery to do, when you COULD be doing a 100 hour a week job of getting paid to do the things you REALLY WANT to do? (No matter how utterly insane the things you want to do, may be.)

Because of my Zazzle income, I now own EVERY SINGLE D&D guide, all editions 1st, 2nd, ADD, 3rd, 3.5, 4th, 4.5, and 5th, AND ALL the minis ever made, and ALL the adventures, and ALL the maps and ALL the tiles, and ALL the board games, and ALL the splat books. I bought a 50lb bulk packages of dice from Chessex. I have an entire storage unit that is nothing but D&D books, minis, teriane, etc.

And at night, I set them up, grab an adventure module and run a game by myself, with no other players, and write down all the results of every dice roll. I spent about 6 hours a day for about 3 days a week, doing this. It's loads of fun and is why I never know what is going to happen next when I am writing my pulp fiction serials. Everything I write, literally is determined by the roll of the dice.

Here's where my IM online income job gets fun...

Every morning at sunrise, about 5AM, I get up, I gather up my game session notes and dice roll results, and I walk to the beach. I sit my ass in the sand and I pull out my game session notes and dice roll results and I start writing. I sit on the beach for 8 damn hours (dressed in full CosPlay as my high High Elf Wizard) and I just write and write and write and write and write.

With my laptop dead I had to find a replacement. After some research, I bought myself a thing called an Acecad Digi-Memo. It's a digital clipboard with a digital pen. You clip a regular pad of paper to it and you start writing. Longhand, short hand, print, italic, cursive...it doesn't matter. You just start writing. You write and write and write. I write 20 to 60 pages a day: while sitting on the beach. Maine's beautiful 7 miles long white sand Old orchard Beach. I sit and listen to the waves and watch the kids playing, the police on their 6 wheel amphibians chasing divers off the Pier, the surfers catching waves, the seagulls stealing hot dogs, smell the pier fries with vinegar, cotton candy, and pizza cooking off the median strip. Watch the ferris wheel and merry go round spin. Hear the teenagers screaming from the rollercoaster, and I'm still writing and writing and writing. I'm sitting on my ass, relaxing in the sun, sand and surf, lazily working my ass off sipping slushies and eating ice cream cones and cotton candy for 60 to 80 hour a week.

When it gets too dark to see to write on my pads of paper anymore, I sit and watch the sunset and the lovers ******* each other in public on the beach. Then I walk the few steps it takes to get back to my beach front yard, jump into my big green motorhome, and here's the best part:

I plug my DigiMemo into the computer, and I go to bed, while my computer spends the night typing up everything I wrote that day, so that I don't have to.

OOOOH! Have I ever mentioned how much I LOVE my Digi-Memo? I am no longer stuck at the computer! I can write longhand on the beach ALL DAY LONG, EVERY SINGLE DAY, ALL YEAR LONG and it types everything I wrote, even if I write in shitty unreadable cursive. It's AMAZING! The DigiMemo is the best thing I've ever bought.

Then the next rainy day, when I can't spend all day on the beach, I do my editing, formatting, and publish it on Kindle.

Here's a picture of me in my "office" This is where I work, all day long:



Yes, I am wearing a 200 year old wedding kimono embroidered with real gold, on the beach on a hot August day. Why? Because by working 60 to 80 hours a week doing what I love, I can afford to do whatever the hell I want to do. You should see the pink sequined ballgowns I wear on the beach. Oh, I stick out like a sore thumb being the freaked out Disney princess floating around between all those speedo wearing tourists. But hey, I don't like wearing bathing suits and I do like wearing ball gowns and kimon, and there's no rule that says I can't wear them every day. And I'm all about doing the thing you want to o, and that's the thing I want to do.

And marketing my books is so much fun. I just park my car on the beach and start handing out business cars to everyone who stops to ask about my car. Here's my car (and my house):



and a zoomed in close up so you can see what it looks like up close:





Ask me again why so many people flock to get my business cards? They are just dying to shake hands with the local insane drag queen and her crazy pimped out car. Did you know, that coming to Old Orchard Beach hoping to get a glimpse of me or my car, is a "thing" now. People come from all over the country and wander around the town with a camera and asking the locals: "Where's EelKat? Does anybody know where she lives? I came all the way from Alaska to see her."

Last year a group from Japan showed up, apparently it's a "thing" now in Japan to follow EelKat's exploits and see what crazy thing she's gonna do next and, a group of them got together to fly out here to meet me and spend the day watching me sit on the beach in costume while writing. I' not really sure how to respond to that, so I just went back to writing.

Last summer 7 tour bus pulled up in my yard, it was the 50+ Club, several of the senior citizens follow my blog and my FaceBook and Twitter and decided to save up money to come to Old Orchard and meet EelKat in person.

The Town Manager has been flipping out, the locals don't know what to make of it, with all these people just randomly showing up in town and running around asking "Where's EelKat? Does anybody know where she lives? I came all the way from ___ to meet her." I don't know what to make of it.

I didn't plan on any of this. I wasn't trying to become famous or make money, and I've done both. I just set out to relearn to walk on the beach and write the things I wanted to write. I didn't realize I had that many followers to my posts online. These people say they've been following me online for years - decades, some of them remember my old sites from the 1990s. My fight to relearn to walk has somehow inspired them and now they are treking to Maine to tll me in person. In the past year I've become some sort of a phenomenon and I don't know how to deal with, I'm still working that out.

I'm not famous for my books, half the people that come here say they didn't realize I was an author. No. I'm famous for being me. I'm famous for not giving up. Being me and not letting anything hold me back, is what pays the bills.

So, now I spend my days doing whatever the hell I want to.

Live your dream, Honey. Make it a reality. Don't focus on the money. Focus on doing what you love, and you'll find a way to make the money come. It always does. Forget the money, follow the dream, and you WILL succeed, and before you know it, you'll be working 100 hour weeks, but it'll feel like 100 hours of play and you'll love it and you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

I had a goal, and that goal was to be able to walk on the beach again, to not spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, to play lots of D&D and to write the kinds of books I REALLY wanted to write, whether it was a hot selling genre or not. And I was determined to do whatever I had to to stay out of that wheelchair and get back on that beach and walk again.

I never focused on the money. The money wasn't my goal. Do what you love and the money will come. Be you. Be true to who you are.

Everyone laughed. My friends, my family, the online people who knew what was going on, locals around town... but I didn't let that stop me. I went to the beach and I taught myself to walk again and I did it in costume and I wrote harebrained stories when I got to the end of the beach.

The first volume went on Kindle September 2014. It sold 198 copies the first day and 114 copies the next day.

And now, in July 2015, I'm able to walk that beach, every 7 miles of it. I'm still on a cane, but the doctors say if I keep going like I am now, within a year I may not need a cane at all.

Who's laughing now?

If you've got a dream, you go after it full force, and you live it. You don't let ANYTHING hold you back.

A hurricane couldn't stop me. A flood couldn't stop me. Being homeless couldn't stop me. Vandalism at the hands of racist bigots couldn't stop me. Health issues that left me crippled couldn't stop me. I REFUSE to not succeed.

If you want to succeed in ANYTHING online or offline, money or not, it's all about your attitude and your outlook on life.

Know what your goals are, know what you want your end results to be, and if you stick with it, you WILL succeed and EVERYTHING you do, because will be able to get in your way.

If you want to quit your day job and earning an income online, you can do it, but it ain't gonna happen over night and it sure as hell isn't going to be served up to you on a silver platter. If you want it you have to work for it. It's easier to get a job and work the 9 to 5. Being your own source of income is a long hard road, that required knowing where you want to go and planning out what you will do to get there, and then MOST IMPORTANTLY: not giving up, not giving in, and continuing to march forward to that goal no matter what life throws at you.

Most people fail in business because they crumble and give up at the first sign of trouble. If you really want something, there is never an easy road to getting it, you always have to fight for what you want no matter what it is.

The easy path to money, success, and happiness doesn't exist. The road it long, hard, and dirty, and it's full of pits and roadblocks and detours, and a lot of people give up the first sign of trouble.

Quitting my jobs and living full time off online incomes, that was never my goal, it was simply a side effect of me following my dreams and sticking with my goals and jumping on every opportunity that came my way and finding ways to take several very bad things and use them to my advantage. Internet marketing was not my career, it was simply the tool I used to build the life I wanted to live.

It took me about 2 months and a half, 3 months.

I used to work in Finance. In real estate finance to be more specific ( Commercial real estate appraisal).

I really went all in and almost crazy about internet marketing though. I used all the tools I know about being productive and really took massive action.

Interesting... So you make your entire living on Zazzle? You don't think the market's too saturated now? I'm always concerned about those opportunities that are only good if you started it early.