How long did it take you to replace your "day job" income?

Thanks for sharing Steven.

Theres either a lot of liars here OR a lot of people that had crappy paying jobs!

I quit my government job of $85,000+ a year and in the latter stages of 2008 when I first started IM -- I LOST $8,000! The end of financial year saw me go backwards by $8,000, although I did blow $15,000 in adwords in 3 months.

Then in 2009 I think I made, about $25-30,000. 2010 saw me earn $55,000, and Im hoping that 2011, sees 6 figures. To be honest, in 2010, having earnt $55,000 -- really was pretty good for me, considering I spent most of my time sitting in a local cafe

Its been a tough slog, many lonely nights, plenty of tantrums, and lots of cups of tea (thank you liptons)

I sure hope it turns out to be worth it

It felt anything but "quick" at the time, I can tell you.

I came - as far as "making money online" goes - from a background of forex-trading (that's been my father's profession all my life), with which one can say at the end of the day "I made $50 today" or sometimes "I made $100 today" (with my small account-size, anyway), and working as a Clickbank affiliate felt like many months of input to get anything off the ground and produce income at all.

I did have a sort of "moment of epiphany" after about 3 months' labour, though, relaising that I was doing a few crucially important things terribly wrong, because I'd started off accepting the "consensus view" on lots of subjects, which prevented me from earning anything to speak of. After I'd identified a very small group of people here whom I knew I could believe and trust absolutely, especially when they were saying the opposite to everyone else, I "got lucky" very quickly, though.

I had limited options, being (i) a writer, and (ii) an incompetent technophobe (which I still am, compared with most Warriors, although obviously I've picked up some skills along the way), which worked in my favour, I think, because I wasn't able to "do what most people do", and this was lucky for me, as it turned out: not doing what most people do (in my case because I didn't know how) was a blessing in disguise, because "most people" aren't too successful, to put it bluntly.

I made that in my fifth month - it's only about 3 Clickbank sales per day (less, now that I've realised that some $65+ commissions aren't such a bad thing!).

No coaching ... I have all the limitations of being entirely self-taught (though a very small handful of people here very kindly answered a lot of pestering messages asking for information/opinions which I knew I could rely on!). It was what I learned here after learning to identify and judge reliable information and distinguish it from misinformation. I started off believing that high-gravity products are a good thing, that it's ok if a vendor has an opt-in on his sales-page, and a lot of other nonsense. When I ditched all these misguided beliefs after about 3 months - without even, at the time, understanding why they were so misguided - it suddenly all fell into place for me, because I was lucky enough (and this really was lucky: I'm not trying to "be modest" about it, and am well aware that I could just as easily have been unlucky as many people are) to have been doing everything else "more or less right" or at least "right enough to have something to improve on" all the time, without knowing it.

A month or so later, I suddenly understood where the real money is, in article marketing, and that it has very, very little to do with "click-through rates", "spinning", "rinsing and repeating" and all the other junk one sees people discussing. And my income's been gently growing since then - with some fluctuations, of course. I haven't quite had an $8,000 month yet (from Clickbank, I mean), but it's only a matter of time.

Probably 3-4 years of building, and then once I invested $$$ into my projects, then my income really grew past the point of just earning a "livable" income.