About a year ago, I bought my first domain. I didn’t have any clue at the time how to pick a domain name or how to research a niche nor did I have any idea how I would monetize my site. I knew that I just wanted to start making money online and figured the best way to jump in was to go head first.

So, jump I did. Within a few weeks I owned 30 domains in various niches that I thought would be easy to make money in. I put an article up on each, like on my hair transplant resources site. I still had no idea how I would make any money I just figured that I needed to get started.

I’d work on my online business everyday. And by work, I mean I’d read a few messages on the warrior forum and think about all the people there who claimed to be making big money online and think about how soon it would be that I’d be joining them. I also read blogs. I read them constantly. I had heard of a few of the big ones, like Johnchow and I figured that they could teach me how to make money. I read lots of promos for various products, and I read and read and read. There seemed like so many good ways to make money online, so many in fact that I couldn’t decide which way was right for me.

At one point I became interested in flipping sites. Some idiot in the warrior forum demonstrated that you could make about $80 if you bought a domain, populated it with content and then put it up for sale. So, I thought this was genius. I bought a few more domains. Spent a week or so writing articles — And at the time I thought writing 10 articles in a week was working hard — then I listed the site on the marketplace for sale. At the time, the sitepoint marketplace was the place to sell a crappy little site, so I went there. It cost me $10 to list my site. I listed it for $100. There were no bids. So I listed another site of mine, again for $100. There were no bids, but an individual emailed and offered to buy the site for $70. Having no other options, I jumped at it. So, I had spent $10 on the domain, $20 for two auction listings and a week writing content. I profited $40 for my trouble. I has hardly impressed.

It had now been three months since I first started. I had spent about $500 by this point for domains and hosting and had still not made any money. But I was determined to stick it out so I went back to what I do best: I read more blogs. Back to johnchow, who is always ready to offer you his affiliate link for the latest-greatest, and back to warrior forum. For the next three months, I floundered about with my 30+ sites, each with maybe 400 words of content on them and wondered why I wasn’t getting any traffic.

Around this time, it came to my attention that the domains I had been purchasing, while clever, were unlikely to be of much commercial use to me since they often did not contain any pertinent keywords within them. I had gathered that a keyword rich domain might bring in more traffic so I started to buy more domains based on some keyword research I did on wordtracker. I didn’t have any experience with keyword research so I was surprised at some of the results I found. I learned for instance, that “another love calculator” was searched for more than 600 times a day on search engines. Imagine my surprise when I went to GoDaddy and learned that anotherlovecalculator.com was available. Sweet I thought! Perfect keyword domain for a keyword searched for hundreds of times a day!

It didn’t occur to me to question these numbers. I just thought, “Finally!” I knew it was just a matter of time until I was getting hundreds of people a day searching for information on more love calculators.

But nobody came. As it turns out, nobody searches for that term. Maybe one person a day. I was ranked second on google for that keyword and I would maybe get two visits a week. I didn’t understand it at the time and I thought about giving up. But, no I thought, I must keep going. So, I returned to warrior where I read more stories of people making $20,000 a month and wondered how they did it.

It had been nearly six months and I still didn’t know what on earth I was doing. I had spent about $1000 and made only a few dollars back. I was down big. At this point, I found myself on Grizzly’s blog How to Make Money Online for Beginners. Which I found interesting and inspiring. I realized that I needed a plan and Grizzly’s approach of making money through seo seemed to make sense to me.

So, now that I knew how to make money online, I bought some more domains. This time I bought keyword rich domains for moderate-heavy monthly search keywords. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to research a niche and in many cases, the sites already ranking for those keywords were too entrenched for me to have any hope of knocking them out of top spots. My sites were all on page 5 and deeper.

I was bummed but still determined. I went back to Grizzly’s site and read everything on it. I began to understand the importance of ranking in google for your keyword as well as the basics of how linking works.

Now, flash forward three months. It has been a year. I have spent more than a thousand dollars buying mostly worthless domains. But, finally, I am starting to see some returns. Using Grizzly’s methods (as well as Court and Mark’s from The Keyword Academy) I have just had my first $100 month in adsense. This is by far the best month that I have had so far. I finally have a strategy that I am using going forward and I see how I can get these numbers up significantly before the end of the year. But, at the moment, I am happy to be making $2-$5 a day. I know it is not much but it’s much better than I did for the first 9 months that I was at this.

The main thing I have discovered so far is that is takes a lot of work to make money online. Dicking around and reading blogs and forums does not make you any money. Doing work does. I have realized that if I want to make a full time income blogging, I am going to have to put full time hours into it. Nobody pays me for sitting on my ass. This has been a tough lesson to learn… to realize just how much work it is going to take. I have figured that for me to make $100 a day, I am going to need to have hundreds of pages of content online. This can be somewhat daunting to a person who first thought that it was hard work to put 10 articles on a blog in a week.

I was so worried about making my content great that I barely made any content at all. I have realized that just doing the content is half the battle. It doesn’t have to be good. In some ways it is a disadvantage if it is too good. So, now I just create content. Content and links. It’s all I am about.

I am grateful to the people who have helped me learn how the whole MMO game works. Though I have hardly learned everything that I need to know. I am also very suspicious of all the charlatans who are looking to separate the fools from their dollars.

The fact of the matter is that working online is just like any kind of work in the sense that it is work. It is boring and hard and very boring and tedious. But the fact of the matter is that even at its worst making websites and blogs and pointing links at them is infinitely better than working for someone else. I can’t stress that point enough. If I start to make a living at this, it will take me two seconds to put in my notice at work. In fact, I look forward to the moment when I am able to quit my job and focus on working online full time. At the rate I am going, I don’t know when that will happen, but I am more determined than ever. So, if you are thinking about working online, I would describe the work much like Winston Churchill described democracy — “Working online is the worst form of work there is… except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.”

There is nothing so rewarding (and difficult) as working for oneself.

I don’t update Paycheck blogging very often. I don’t have all the answers at the moment. I am just a passenger on this particularly journey. But I do have some faith that my base of knowledge will grow over time. And I will gain more useful information to pass on about these matters.

This is one of the first domains that I bought and I actually like it. It isn’t really super keywordy but it is the kind of thing that I can brand over time. So, I expect to return to this site and talk about my methods and ways to make money online and, particularly, my own money making journey. I can assure you that I don’t have it all figured out just yet, but I will be posting more regularly here in the hope that, some day, this content can be advantageous to me (as an entrepreneur) and you (as an entrepreneur). So, give me a chance here and let me find my voice.

I’m out.