The other day my internet buddy Lis wrote a post on her blog called Online Income: One Simple Secret to Success and mentioned me in it. The one simple step? Treating your online income making efforts like a business. She mentioned me in the post because in June she made more than me and I’m someone who has been at this for a lot longer than her. Her point was that I’m not treating this like a business and she’s right.
One of my problems is that I’ve never been motivated by money, certainly not just for the sake of having it and definitely not if it comes at the expense of my time. What motivates me most is having the time and the means to to do what I want to do when I want to do it. Obviously this takes money but since I left my job and started travelling in January 2008 there hasn’t been anything I have wanted to do that I didn’t because I didn’t have the money. Because I’ve been travelling in cheap countries and doing long stints of volunteer work in exchange for accommodation and food along the way, earning $1000-$1500 a month with the occasional $2000 month has been plenty. So while I would obviously like to, I haven’t really gone out of my way too much to try to earn more.
Each earnings update post I’ve written for the past two years nearly I almost always say I’m happy with the amount I’ve earned but still list off a bunch of other things I should be doing or plan to do to increase that amount. I haven’t done most of those things though, party due to not being completely motivated, partly due to bad net connections for long periods of time, partly due to laziness and mostly due to being happy with the status quo.
Well now,for the first time, I am in a situation when I’m not able to do what I want to do because I haven’t got the money for it and I don’t like it one bit. I would love to spend a month or so living in New York and, while I could pull it off, it would leave me in a really bad place financially. So without being able to count on much more than $1000 in income, it would be a risky move. Plus I have a bunch of annoying expenses this month like driver’s license and passport renewals, jabs for Africa and I need to get my camera repaired so I’m thinking that renting a place in NYC and living it up for a month would be a bad move at this stage. So now, finally, I’m starting to get motivated.
In a comment response Nomadic Matt says something along the lines of needing to reassess where I am after six months and I think I’m at that point now. I need to reassess, see what’s working and what’s not and, most importantly I think, put into action all of those plans and ideas I’ve been putting off for the past year. Actually, that’s not true, I don’t need to but this time I want to.
Lis is right that you need to treat your internet stuff as a business in order to earn an income that will replace what you might have earned offline. Am I willing to give the travelling a rest for the next six months to concentrate on my business? Well… no, not just yet. But I am going to put in a hell of an effort for the next two or three months and see where that gets me.
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