I’ve had some people wondering how, exactly, I make money online since replacing my cubicle job income a few years ago. I’ve mentioned that I do a little freelance writing as well as some internet marketing, but I want to give you the full breakdown on my income sources.
For privacy reasons, I will not be disclosing any dollar amounts. However, I will let you know that I have my MBA and my last cubicle job was as a Sr. Financial Analyst in Los Angeles. You can do the math and come up with a ballpark figure of my online earnings.
Income Sources
I can probably break my online income sources down to four main categories.
The bulk of my monthly money comes from what I will categorize as ‘professional services.’ This includes things like freelance writing. If I had a side gig doing online tech support, then it would fall under this category.
A close second in terms of monthly earnings is book publishing. As you can see, I have several non-fiction guides out at Amazon under my name. In fact, my Make Money From Home As A Google Rater guide from the Cubicle Freedom Series is a #1 Bestseller on Amazon. I keep the prices low on these guides so that more people will benefit from them, and this means that they are NOT responsible for the bulk of my ebook income. Instead, I have fiction books under a pen name that bring in most of the bacon in this category.
Probably the next largest income category would be my niche sites and web 2.0s. I have a lot of these in a variety of different niches and topics. They primarily earn affiliate money from Amazon and other programs. But, a few also make AdSense money. This category has the most fluctuations. For instance, it is always higher during the Christmas shopping season.
The final category is digital products. These are things that I have created and sell on sites dedicated to each product. I also advertise these things with Google AdWords. Money in this category can range from around $100 to around $2000 per month.
I’ll be releasing more Cubicle Freedom Series books in the next few months on ways that I make money online that you might also be interested in doing for yourself. As they come out, it will give you a little more insight on how I make enough money to pay the bills and fund a lifestyle full of travel.
Henley after reading the above post and purchasing both of your cubicle freedom books I wonder which category of your earning does the google rating jobs fall under? It seems you wrote about earning that way but not actually earn it.
Hi Anna! Hope you enjoyed the reads. To answer your question – It falls in the first category. If there are good tasks available (ones with a lot of time to complete), then I average around 30 hrs a week doing them while working on other things at the same time. The amount of work I take rating basically depends on what else I’m working on (i.e. can I take freelance writing jobs that pay me $50/hr instead?) and if I’m trying to build up a cash surplus for travel or not. But some weeks, I won’t do any rating or just a few hours here and there. I also try to avoid doing rating tasks if only the short 30-second tasks are available as I can’t do anything else at the same time. I prefer to rate when it pays me to accomplish other things at the same time 🙂 Hope that answers your question.
any advice on writing platforms where i can earn money publishing content without owning my own website.
If you’re wanting something like Squidoo before it closed, then you’re mostly out of luck. HubPages bought Squidoo and if you can manage to get some traction there then you can make some cash. HubPages has a lot of ridiculous rules though, so it might not be worth your time. There is always Blogger.com – get yourself a blogspot.com URL (or a few) and go crazy with them. This is still working for making money as an Amazon affiliate.