Make Money At Home - How I Did It!

Make Money At Home?

One of the questions that were asked on the survey from last week was exactly how did I make my first few bucks online. I’m going to tell you exactly what I did here in this post. When you make money at home, you’ll try a number of different things, some will work - some won’t work…

What I did in the VERY BEGINNING - BEFORE I did graphic work for people around the world - was went to a local friend of my dad’s. This man was one of my dad’s local customers who needed some website and graphic work done for his business, which is www.aerohio.com (local skydiving facility in our area.) That is exactly when I started to Make Money At Home, pretty much all by myself - using my own talents. Tim paid me to create a new website, add content, and teach both he and his wife (and a couple other folks) how to edit the website themselves.

At first we all used Front Page to edit the website. I learned a lot from them, and they learned a lot from me. Periodically I would find shortcuts that I would share with them, and it was close enough to head to the office to sit with them in person. I did most of the work at home, then would go in to get further details - or to teach them how to do more. I was then pregnant with my first son, to it worked out great.

I also picked up a few various other local jobs this way - and still to this day will do a local job whenever it comes along.

Local Business Can Be A Great Way To Start Making Money!

Meanwhile, to find more “make money at home” ideas - I was going through a number of different ebooks, and working on some eBay stuff. I found literally thousands of ebooks and went into complete information overload. At the time you could get ebooks cheaper than heck on eBay. I tried my hand at creating a few little small reports that I could resell myself on eBay. This didn’t go quite as well as planned, but it gave me a lot of experience.

One thing that DID make money on eBay was some physical products. I once sold an old book that my husband’s mom picked up at a yard sale for over $125.00 bucks. (Who’d have thunk it!) I just thought the book was cool for the illustrations, and it was in a big box that she paid like $5.00 for the whole box.

I also purchased around that time, David Vallieres Public Domain Reports (forget what they were called exactly, been years) - but I picked that up on eBay with resell rights for around $19.95. I was able to turn around and resell that very same package on eBay MANY times, (well at least 20 or so, for the same price - which made enough money back to make me extremely happy.)

Then one day some competitors under cut the price. There was a price war going on, and at the time I didn’t understand what was happening, but it pissed me off to say the least. I lost sales, others were making sales for like $14.95 - then it was $9.95 and by the time they dropped it below 5 bucks I had totally had enough of THAT. I thought the information was too good to sell for under 5 bucks. I STILL think it’s too good to sell under 5 bucks. I refused to sell any more copies.

I also had asked around some of the message boards on eBay saying that I thought ebooks were pretty dang hot and would get hotter. Some eBay folks jumped all over me, essentially hurt my feelings - and I LEFT. I didn’t sell anything on eBay for a long time after that, because of some really crappy attitudes, not to mention the cost of doing business on eBay. I was out to MAKE money at home, not spend half of it or more on eBay and Paypal fees, not to mention shipping for physical products, etc.

So, that’s what I did in the beginning to make money at home, online. It didn’t START as an “online” thing in the beginning, I actually went to local businesses - and worked with them in person. It was easy to carry this over to working with people online around the world. Once you get used to working with people, it’s generally just as easy on the phone, through email, etc now days.

If you know how to build a website, I’m going to make a decent bet - that you can go downtown to a few local people that you know, and pick up at least ONE job immediately. I’m also relatively sure that you can go to eBay, and SELL SOMETHING and make a few bucks that way. Depending on what you sell, you can make more than a FEW. BUT - I would caution anyone looking at eBay - that the fees are a pain. You pay a fee to list, you pay a “final value” fee - you’ll pay a lot for images - unless you know the ways around that.

Not to say that there isn’t ways to make money from eBay, because there is. Like setting up your about me page to lead directly to your website (think you can still do that) - and setting up monthly classified ads for your digital reports. I don’t work with eBay too much anymore, unless I want to BUY something. I may START using classifieds and whatnot, but so far I have NOT.

Now, if anyone is interested in further information on any of the topics listed here - please add a comment and I will do my best to tell you how to make money at home using one of those techniques.

From those beginnings, I ended up finding some more info on eBay about public domain - which led directly to Russell Brunson’s “the Lost Files” membership. This is when I actually built my very first website, which is at ECoverFX.

Michelle

It was this website that I created that went on to put me on the map as a graphic designer, with a little help from Russell Brunson - and the Warrior Forum.

After I had created created the ECoverFX website, I had a few of the members in the forum of the Lost Files look at my site. It was bigger originally (as in a lot of pages, was not a sales page, etc.) The pals from the Lost Files told me to rework it into a two page mini-site - which I did. It still has the same basic look today.

Once I had everything set up, I was ready to take orders - but guess what. There were no orders. LOL! Isn’t that how everyone’s website starts out? Well, it just so happened that I was in Russell’s first coaching program, and had a half hour call to “get to know” each other a bit. This was one on one with Russell.

Before the call, I wrote down a number of questions - of which one was “Ok, my website is ready to go - but I haven’t got one order. What do I do?” Russell says, hmmm. Have you ever heard of the Warrior Forum? Of course I hadn’t yet - this was back in 2005. He had me write down the address and tell the folks there that he sent me over. I was to get acquainted with the forum, then go post what they called a “WSO” which stands for Warrior Special Offer.

I did exactly as he instructed, and put up my first WSO. Within 24 hours I had over 3-4 orders. That’s where it all started. Before long I had people picking me up for jobs left and right - and I also did various other methods of advertising, but I never really needed to advertise much at all. I did free work. I got my name out and about. There was a lot less competition back then, and the “more well known” graphic folks were REALLY GOOD. But they were quite a bit more expensive than I was.

There was also a very large learning curve when I began to create ebook covers. I gave those out for free in the forum of the Lost Files while I practiced my new techniques. Russell had a link in the resources area of the membership site that directed me to what they called “Action Scripts” for Adobe Photoshop which were created by Max. Once I discovered how to use those action scripts, I became quite unstoppable. Before that I was trying every crappy cover creator out there - and even did them totally by HAND. Uhg. Those action scripts saved my life!!!

I’ve been busy ever since with ECoverFX - you can see the last time I updated that site on the bottom footer area. Hehehe. Yeah, it’s been a while. I want to turn that into a blog - I can get a lot more traffic that way, but the site needs totally overhauled. I’ll explain what and how, and why I do what I do to that site the first chance I get to DO it.

As always, if you have questions - please ask here on the blog - or shoot me an email, call - whatever you like. If you have sent me an email that didn’t get answered, please remember that sometimes emails get lost - or I don’t get the chance to answer as quickly as I like. Just shoot me another email - and I’ll be sure to get back to you! If you want to make money at home, hopefully this tells you a bit about what I did in the beginning. I would be happy to elaborate on anything you need help with.

My ultimate goal is to inspire others to be able to make money at home too, even if it’s just a little to start with. Hopefully, as I advance, you’ll be right behind me - advancing right along with me!

Thanks!
Michelle

PS - ahh heck. I also made 10 new blog templates, and picked up some Valentine’s day graphics that you can take a look at here. I’ve put them all in one nice pack for a great price! I’ll also be running a contest for a free website that I created myself. Whomever purchases the new graphic pack I just put together - will be added to a drawing for this free website. Since it’s so time sensitive, I have to get that done like THIS EVENING - Latest tomorrow night. Keep an eye out for the info right here on the blog!

PSS - song of the day!

Tagged with: Make Money At Home

Filed under: What Are The Steps In Creating An Online Business

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