Can you “Afford” to make money online
Happy Sunday everyone.
Gotta tell you, I’m really digging Aweber. Having a reliable service to handle my blog subscribers is awesome. Feedburner served it’s purpose for the first couple years of this blogs existence but when things hit the fan, the lack of customer service was the deciding factor for me to switch over to a paid service. You know what they say, “You get what you pay for”.
So real quick, I wanted to talk a bit about the money we spend to try to make money online. I think a lot of us feel we need to take advantage of every subscription, upgrade, and offer; that we must have for financial success online.
I’ll confess, I was a bit of an upgrade whore a couple years ago. At one time I had over $400 in monthly subscriptions coming out of my PayPal account. This didn’t include any paid advertising or any money I wanted to pay myself. I created this daily routine of trying to keep up with paying for my expenses with what I made online. This was very stressful and a stressed out Philsfault writes lame and desperate posts for this blog ( no one needs that ).
So it came down to looking at what I absolutely couldn’t live without. What subscriptions did I use on a daily basis and getting my money’s worth? Yearly and Lifetime low cost upgrades were the obvious ones to keep. Monthly subscriptions for programs I wasn’t taking full advantage of had to go ( for now ).
At the end of the day I whittled down my monthly online expenses to under $100 a month, not counting a few yearly affordable upgrades; i.e. Link Grand, ClixSense..etc.
This kept my online budget way below what I was earning. I was able to not only place more frequent ads ( for referrals ) but also pay myself every once in awhile.
So here’s the bottom line. Don’t Practice Desperation Marketing!! If you can’t afford to pay your real life bills, you probably can’t afford to spend money online trying to make money. Especially, if your new to this whole online FREE MONEY making scene.
Oh but wait! You have Credit Cards. Bad idea. All your doing is creating a new bill to pay each month. I don’t care if it’s only an additional $10 a month added to your statement, it’s still money moving in the wrong direction.
Money moving in the right direction means earning more than I’m spending and keeping my online earnings separate from my ( real life ) offline earnings. I tend to move money pretty damn quickly once it hit’s my PayPal account. My ads aren’t always winners, but at least I’m no longer trying to keep up with my monthly subscriptions and I…
Can Afford to make money online
I hope this post wasn’t too vague. I just noticed the time and realized that I’ve got a ton of chores to do, and I still have to shower. So I gotta go.
If you still need more to read, please check out a couple of my previous posts:
Instant Cash Sweepstakes..Just got Awesomer
Creating an Ad Budget with Treasure Trooper
Phil ( philsfault ) Ames
Great Article Phil!
This is just good advice for everyone. It’s true it takes money to make money. But you have to do it within your own means. It’s definitely something I practice. Desperation leads to poor decisions in all facets of our lives. But it’s something you can pull yourself out of. You’re a perfect example of it.
Thanks for the sage advice!
@Eddy Salomon
Thanks for commenting Eddy. Yes, good advice but I do think I was all over the place in this post. Think I’ll do a bit of editing tonight.
Hopefully the message was clear.. “Don’t Spend more than you can comfortably afford to lose”.
As far as “Sage”. I could have used some tonight for my BBQ. I did a pork thingy and I’m used to having a Sage and Rosemary plant available for fresh herbs. Wait, you were talking about a different “sage”… sorry, I’m tired.
Phil
Your thoughts are very inspiring. I often question whether I should be spending money on advertising but I promised myself when I started looking for ways to make money online I would not get sucked in to any paid programs or monthly subscriptions. It seems that the free social media sites like twitter, facebook and others are the key to getting your message out and increasing traffic these days.
Thanks Best Mommy ( enter real name here___________ )
I’m a paid advertising kinda guy. Although I don’t mind dabbling in Social Networking, for me nothing beats growing my subscriber list as well as my downlines by reinvesting my online earnings. Still working on the SEO for this blog as well.
There are a few subscriptions that I simply can’t live without for various tools and resources I use everyday. The extra affiliate commissions by having an upgraded or subscribed too account is nice, but I really want to be actually using the service first, and not just subscribed to make a commission. This includes PTC programs where not only do I get a higher earnings ratio from my referrals but I usually get more ads to click on. The end result is more money and more reinvesting.
Thanks again for chiming in. It’s always a pleasure.
Phil