May 2009 Debt Report
For the record, there was no April 2009 debt report. I didn’t have time to get it written.
Starting Balances calculated post-bankruptcy (May 2008):
- Debts excluding student loans and 1st mortgage: $38,707
- Plus debts incurred between May 2008 and March 2009: $8,583
- 1st mortgage balance: $117,803
- Student loans: $48,774 $80,215
- Total: $213,867 $245,308
Current Debt Balances:
- IRS: $2,221.03 (TY 2007)
- LDR: $2,737.00 (Louisiana Department of Revenue, TY 2007, no payments scheduled yet)
- Chase HELOC: $4,537.52
- CFCU Visa: $5,035.04
- Capital One HELOC: $21,606.76
First mortgage balance: $115,303
Debt Balance excluding co-signed student loans and first mortgage: $35,932 $36,137
Total debt including first mortgage, excluding student loans: $151,630 $151,440
Student Loans:
- Co-signed student loans, approximate balance: $48,774 $80,215 (found out the new balance when my attorney checked my credit report. No letters I’ve received add up to this much. Attorney is checking on it).
Total balance including 1st mortgage and student loans: $200,404 $231,655
Change since highest balance ($245,308 starting May 2008): $13,463 $13,653
Discussion
A lot has been going on since March. Details below.
Bankruptcy Update
The only thing I’m waiting on right now to send my bankruptcy case to the trustee is my 2008 tax return, which will be done in the next few business days.
My balances are different from what I thought based on my credit report. What was reported to the credit reporting agencies isn’t the same thing that I received from the debt collectors. It doesn’t matter, the debts get wiped out anyway. I’m told it’s very common that the letters and the credit reports don’t agree. They are in the same ballpark, except for the student loan. That was significantly higher than anything I’ve been sent or that I cosigned to borrow.
My attorney is checking into bankrupting the student loans since they are private, I cosigned for them and didn’t borrow the money directly for my own or a family member’s education. If I can get them off my debt list, that will be great. If not, oh well.
Laid Off
I’ve technically been laid off again. The tutoring company I work for closed as of June 1 and the owner didn’t tell us until May 21. The company was very profitable, but she and her husband made a family decision that she would start working on his business because it makes more and takes less time away from their children. I’m very busy getting my own clients, and the former owner will continue to give out our contact information to potential clients.
The good news is I get a big pay raise, anywhere from $35-$45 per hour, nearly double to over double what I was making ($20/hr). The bad news is I have to do all the back end work dealing with clients, which may be more time-consuming than I like. There are other companies I can work for, but now that I have a client list, other potential clients and plenty of contacts, I plan to continue as an independent tutor unless the back office work is not worth the money I’m making. I doubt that will happen because I can streamline my back office a lot more than my former boss. I have more computer and internet tools to make things easier and more automated.
Online Work
With Hurricane Gustav, the messed up school schedules, and all the extra tutoring I did this year, I haven’t spent nearly as much time on my blogs or online business. But they are paying off better passively than ever before. My niche sites are making money with very little work on my part. Now that it’s summer, I’ll be able to spend more time on the sites that are paying and branch out into those niches more.
My plan is also to work on my own products so I can keep all the money I make from sales (minus taxes of course). I’m working on an ebook and a podcast. Video will come a little later.
I am looking into setting up a membership site, but I haven’t found the right niche with sufficiently low competition that would attract enough paying members to be worth the time. It wouldn’t cost me much money, only $10 more per year for another URL.
April and May Income
Passive online income:
- Affiliate Sales Commissions: $150.55
- Advertising: $111.92
- Services and active sources: $0
- Total online income: $262.47
I will be doing some active online work as well to increase my income. I have friends who need work on online marketing for their brick and mortar businesses.
Tutoring:
- Company: $2,780
- Private Students: $50
- Total tutoring: $2,830
Total Income: $3,097.47
On top of my income I also receive child support of $400/mo.
Online Income Discussion
Common wisdom in the blogosphere and in internet marketing circles is if you can earn $100/mo with your online business, you can earn $1000/mo. All it takes is continuing working on it and developing a few of your own products and/or starting a membership site. The key element is consistently working on growing traffic to your sites.
If I don’t put up another site but keep producing content for my existing sites and marketing them, I will start making $1000 in a few months. If I want to increase my earnings from $1000 to $5000, it will take a lot more effort up front; some new sites in either new niches or profitable extensions into current niches.
If I can find a good niche for a membership site, get 200 subscribers and charge $27/mo per member, I’ll make $5400/mo. If I find a niche willing to pay $47/mo per member, I’ll make $10,800/mo. I’ll have to pay taxes out of that, as I do now on my other income.
Over the summer, I tutor fewer days/week so I have more time to work on marketing current sites, work on more niche sites and start a membership site if I can find the right one.
Conclusion
The online work will have to come after doing everything I must get done for tutoring.
I will be glad when my bankruptcy is over. Then I can focus on work and starting over.
I think it may be difficult to justify $48 a month for content on a membership site. Even $27 might be pushing it.
Comment by Chris | June 3, 2009
Why isn’t the person you co-signed for on the student loan paying it off? What are you going to do when that debt isn’t discharged in bankruptcy?
I suggest that you update your blog more frequently in order to earn more sweet passive income.
TW
Comment by TardWatcher | June 3, 2009
@TW: I plan to update this blog more often, but when I have to work, I have to work and my blogs have to wait. Now that I have more time for the next 8 weeks, I hope to bank some posts and schedule their releases on a regular basis.
The person I cosigned for keeps becoming unemployed and can’t continue making payments. She has made some payments, but without a stable job, it’s not easy to pay a loan that large.
If I have to pay it, I will, but it will be one of the last things I pay. It’s already in default so I’m not stressing over it. By the time I can start paying it, my friend may be paying it again. I’ve contacted her about it and my attorney will, and the trustee will also. I’ll just have to see what happens with it. I can’t go back and un-cosign the loan.
joubess
Comment by joubess | June 4, 2009
@Chris: Like I said, I have to find the right niche before I start a membership site that will be profitable. I may have to test a few niches to find out what people might be willing to pay for, and how much. You don’t just “build it and they will come”. There is a lot of research, list-building, and testing to do before a decision is made about a niche and how much to charge.
$27/mo is actually very cheap for a membership site in a high demand niche. $47/mo is much more common, and if your content is worth it and the niche is in a high demand area people are willing to pay for, you can start out charging a lower amount, then close and relaunch at progressively higher amounts. As you relaunch, you can add some content, but the majority of the work and structure are done with the initial launch.
A membership site is a considerable amount of work before you ever launch it the first time, but if you do the research and pick a niche that sells, people will pay for the info they really need, especially if you can teach them or inform them better than most others and more expertly than most others, they will be happy to pay.
Great content + profitable niche = paying members and lots of them
joubess
Comment by joubess | June 4, 2009
I have a hard time seeing anyone paying $27/month for membership to a site, as that’s $325/year. In this economy, you’d be hard pressed to get away with $27/year without some really compelling and unique content. Bill O’Reilly charges $5/mo, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh $7/mo, and these are widely known personalities who could probably get away with charging far more than they do. Angie’s List is $5/mo. Most other community sites are in the $3-5/mo range.
Given that so much web content is available for free, most people aren’t going to be willing to pay for membership anyplace, or more than a mere pittance. Even adult sites or casinos can’t get away with charging more than $20 or so per month. Anything you can try to sell others will be willing to give away for free, unless you’re planning on setting up some sort of scam or Ponzi. And I don’t think you’d do that, because you seem to be a woman of integrity.
Why not buy the tutoring company from your old boss and collect a chunk of each of the other tutors’ hourly earnings? It seems like it would have the potential to be an awesome income stream, would let you get your feet wet in running a real business, and because it’s already established, the hard work has been done for you!
Comment by Julia | June 4, 2009
Thanks for the response. Even with working, I would think you’d have 20-30 minutes to spare in a day to update one of your blogs with a short post. For example, you could find the time by cutting back on your Rachel Maddow TV watching or some other unprofitable activity. I know you aren’t working every minute of every day.
Comment by TardWatcher | June 4, 2009
And this is why…………
Twitter Digest for 2009-06-05
Just got home from karaoke; watching Rachel @maddow. Awesome night!
Hard at work I see!
Comment by TW | June 5, 2009
@TW: It sounds like you’re projecting your own laziness onto me.
Do you work every minute of every day while you are awake? I don’t think so. Does kicking your feet up and watching the news equal “lazy”? No, it doesn’t, unless you’re a masochist. Does spending an hour with friends constitute laziness? No. Not in my book and that’s the only book that counts for me.
How long do you work each day? How much TV do you watch each day? How much time do you spend with family and friends? I haven’t seen or talked to any of mine in two weeks. If you don’t spend any time socializing with other people your networks dry up. I need my networks right now to help my business income.
You seem to have enough time to spend on my blog chaffing my ass, and I’m sure it isn’t profitable for you, though it’s probably emotionally satisfying to you to judge others. You also have time to look at my Twitterstream? It’s not on this blog so you either follow me or you went to Twitter and searched for me. You may have gone to one of my other blogs where I publish my twitterstream each day. It isn’t a blog that is active except for the tweets. I don’t plan to post to it either. It’s a way to communicate with other TDCers before we had FriendFeed.
Will you be taking the weekend off? I won’t.
I worked 15 hours on Thursday. Before I took any time to enjoy myself and my friends, I posted to one other blog, scheduled a post for another and have begun 4 more articles that will be a series when I get them finished. I also finished some reading for another post I’m planning to write next week. I had 5 hours of tutoring this week as well. It takes commute time driving to and from the libraries and preparation time.
I don’t write short posts. The number of posts isn’t the goal. Quality of posts is what brings in readers and subscribers, and thus potential customers. This blog doesn’t make much so it gets less of my time. I personally believe posts under 400 words to be worthless unless you are simply making an announcement relevant to your readers or presenting other content like video or a podcast.
I have a lot of irons in the fire that don’t have anything to do with my blogs. While I’m doing other work, I’m not writing for a blog. Humans can’t multitask. We can set up systems that work for us while we do other things, and I’m in the middle of a lot of set-up right now. I have a tutoring business to set up formally. I have to give out receipts for payments, accept various types of payments and develop a client contract and other materials. The company I worked for used to take care of that for me. Now I have to do it. Once that’s done, it will be done. But that doesn’t constitute blogging.
I’m a single parent and I refuse to ignore my son to make a few extra bucks.
Why I’m wasting time answering you is beyond me. I probably won’t waste this time in the future.
Comment by joubess | June 6, 2009
@TW: If you actually read all my Tweets for 6/4/09-6/5/09 and this whole week, you’d see I posted links to new blog posts. Karaoke and watching Maddow is not the only tweet I made. I use some MSNBC and NBC video on some of my blogs when pieces are relevant to the topic and I can incorporate them into a post.
Since I don’t know what your Twitter handle is, here’s my tweet in response to your reply: Since you have time to follow my Twitterstream as well as this blog, you must not be very productive with your time. Hard at work I see…
Comment by joubess | June 6, 2009
@Julia:
Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh may be widely known, but much of their content is available for free. People won’t pay $27/mo for it because it isn’t worth it. I’m not talking about membership sites like Angie’s list or community sites or adult sites or online casino sites. I am a woman of integrity and would not do anything illegal or even unethical.
You have a very narrow view of what a membership site constitutes. There are plenty of membership sites that provide priceless content and people pay anywhere from $27/mo to $1000/mo because these sites provide them with knowledge they can’t get anywhere else, and it makes them a lot of money in their businesses, online or offline. Some people pay mentors over $2000/mo for one-on-one coaching because the expense is worth the profits they make in their businesses.
I’m talking about educational material that people already pay $40/hour for offline which I can re-purpose and put up as an online course of content not available free or cheap, and also provide personal assistance to members. It would be a specific niche where people are very willing to spend money. I know they will because they already do spend a lot of money on it.
I haven’t settled on a niche I feel is the right one yet. Until I find it and the research pans out, I’m not setting up a membership site.
The former owner of the tutoring company isn’t selling it because she might want to reopen it in the future should working in her husband’s business not end up being a good fit or as profitable as they think right now. That was the first question I asked. It’s not for sale.
Why is it that people think because a business exists online it isn’t a real business? Tutoring actually is a real business for me because the company didn’t withhold employment taxes. We were all 1099 contractors, have to pay our own taxes and basically run a rudimentary business. I deduct my expenses for tutoring. I already have a lot set up in QuickBooks. I have to add invoicing and receipts and do some other work to get a contract together and other client info. I also have to set up to take credit card payments, and for now I’m using PayPal because it’s inexpensive and readily available to everyone, even if they have to use a computer at the library. No PayPal acct is required to use it to pay someone else with a credit card.
Comment by joubess | June 6, 2009
@ Sherry
Actually I did work today and I will be working tommorrow as well. I work for fun now, I was able to retire when I was 45 and can live comfortably on my investments alone. No luck involved, just hard work and careful planning.
When I HAD to earn a living, I managed not to get myself into quite the same the debt situation that you have (even with hurricanes hitting much closer to home than yours ever have). I would NOT have co-signed a loan for a boyfriend/girlfriend that I couldn’t afford to pay back and when I did have debt, I cut back on the extras in order to work harder to pay the debt back quicker.
Oh and like you, I too lost a job (in my career field) along the way. Unlike you, I worked independently IN MY FIELD while networking like crazy in order to be hired by another company. I needed the benefits at the time as I was single, female & a homeowner.
You MAY be working but you obviously aren’t “working smart” and your debt seems to grow larger with each passing month.
Your blog likely would produce more income if you posted more frequently and if you are counting on this as part of your income, you should consider trying it.
Am I lazy? I think not. Humans CAN multitask, I happen to be quite good at it. BTW, I am not “TD”, I don’t “tweet” nor do I follow your Twitter. I’ll leave you wondering how I knew about that particular “tweet”.
You can “waste your time” replying (or not), it makes no difference to me either way.
Comment by TW | June 6, 2009
How is taking someone else’s work, and “repurposing” it (ie. stealing it) ethical?
Do you have clue one regarding copyright? Other people’s work is not created so you can steal it, and charge for it. Are you going to license said work? Are you going to at the VERY least contact the owners of the work you intend to resell and *ask*?
And, if you can afford licensing fees, why can’t you pay your bills?
Comment by MandP | June 7, 2009
I would be VERY leery about filling up a membership website with “repurposed” content that you’re not the sole author of, unless you want to end up in court for theft of intellectual property/copyright violations. People who work hard on books/theses/articles do not want them “repurposed” in order to enrich someone else. If the content is 100% your own though, and you feel it is valuable to others, then by all means, go ahead.
What information can one get on a membership site they can’t get anywhere else? And how would it be so valuable that it would justify a perpetual membership of up to several hundred dollars per month? Even ancestry.com is less than the $27/mo you seem to have chosen as a target fee amount.
If such sites already exist on the internet, they must be well-hidden diamonds in the rough, because I’ve been online for ten years and haven’t found them (or even knew to look for them) yet. Could you provide specific examples of membership sites that operate that way that you are talking about, because I am totally lost here.
Comment by Julia | June 8, 2009
Dear Lady,
I see this as your difficulty
I worked 15 hours on Thursday. Before I took any time to enjoy myself and my friends, I posted to one other blog, scheduled a post for another and have begun 4 more articles that will be a series when I get them finished. I also finished some reading for another post I’m planning to write next week. I had 5 hours of tutoring this week as well. It takes commute time driving to and from the libraries and preparation time.
You have worked 15 hours one day, what other time have you “worked” on the other 4 or 5 days? Yet you have only received remuneration for 5 hours this week. Where is the ROI on the many hours you have spent “working”? Frankly, I can not see why you are wasting your time on these schemes that you talk of they seem to be distracting you.
The Great Wobla Kanubla
Comment by Wobla Kanubla | June 8, 2009
I just quit my job, am getting a divorce, stopped taking care of the house, my personal hygiene, or paying the bills, and have started surfing the ‘net, eating bon-bons, and watching Rachel Maddow all day. Most days, I don’t even get out of my pajamas anymore.
Sherri, you are my new God.
Comment by Reality Chex | June 8, 2009
Is there a way you can consolidate all your sites into one? I’ve been following your Bankruptcy in Louisiana page on Squidoo but it never seems to get updated. Maybe have one central site where you link to your other sites and include the date of the latest update? I think something like that would be a good starting point for a pay site.
Comment by Chris | June 8, 2009
@Chris,
The point of having separate sites is multiple high PR back links. So consolidation is not something you want to do on certain sites.
Comment by joubess | June 9, 2009
@Reality Chex:
Good for you. WTF ever…
Comment by joubess | June 9, 2009
@Julia: Any material I would repurpose would be my own. Many people repurpose their blog and other content to make membership sites and e-books.
Have a look at Blog Mastermind, StomperNet, and Thirty Day Challenge Plus for examples of higher paying monthly membership sites. There are many thousands more, but they are in very specific niches. If you haven’t search for them, you won’t run across them. Why? Because they are laser targeted to a very specific market.
Membership sites are for people looking for something very specific that they want to learn or belong to. You won’t find them just surfing the net. You have to be in the market for something specific and start searching using long tail keyword phrases to find what you want.
Comment by joubess | June 9, 2009
@MandP: See reply to @Julia.
Why is it you think I would plagiarize anyone’s material? Y’all must have done a lot of that before for it to be the first thing that comes to your minds. I respect copyrights. I’ve never plagiarized anything in my life. I’ve created tons of my own material and I have no need to even look for other stuff, unless I’m quoting someone. Then they get full bibliographic credit for the quote. I list references when I use them.
Any material I would re-purpose would be my own, private label rights material that you have to buy (I don’t do this) or something in the creative commons licensing on the internet (free). A lot of article sites provide articles with this licensing and you can use them any way you like as long as you follow the rules of the article site.
I’m not buying anything until I can pay my bills without trouble. I am currently able to pay my core bills.
Comment by joubess | June 9, 2009
@Wobla Kanubla: I was answering a specific question about that Thursday.
I work normally 12 hours a day 6 days a week, and lately I work 4-5 hours on Sundays, too.
“Schemes that are distracting me”. I’m working on building both an online business and an offline tutoring business. Building a business does not always pay you by the hour. You do a lot of hard work up front and if you do okay, you reap the benefits of that work over and over again later. During May (final exam month) I did extremely little online and it still paid me over $150. How much did you make from doing absolutely nothing last month?
Comment by joubess | June 9, 2009
@TW: Lucky you for getting to retire early. How are your investments doing?
If you retired at 45, were you in the military? There aren’t many employers that allow you to retire at age 45 with full benefits. Or did you get rich or take partial benefits?
In the chem industry, early retirement is age 60, no matter how many years of service you have. My regular retirement age is 67. At that age, I will get a pension from my old company.
The debts I’m keeping after bankruptcy are going down. You didn’t read all my numbers. Some had to be revised based on my credit report, and what I really owe still has to be sorted out by the trustee. My relative debt is going down no matter which set of numbers you use. What the real set of numbers should be will come after my BK is final and I know exactly what I owe and to whom I owe it.
WTF does “hurricanes hitting much closer to home than mine ever have” mean? How dare you! We had 3 severe hits in 3 years in Baton Rouge. If you’re going to count only the few miles wide eye of the storm, you can’t count most of the Gulf Coast as being destroyed by Katrina (though it was) or Texas being hit by Rita. We took a pounding with both Katrina and Rita right here and very nearly a direct hit by Gustav. Did the eye of a hurricane plow through your living room? Were you flooded out in New Orleans? Unless you can answer yes to those, hurricanes haven’t been any closer to you than they were to me. Gustav is the worst storm anyone in BR has ever seen, including Betsy in 1965. It’s June 2009 and many people still have blue roofs and fallen trees that haven’t been removed. It’s been almost 4 years since Katrina (a 397 year storm) and some of our intersections were just blocked off instead of being fixed because we don’t have the money to put them back into service. Don’t sit in your ivory tower and tell me these storms didn’t “hit us farther from home then yours did”, harm our economy and our psyche severely, because they did. I suppose I imagined the trees coming down all around us and the power being out for many days with each storm? I suppose those who were killed weren’t really killed? I didn’t imagine any of it. Hopefully there’s a nice hot spot in hell for you and people like you with your attitude toward the near loss of one of America’s most unique cities, its culture and nearly 2000 lives in Louisiana and Mississippi just from Katrina and its botched response.
You should trade Sean Hannity your balls for his tits because you have some big ones and no heart to say something that cruel to survivors of those three storms. Don’t forget to dis Ike survivors while you’re at it. You stepped way over the line here. You’re just plain mean and cruel. Were you at John McCain’s birthday party on the tarmac in Arizona along with President Bush when we were being hammered and people were dying?
So I made some bad decisions. I suppose you never have? Bullpuckey. You’re divorced so that’s one biggie right their. I’ve said in posts on this blog several times that I’ve made some stupid mistakes and decisions. I’m not groveling before any of you for forgiveness. I can’t undo them now so there is no point in beating myself up anymore about them. I have to pick up from where I’m at now. I’m doing what I need to do to make a living and rebuild my future, building a tutoring business and working online.
FYI: No human can truly multitask. It’s a misnomer. We cannot actively do two or more things at the exact same time. We can set up sequential or parallel tasks that can be left alone while we perform another task. By left alone, it could be for a few minutes while we do something else, then go back. We can use time efficiently, but we can’t parallel process without machines to help us. If you argue talking on the phone and driving, you’re breaking the law for being a distracted driver. In fact, doing anything and talking don’t count. We are capable of conversing with other humans while we fold laundry, wash dishes, etc.
Comment by joubess | June 9, 2009
Ok Sherri, I see what you’re saying, but you’ve got me worried. These sites you’ve linked here all look like Kevin Trudeau’s site, and he’s been a known scammer for decades. Read this article: http://www.upstartblogger.com/10-easy-ways-to-spot-a-blogging-scam
I really hope you aren’t paying these people to get their lame advice, most of which is either common sense or not ethical (click fraud, google bombing), and none of which cannot be found on free websites. Another thing, if the three sites you pointed out have essentially the same information, how are they examples of unique niche markets? They all look to prey on the greedy and ignorant.
Anyway, if you do come up with a specific niche, say single-mother-birdhouse-building-corn-eating-packers-fans, how will you market it, and what unique content would be useful to those folks that would justify a high-dollar membership?
Comment by Julia | June 9, 2009
I’ve read that article. The programs I linked to are legitimate programs and provide fantastic content you can’t get free elsewhere. There are a lot of scam artists out there, but these sites aren’t scams. The mentors, Yaro Starak, Ed Dale and Andy Jenkins are very well known on the web. They teach very useful stuff. I joined 2 back when they were very inexpensive just starting out, and I only pay for one now. I am still a full member of the other program I no longer pay for.
StomperNet is way too expensive for me and way too big a commitment. They are actually a university and working with them is a full-time endeavor. Your business has to be ready for that kind of growth for it to be useful to you. I know several people in real life who have studied with StomperNet and their businesses are making them rich. They work with both online and bricks and mortar businesses.
As far as what niche would I come up with and how would I market it? Not telling because someone else will steal it. Also not telling because if you want to know how to market such a site, either look it up on the web and see if you can find enough free material to coach you, or join one of my affiliate programs and pay for the advice you will need to successfully pick a niche, develop a site and market it.
You won’t find enough of what you need free, and you won’t be able to sort through what is really useful and what isn’t unless you’re an exceptional marketer period.
I bet you won’t be starting a membership site and will continue to think everything on the internet is a scam. Buyer beware, but not everything is a scam.
Comment by joubess | June 9, 2009
If someone else would steal your idea for a membership site before you mention it, is it really that good or unique an idea in the first place? Anyway, you didn’t answer the second half of my question. What sort of unique content would justify paying for an ongoing high-dollar membership? Unless you’re turning out ever-changing proprietary content, I don’t see it. And even if you are, ten subscribers paying $30 per month isn’t going to provide enough revenue to justify the time you’ll spend on such a project. I could see someone paying for a month’s worth just to acquire all your content (if you have a repository of homeschooling curriculum resources, for example), but what would keep them coming back?
Have you run the numbers to figure out what your earnings are on a per-hour basis? I see that you made $262 last month. If you spent two hours per day working on blogs, that is a terrible return on your investment. It works out to just over $4 per hour. You’d come out ahead financially working at McDonalds.
I never had the need or desire to start a membership site. I was able to parlay my single blog into a business that created enough revenue to suit my needs at the time, which ultimately worked out to about minimum wage. I eventually abandoned the blog for a number of reasons, including scraping/plagiarism (which WILL happen if your content is any good), better-paying freelance opportunities arising from my exposure, tax ramifications (bloggers are self-employed, and with no real expenses, I was paying out almost 40% of my minimum-wage income in taxes), and pregnancy/childbirth. I miss the readers I had, but hassle-wise, I’m glad I gave it up.
Comment by Julia | June 10, 2009
Dear Lady
You do not seem to be following the point I am making. You only made $150 from “doing nothing” last month because you spent hundreds of hours in previous months setting these things up. You say you are working 76 hours a week. That is 329 hours a month to achieve $150 income.
You also do not seem to understand business. Yes, you work all hours to begin with to establish a business and the returns on an hourly basis may not be there, but you do not stop working on it at some point in the future where it somehow miraculously only returns money to you without any further effort from you.
When are your businesses going to become paying concerns? Can you stop working on all your blogs and online businesses and they will still pay $150 a month next month? I believe not.
How long have you been doing this, a year? two years? Where has it taken you? Tell me where I am wrong? Let us say that you work 40 hours a week at other jobs, tutoring and whatever else you work at and you therefore are working 36 hours a week on blogs and online business. How long before they start showing a profit?
I fear you are trapped in a spiral of hoping to get a little more money but having to expend a lot of energy in doing so. Then you follow the latest trend in online business and try and do what everyone else is doing following the same people.
The only people making the money are the one selling the courses, dear lady.
Truly
Wobla Kanubla
Comment by Wobla Kanubla | June 10, 2009
@Wobla Kanubla: I’m not a trend follower, I’m not planning on being totally hands off when I get everything going, and I also have a tutoring business that I am still getting set up completely. I’ve had about 20 days to work on that since I found out the company I worked for closed. I think I’ve done quite a lot getting so much set up in that short a period of time while still seeing students.
I am working on my niches and finding new ones that pay better than older ones. I’ve already made more than $150 this month and it’s only the 10th.
None of you understand niche market internet business. It’s not the same thing as bricks and mortar. I make most of my money online selling stuff for my niches. Real world products people want to buy and I make a commission on each sale.
Comment by joubess | June 11, 2009
Julia, you have no idea what niche markets on the internet are about, and you didn’t understand my answer. I did answer the second part of your question. If you want to know what you asked, sign up. I’m not giving away what I can sell.
I haven’t run numbers for a niche site because I don’t have a niche I want to develop. I won’t run numbers until I find a niche. I never said I was absolutely going to start a membership site. I only will if I can find a good one.
In the meantime, I’ll continue working on my niche blogs and tutoring, which is my bigger job.
I enjoy writing and I’m good at it. I don’t need to steal other people’s content to create blog posts. If you don’t have enough to write about, you need more research or a topic that interests you more.
Comment by joubess | June 11, 2009
@TW
You really are cruel and arrogant. Did you retire early because you’re such a pain in the ass?
And I still suppose you never made any big mistakes. If you’re married you have no f**king idea what it’s like to be a single parent, so shut up.
I’m not alone in LA in being a survivor. We all are.
I confused you with someone else I was replying to about being divorced, sorry.
Comment by joubess | June 11, 2009