Self-Employment is a Journey

byTheJackSmith

2K followers

7 years ago

Wanting to be self-employed is certainly a journey and requires time, patience and self education.

Time is required to be put into learning new things for your business, building your business, and marketing your business.

Patience is required because being self-employed you will probably not begin earning money right away and in many cases you will be losing money because you will have to invest into different tools, resources for creating your business.

Self education is important because you need to stay up to date with your type of business and continue to learn more to grow your business.

The longer you are self-employed the more you learn and the more you can use trial and error from your past to help guide you.

My first self-employment venture was selling on ebay. I did well made over $7,000 over the course of 6 months. However doing ebay as a way to be self-employed requires a lot of time because you have to answer customer questions, list products, keep products stocked, send invoices, manage finances, ship products and... I simply wasn't enjoying that sort of self-employment.

So then I went with a more hands on approach to self-employment and selling. I took the rest of my inventory and listed the items on classified sites, and was selling through classified sites and through garage sales. When my inventory would get low I would attend auctions, garage sales, yard sales, and go to thrift stores to find things that I could resell for profit. I made a little over $4,000 doing this for 4 months. WOW! This was even more physical work than selling on ebay and I wasn't really turning as much profit this way.

So then I took a few months off from being self-employed and thought about what I enjoyed. I thought about it and realized I like teaching things and having children of my own I thought I could start an in home day care and get people to pay me to watch their kids and spend time with my children as well. So I went through the first aid training, the classes required, child proofed my home, had health and fire inspections done in my home. (They returned every 4 months for another inspection.) This was something I enjoyed for a while, I was creating lunch menus, snack menus, activity schedules, and people started bringing their children... This was unique because not many men are child care providers ( I think this is why it took about a month before people started bringing their kids to my day care.) After that rough month of being available some parents starting coming and bringing their kids. I began earning money... I enjoyed it for a while, however the amount of work required for an in home day care, the inspections required, the training required, and then watching kids sometimes 12 hours a day became a lot of physical work and I didn't enjoy it anymore. I earned over $18,000 running this day care so the money was good considering I was self-employed working in my home.

This is when the tide turned for me. I had a sports blog that was earning me a few dollars here and there. I had seo knowledge because I taught it to myself to get my ebay listings and my daycare seen online. So then I thought what if I use my knowledge to focus more on building sites and selling them.

I did this for a while but sometimes the sites don't sell for what you expect, quit this after a couple of months. I only earned a little over $1,000 doing this for 2 months.

So then I thought what if I build a website that people will want to go to to earn prizes. I used all my earnings from building and selling websites to hire someone to build me a cool website where people can do surveys, play games, download apps which would earn them coins then they can redeem the coins for prizes. I wanted it to be the online equivalent of chuck e cheese for teenagers and young adults. The website builder took longer than anticipated to build the site, the site builder didn't complete some parts of the site, couldn't get my money back because the time window for a PayPal claim had passed, so I thought well maybe I can fix it myself and update site and people will come, but the site wasn't earning any money and ultimately the site was a failure because the way I was monetizing the site had small amounts of earnings. I was giving away prizes here and there mostly amazon gift cards but all the money was being put back into keeping prizes stocked. So I said this isn't going to be a sufficient income and shut the site down... Now if you look online there are some popular sites and apps similar to my idea that are fairly successful.

So I moved on and became a freelancer offering seo services because by this point I had built up enough seo skills and understanding to help people with their websites. I helped several of my clients do really well and I earned decent money... I did this for several years... However as mentioned in my blog post here yesterday seo is tedious and not really enjoyable most of the time.

So after doing this for a few years I decided to go back to my idea of building a website and making it profitable. I used amazon affiliate program and I built a comic, geeky, nerdy niche site. I built an amazon store on a wordpress site using woo commerce and an amazon affiliate plugin. I listed costumes for cosplay, I had comic books, collectibles, various gadgets, it was basically an affiliate site version of thinkgeek.com but my site had more products for more shows. So I built the site and did seo, and did some advertising and the site earned me a decent chunk of money. The site wasn't really something I wanted to do I just did it because I could make money from it... I had no passion for it! I sold the site for a couple thousand dollars and decided I wanted to start a website where I could earn through affiliates but also write more content instead of just running an ecommerce sort of affiliate site.

So I started a religious site... if you're a religious person and look at sites online to read the bible, or do bible study or look up religious movies then there's a good chance you may have seen my site in search engines or you may have been on my site before. Not going to tell the name of the site right now because the site is undergoing maintenance and will be back up soon however the site is doing well because it gets a fair amount of search traffic.

Anyways I was wanting to build more affiliate sites but then I bought tons of domains and couldnt keep up with content regularly so sold some of the sites wanted more self-education and a place where I can manage the sites from 1 platform... that is how I found wealthy affiliate earlier this year.

Now I have 4 websites total they are all growing and improving steadily. Keyword research has been a huge skill in my journey because search engines are important for getting traffic to your online business.

That being said I have had an impressive self-employment journey and I feel like it is barely getting started because my websites keep me focused, keep me busy, and I enjoy them very much.

So I wrote all of this to basically say that being self-employed is a journey, there will be bumps in the road but if you stay focused, put in the time required you can be successful in a niche or multiple niches that you are passionate about.

I wish you all the best of luck!