Success! Just made my first $136 online in one day!

byjmac86

224 followers

6 years ago

This is not directly related to my WA sites specifically, but rather the tricks, tactics, and suggestions that were made to me by my wonderful peers and mentors here at WA.

I have, for the longest time, been a huge pessimist about the potential of making money online. This is mostly due to the numerous poor experiences, setbacks, downfalls, and pitfalls I've come to experience over the last 15 years of trying.

I had set up an account at Fiverr, a freelancer site, about two to three weeks ago, as was suggested to me by a few members. At first, nothing was coming in - as was to be expected. About a week ago, however, I noticed the stats were starting to go up in the views and impressions, and finally I was contacted by someone for one of my translation gigs (Japanese to English).

I was ecstatic to say the least... especially since the job they needed to be done had a price tag of over $1,500! The only caveat was that this amount of work (120 pages of FINANCIAL documents, plus re-creating the formatting...) would normally take about 4-5 days to realistically complete, but they wanted it done in 24 hours. Needless to say, I told them it would be impossible and that at best, I could complete roughly 1/3 of the work for them for $600 (included a rush-delivery and legal jargon fee).

Unfortunately that job, as expected, ended up getting scrapped by the guy's upper management. Poor sap must have waited too long, or had thought that a single freelancer could equate to the same amount of work as a full corporate team. Don't know...

Either way, my pessimism had shot through the roof at that point, and I was on the verge of just closing up shop... that was until about 3 days ago when he contacted me again with a new job. This time for proof-reading a google-translated document.

To cut an already long story - I sent him a very generous offer, which he kindly accepted. In hindsight, I should have taken into consideration the scope of the work in more detail, and probably could have justified charging more than double... but oh well. Let's just call it a "first customer discount".

24 hours ago, my challenge was:

Proofreading 18 pages of mostly technical IT jargon, A technical design document translated from Japanese into the form of Japanglish... i.e. GOOGLENESE.

Now, you may think that proofreading 18 pages does not seem like such a bad thing, especially since the entire English side of the document was only a little over 4,500 words - but throw in grammatical chaos, IT Jargon, and a few untranslatable Japanese metaphors... you've got yourself one hell of a migraine waiting for you.

Needless to say, the entire document took me over 6 hours of hard, brain-wracking work... but it was so worth it in the end, because this was the first time in my life that I have earned a profit online (I'm not counting "Sell-it-yourself" sites like Amazon, EBay, etc)

This feeling of success is like no other. I put in nearly the same amount of work as my day-job, if not more... yet the outcome was much more satisfying because I know that I am doing this for myself and my family, and not to line the pockets and stoke the ego of the company president.

Hopefully this is a turning point for me, and not just a one-hit wonder. I want to eventually transform this into a livable situation (making a living from doing this) so that I can work from home while providing for my family. I really enjoy my wife's cooking, and would love to be able to eat it every day for lunch, and not just dinner! (Yes, I do cook on the weekends, if you must know).

Jason, signing off for now (it's well past midnight now, so off to bed for me)