Building Wealth Online #1: Making Your First $!

One of the biggest boons of the current phase of Information Age powered by the Internet is the plethora of options available for making money online without the hassles of physical interactions whether going to offices, meeting clients in person or moving goods and services.

This is useful for a wide range of requirements that people may have depending on their personal situations. Some may be looking for a side hustle to supplement their income from the 9 to 5 job. Others may be looking for options to transform their career or follow a personal passion to see if it is financially viable.Many people are considering it for achieving early retirement by building online assets.

As most people look towards online income to supplement their existing day job I will be focusing on ways which are not time intensive and can be managed by dedicating a few hours per week. Of course once your income stream grows you can dedicate more time and consider quitting your day job but initially till your online income has stabilised I will not recommend anyone to quit their jobs.

Why Making your First $ Online is Important?

In today’s era where the concept of stable jobs is fast disappearing and technologies like AI are treating the very existing of majority of the day jobs I think it is really critical that everyone knows how to create some additional income online.

You must have read about the rising levels of job dissatisfaction across the world which seems to have started rising exponentially since the start of COVID. The term Great Resignation was coined to defined the large waves of mass quitting which was happening all over the world as people realised that continuing in their day jobs was crushing their soul.

I want to clarify right at the start that making money online is not something which will happen overnight and it takes a lot of patience and perseverance.

You might be wondering why $1 is significant and what use it will be when we can hardly get anything from it today.

The reason why the first $ is so critical is because it will be your first step in building your online wealth. It will give you the confidence that it can be achieved by you. It will also help you establish the foundations for generating wealth online on which you can later develop and scale up to increase your income step by step.

After you bag that first $ there is no limit how further you can go but the biggest step is overcoming inertia and self doubt and get started.

Stages of Building Your Online Wealth!

Generating wealth online works in a very different way from how income comes from a standard 9 to 5 job.

As you can see from the graph below the evolution of salary income is usually linear where it goes up 5 to 10% every year which may vary to some extend depending on which industry or country you are in.

Online income on the other hand has a more logarithmic scale and grows many folds over the years. The tricky part is that it is very low initially and takes time to rise to a substantial level. That is why I mentioned that you need patience and perseverance to achieve it. Most people get frustrated when they don’t see the online income grow to their expectations and leave without realising that they may have been very close to making their income grow to the next logarithmic level in a few months of dedicated efforts.

Looking at the graph you may think that the later years must be very challenging to reach levels like $100,000 which may seem impossible. The reality however is that the tough part is the initial years of getting the $1 to $100 mark as that signifies building the system which can later be leveraged and scaled. Scaling up is the easy part and the tough part is finding the right niches that suit you.

How Can you Make that First $ Online?

Now let's come to the big question about how exactly can you make that first $. There are unlimited ways of making money online and new ways keep coming up every year but I would like to share with you ways which have worked for me well over the years.

Before I get into the details I would like to mention that when I started out many years ago I tried and experimented with several ways and then selected the ones which I found more aligned to my likes and abilities.

It might be similar for you or different but what you should strive for is to keep an open mind and try as many options as possible before you finalise the options you want to stick to on long term.

The first prerequisite before you even start thinking about making money online is to be clear about how will you be receiving the money. Different sources pay in different way but if you have the following options ready you are set to receive money from more than 99% of the options:

Metamask wallet- If you are familiar with cryptocurrencies then you probably already have it. If not you need to watch a tutorial on YouTube and setup a Metamsk wallet for yourself to receive payments in crypto. More and more sites are making payments available in crypto so this is something you should definitely learn how to handle.

Paypal- This is still the most popular mode for receiving non-crypto payments. You need to have a registered email and link your bank details to Paypal

Stripe- Many sites which are very particular about regulatory compliance only allow payment through Stripe so make sure you have a account there as well.

With these 3 accounts you will be set to receive payments from almost all the sites. You might still encounter some portals which have a strange or unique payment system and then you need to decide if it makes sense to create an additional account for that.

Let’s move now to the Income Streams that I have been using for a long time and can personally vouch for their credibility for being genuine. I prefer options which are stable to be used in long run. I avoid passing fads which might pay well for a short time and then disappear.

Paid Blogging

I always had an active hobby of reading and writing since childhood so I have been maintaining blogs since a long time for the topics that interest me specially cryptocurrencies and spirituality. Many writers run their own blog and monetise it but from my experience it is very tedious and requires a lot of effort and needs you to keep refreshing your SEO (search engine optimisation) skills and need to maintain heavy traffic to your site to get reasonable returns.

I prefer platforms where you can add your blog and it instantly gets monetised linked to the number of readers it attracts.

1. Medium

Medium is one the biggest blogging platforms and once you established there you will realise it is the best paying site as well. The only catch is that it will take some time for you to start earning as your income will be linked to how many readers your blog gets.

You should think long term and only publish your best articles there as your income will depend on how many people find that article worth reading.

The better your article is the more people will subscribe to your account to receive notifications when you publish new articles. The more subscribers you are able to build over time will get high viability to the blogs you post.

It took me about 6 months to build a subscriber base of 500 and then my blogs started getting a decent number of views and since then I started receiving a steady income.

One factor you need to keep in mind is that till recently Medium allowed users to register for free and start earning from their blogs. A lot of people used bots and AI in attempt to game the system by posting auto generated articles. To prevent such exploits now they are only allowing registered members to publish blogs. The registration cost is about $50 per year. If you are an active blogger then you can go ahead as $50 is something you will be able to recover within 6 months and start making good earnings thereafter. If however you are new to writing or blogging then I would recommend you to first try the other free options and get some funds and then register on medium to avoid paying from your pocket upfront.

If you decide to join Medium you can use my referral link - https://medium.com/@sambtc/membership

Factors to consider while using Medium are:

Registration Fee- $50/ year

Expected time to Earn your First $- 3 to 6 months

Expected Daily Earnings with 500 subscribers- $1

Payment Mode- Stripe

Once you have started earning on Medium you can work on expanding your user base by interacting with them to understand which content they like more. With growth in user base you will be able to scale up your earnings proportionately.

2. Publish0x

Publish0x is the most popular blogging site focused on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency related topics. If you are interested in Cryptocurrencies then you will be able to make your first $ there within a few weeks if you post regularly. The best part about Publish0x is that registering is free so unlike Medium you don’t have to pay an annual fee to be a registered user on the site.

What you need to keep in mind is that Publish0x caters to the niche of blockchain topics so the reader base is much smaller than Medium so your earnings will not be able to scale up later that significantly. Once you are able to grow your subscriber base to over a 500 you can start earning better as your posts will get better visibility.

One thing to keep in mind is that Publish0x works on a tipping pool model and payments are given out in cryptocurrencies so you would need to setup a Metamask wallet and learn how to operate it before making your first withdrawal from Publish0x.

Factors to consider while using Publish0x are:

Registration Fee- Nil

Expected time to Earn your First $- 2 to 3 weeks

Expected Daily Earnings with 500 subscribers- $0.50

Payment Mode- Metamask/ Crypto Wallet

If you would like to register on Publish0x you can use my Referral link - https://www.publish0x.com?a=zPdyJz7eQr

What makes Publish0x different from other platforms is that you don’t get rewarded simply by the number of views you get. A reader who likes your post has the option to tip your post with a pool of tokens setup by the Publish0x team. So to get a decent earning you need to ensure you are posting quality content so readers find it tip worthy.

3. Vocal Media

Vocal is very similar to Medium in how it operates. Users can register as authors and start posting blogs which will be rewarded linked to the number of views they generate. It is a much newer and smaller platform than Medium so the income expected will also be lower than Medium, however for now they are not charging any fees for writers to register and start blogging. I strongly feel that as the platform grows at some point they will also start charging a registration fee to the new authors. If you are an active blogger then I will definitely recommend you to join early before they implement an annual fee for joining. They also have regular contests so there are options to get some additional earnings as well.

Compared to Medium and Publish0x, I have joined this platform more recently and so far I have not got a big subscriber base like I do in Medium and Publish0x but what I have noticed is that even without having any subscribers I am able to get some views and earnings. At the moment the earnings are much lower but I expect them to scale up once my subscriber base grows.

Factors to consider while using Vocal Media are:

Registration Fee- Nil

Expected time to Earn your First $- 3 to 4 weeks

Expected Daily Earnings with 0 subscribers- $0.05

Payment Mode- Stripe

You can access their site at the following link- https://vocal.media

They currently do not have a referral program.

What Next After your First $ is Earned?

Like I mentioned earlier in the post that building Online wealth is a journey which needs to be scaled up.

Once you identify which modes and platforms work better for you and you have made your first $, the next step in your journey would be to scale from this $1 to $100 which I will explain in details in my next publication and it will also be linked to my real life experiences.

Cheers,

Sam