Thursday, February 22, 2007

The road to Independence

Let's not be hypocritical. I want to make money. I want to make enough money from Internet income that I can quit my job and become independent. I'm not naive, I realize that I share this plan with at least 25 million other people on this planet, so I will need persistence and preferably good ideas. You may ask, why do I want to write a blog about it, and perhaps have my best ideas taken? Well, for starters I believe in synergy and the creative power of sharing. Maybe you will find some ideas here and use them for yourself, but by sharing I'm bound to get feedback and in that way discover possibilities that I'd never find otherwise. So it's a win-win situation really.

Let's start with setting the goals. That is always a good idea since it gives you a focus and something that you can work to manifest. If you don't know about manifestation and the power of such techniques I recommend that you start by heading over to my other blog to read up on it and establish a baseline.
So, what are the goals? Eventually I'd like to be able to support my family which is currently me and my wife. We hope to have two kids, so that would make it a family of four. To support a family of four and lead a comfortable life I'd say I need to make $ 10k per month. Another goal is to make this income as passive as possible. There are a lot of people out there with the same basic idea, so there is a lot of ideas to be found, but also stiff competition. But ok, I want to minimize the time per dollar, to make as lean as possible money making machine. I won't put a number on this yet, but basically, if I have to spend more than 1 minute to make $1 it's not going to be sustainable to reach my goal.
Of course most ventures will require initial investment of time and money, and the more passive income, the more investment is needed initially. You can start making money right away, with very little investment, but the income will probably not be passive, even in the long run.
But where to start? I'll start by tossing some ideas out there, just to see what comes of it:
  • EBay-type reselling
  • PPC advertising
  • Selling a service
  • Selling your intellectual or creative property

I already started with the first one, eBay-type reselling, since it's the the quickest way to start making independent money. I've bought a simple electronic device off eBay for a small initial investment ($25) and is reselling it on a different auction site. The profit margin is about 70-100% (I'll have better numbers in a month or so). The picture below show my sales the last month.

It's not huge sales, and the market saturate quite easily, but it's a niche, and it makes a good profit so far. I'd estimate that the passive index for this program is $0.3 per minute. Not quite what I'm shooting for, but for now I will continue with this resell program.

My second resell program is slightly more involved. Basically I buy large quantities of a cheap product, manipulates it a bit and resell in smaller packages. It's a small niche market, but the profit margin is around 200%, i.e I make three dollars for each dollar I spend. My last month sales can be seen in the picture below. The passive index for this one is a bit more difficult to estimate, but I believe it is close to $0.5 per minute which is better, but also not quite cutting it.

Ok, time is running out for today, so I will have to come back to this tomorrow, or some day soon. Stay tuned!

1 comment:

Brian C. Lee said...

Great post! I'll be following your progress on your eBay venture. I am trying one also!