Do you have a job or went full time on your dream?

I do both.

Made 200k at a job this year and made 150k 'on the side'.

I took a job that I knew would help get me the experience to make the 150k on the side. Now I'm looking to expand that 150k for 2017 to 350k in 2018. The 200k day job has become stable and easy now.
 
I have a day job, and will keep it until we're financially independent to my wife's satisfaction, or until the kids' college funds are paid for, or until we have universal healthcare...basically for the foreseeable future. That said, I've been fortunate enough to make good money with IM money for a few years now, so I get to chase the dream while having the security blanket, which is nice, seeing as IM is extremely volatile as an income source...especially when you've got a family. If it all fell apart tomorrow, our savings rate would be chopped in half, as would charity, but life would continue as usual.
 
I went the no job route and lived on very little - this was partly because I wanted to be home and be a full time mother as well though. However not sure I would be where I am now if I had a job - took me long enough to make progress when I first started as it was. The money I would have made from a job would have not been very much anyway and I prioritised being home.
 
Zach said:
I do both.

Made 200k at a job this year and made 150k 'on the side'.

I took a job that I knew would help get me the experience to make the 150k on the side. Now I'm looking to expand that 150k for 2017 to 350k in 2018. The 200k day job has become stable and easy now.
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What kind of job is that?
 
Six months ago I found myself out of a job and had to choose - return to cubical life or start out for myself.

I managed a month of working for myself before my wife told me to "get back to work". I don't think she believes that making a living online is actually possible.
 
Zach said:
Media buyer at a company. Learn the game. Pivot your skills into your own dynasty.
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I assume that's not a remote position, but working in an office. I am working in the office as senior SEO consultant and I am sick of it, so hard to find something good to work remotely.
 
Now I do 1-2 days/week at home. I did 0 at home initially. That part doesn't matter that much initially. More about just learning the game & then doing it on your own on nights, mornings, and weekends to start out. You just need some momentum to build up. I lost $$ on many campaigns, then finally 1 worked, then another, then another, etc...
 
For me I started with online marketing when I was jobless from more than a year and did not have any money to get started. I started doing this on full time basis from the start mainly because I did not have a job and being so long without a job, I wasn't keen on doing one either.

I learned things from forums. There was this thing called Bum Marketing in those days which was about writing articles and submitting to sites like EzineArticles etc and targeting low competition keywords. That worked nicely for me. I had started a free blog on Blogger and would post product reviews or other stuff on it and link to it from EzineArticles. I would promote Clickbank products as affiliate through my blog. Things started working and I then registered my own domain.

Then I tried building profile backlinks (which were made famous by Angela from Warrior Forum). Those links used to work beautifully in those days and I was able to secure some first page rankings for pretty well-searched for keywords and things started to rock and roll for me. This was at the start (during the first couple of years). Obviously there were lots of ups and downs that I cannot possibly mention in my brief post but that is the main gist of it. Then of course the big Google updates spoiled all the fun and people were forced to look for other alternative ways to make money online.
 
@anwar001 Those days make me laugh when I think back. Paul’s backlinks and all the knockoffs. The article marketing era set so many people up for a crash and burn with Squidoo and Hubpages parasite ranking. And that main ‘artsy’ young girl on Warrior Forum naked Alexa or whatever turned out to be a 50 year old man. So many scandals with the hot shots and mods of that forum. They kept the lid on it pretty good.

Anyways, glad to have you here as another veteran!
 
anwar001 said:
For me I started with online marketing when I was jobless from more than a year and did not have any money to get started. I started doing this on full time basis from the start mainly because I did not have a job and being so long without a job, I wasn't keen on doing one either.
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Do you still make a living online now?
 
Focused said:
Do you still make a living online now?
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I still make a living online but not through affiliate marketing anymore though I am planning to go into that again. I am currently mainly involved in web development, and also provide few SEO services on the side. , lol...
 
I expect that I'll have a job at some point soon. My goal right now is stability, so I'll do whatever it takes to achieve that. Can't really build an online business on a foundation of sand.
 
Is there a golden rule to when you can make that switch?
Did you guys go F/T once the income level was the same? or when it was a stable amount.
 
ironlemon183 said:
Is there a golden rule to when you can make that switch?
Did you guys go F/T once the income level was the same? or when it was a stable amount.
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If you have the cajones and talent, you just go for it. If you work best with your back against the wall, you just go for it. Both of these scenarios requires you actually knowing what you're doing, where the only obstacle is having enough time to execute. At the same time, someone smarter would use the money from their job to outsource the tasks and wait until success was a guarantee.

It doesn't matter if you have a family or not, dependents or not, whatever... you should at least have 6 months of savings and have exceeded your day job's income for a period of at least 6 months to make sure it averages out and is stable. That's with SEO related work. I'd recommend a 12 & 12 situation.

If you're launching your own products and/or using PPC for product sales or commissions, you might be as careful or more careful. It takes a lot of money to float the cost of ads, and campaigns get sucked dry or die all the time. You need to be able to weather long down periods where you not only aren't earning but you're losing money paying for ads that aren't converting.
 
I had a good job. Co-owner and CEO in a company in IT field. After couple of years I got tired of people and stupidity so I quit and gifted my shares in the company.

Long before that I was in IM field mostly experimenting and trying new things. It brought me some money but nothing spectacular. Right now, I actively work maybe 10hours/week. The rest of my time I spend with my child, read, etc. Well, I became lazy :smile:

I guess I will start working IM full time very soon.
 
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