If you notice, many successful bloggers do not rely on blogging alone for generating money on internet. In fact, their blogs are usually the secondary source of income for them. Although they have done many SEO Tips for their blog.


This applies to myself as well (not that I am a successful blogger). My primary source of income comes from my long time online business, which has been around since 1999 (acquired its own domain name in late 2002). I started this website as a hobby in my university years, providing free tutorials on photoshop, dreamweaver, css, php… etc. But after some time it became popular and was driving thousands of visitors every month.

After my degree, when I was working in Web Design field, I added free website templates to my website. This too attracted a lot of visitors. After all, who doesn’t love free stuff right?

• Traffic and free stuff brings business

By now, I was getting a lot of requests to design websites. Initially, I did a lot of freelancing (not all listed in portfolio). It did bring quite substantial amount of income, but it also involved a lot of hard work on my part. So, to reduce my workload, I introduced ready website templates to my website. This took huge workload off my shoulders. Because, now people who were looking for web design were purchasing my website templates directly, instead of hiring me for custom design. As a result, I had more free time for other things.

By now my hobby site that started humbly in 1999, was making money from many sources, including advertising (i.e text links, publisher programs, affiliate programs etc.) If it was not for my free tutorials, I wouldn’t be where I am now – doing what I like most, staying at home and creating my own projects and products. Of course blogging has been part of my everyday life for the past 2 years now.

• Lessons learned

Here are some of the lessons that I can bring to your attention from my life, work and entrepreneurial experience so far.

• Have more than one online business – if you have only a blog as your online income generator, try to open few more businesses. If you are not sure what kind of business you can do online, there are tons of ideas on Amazon. Just make some research and pick few ideas to work on.
• Pursue your hobby – just keep doing what you love i.e your hobby. You never know what it might bring you in the future.For example, I graduated with a degree in ICT, majoring in Databases. But I ended up working in the field of Web Design. And now most of my income comes from web design related things. Not bad for a hobby that brings money, huh? If I had abandoned my interest in web design then, I wouldn’t be where I am now.
• Turn services into products – if you can, try to turn your service into a product. This way you can put your business on auto-pilot! As a result, you will have more free time for your new projects. For example, I have turned my web design service into a product, which is website template.
• Give away things for free – by giving away things for free you benefit both parties; the community, and yourself. I gave away tutorials (my knowledge) and website templates for free without knowing that they would one day bring me enough money to be self-employed. Leo Babauta has a good article on this too, read here.
• Make your own products – sure you can make a lot of money by selling someone else’s products. But why not reverse the situation? You could easily become the party that provides the affiliate program. This way others would sell your products, and you would get the larger share of the profit.There is nothing more satisfying than selling your own products. Moreover, investing in your own products is a long-term strategy, which could very well secure your profitability for a long time to come. You have no programming skills? No problem, there are thousands of people who has. Just invest some of your time and money, and you can have your own product in no time.
• Act on your ideas and thoughts – Don’t read all the popular business books and bestsellers just for the sake of reading only (So that you can say “I read that book”). Because knowledge that is not acted upon, is no better than not having that knowledge at all. Unfortunately, many of us simply don’t take that first step to make our ideas and thoughts a reality, to turn our ideas into a potential business that could sustain us (possibly for the rest of our lives). So if you are not gonna act, don’t waste your money on books. Instead you could collect that money and hire someone to do some project for you.

I hope you will find some of these tips useful. Please do share your own tips that have made a difference in your life or business.

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