Sounds crazy, right?
Starting a business isn’t meant to be about having fun.
It’s meant to be about hard work, late nights and freaking out over your bank balance. Maybe throw in an ulcer or two along the way.
Traditionally, that’s what starting a business has been all about.
I’ve been there myself as part of a few different start-ups over the years. It’s always been about the big dream. And that dream has usually revolved around a huge pot of money.
As the end of each year approaches, and the holiday season looms, most of us come up a little short.
We wish we had a little extra money in our pockets. More to save. More to spend on our families over the holidays. And more of a cash cushion so we can sleep better at night.
An extra $12,000 – one thousand more each month – would certainly make a big difference. In fact, for many of us, that extra thousand dollars a month would change our lives.
So how can we do that? Really, there are only three ways.
It’s hard to track all the different ways in which I have built up my knowledge and expertise in writing for the web.
I guess it started when I wrote and published my first website back in 1996.
When I began writing for the web full time in 1998, I was soaking up new knowledge from all kinds of different sources. I would read articles, buy books and listen carefully to fellow presenters at industry conferences.
And, of course, I learned a great deal from every new client project I took on.
But nothing compares, or even comes close to the knowledge I have gained from writing and publishing my own hobby website, CoffeeDetective.com.
Yes, it’s a hobby. I work on the site just in the evening and at weekends. Sometimes.
And before I get into the part about learning, let me just mention that the site has also become a significant source of income for me and my family. Since I began writing it in 2007, this hobby-site has earned me over $200,000 in passive income.
Now let’s look at how my coffee site has helped me learn so much about writing for the web.
For most of the time, we take our ability to write for granted.
After all, pretty much everyone can write. It’s one of those default skills we learn at school. And because everyone can do it, the act of writing becomes a commodity. There is no longer anything special about it.
Your mother writes. Your neighbors write. Your kids write. In fact, chances are that one of them is writing something on Facebook right now.
But if you view writing as a craft instead of just a commodity activity, remarkable things can happen.
First, you will have found a way to express yourself, your feelings and your opinions beyond simply writing one more Facebook entry. Second…
For most of the last 30 years I have earned my living by writing for clients, as a freelancer. And I have no complaints about that. I wrote promotional materials to help companies sell more of their products and services and, in return, they paid me for my time.
But over the last decade I have branched out a little, using my writing skills, and my love of writing, to make some money in a few different ways. I have written books, ebooks, courses and programs.
But my favorite way to make money as a writer is to generate passive income from the websites I create for myself.
The most successful of these sites, so far, is my site about coffee – CoffeeDetective.com.
As you`ll see from this video…