As I’m sitting up way too late and watching something that is not doing its job putting me to sleep, I thought I’d write this to share with you about how far I’ve come in what I wish was a much shorter time period.  But you know what they say, wish in one hand and sh… anyways…

Everyone has their own personal experience of how they first started on the internet and why they even got on the internet in the first place.  I am going to share with you when and why I first got online and what it has developed into today and how you can do the same, hopefully in much less time.

Our story begins by travelling in the way, way-back machine and going all the way in history to May of 1999.  I opened a trading account for my father with Ameritrade and began trading stocks online, while also gathering financial information for trading from Yahoo Finance.  I continued doing this for awhile with better then average results, August thru November of 2000 was tough, and in November of 2000 I opened my first Ebay account.  At first I only used my account to buy online, but in spring of 2001 I bought my first digital camera, a 3.1 megapixel Canon Powershot G1, and then everything changed.  I then began to sell things online and started making my first few dollars online thru means other then stock trading.  I was hooked but still had much to discover and didn’t know where to start looking to learn more.

In March of 2002 I discovered my first online forum and joined.  It was naturally a bodybuilding and fitness site (it was and still is the largest bodybuilding community online) as I have been heavily into fitness and weightlifting from a very early age and competed a few times as a teenager in bodybuilding contests.  After about 24 months of being on the fitness site I was made a moderator for the forums and began learning alot about how forums are run and can be monetized.

Around December of 2004, I took 1/3 ownership in a local antique shop and leveraged my new connections with vendors of our store to sell their antiques online thru Ebay.  It was a quick lesson in creating a service price point for their items that gave them an adequate selling price while still leaving me with a profit for my work and to cover the necessary shipping costs for their items.  It also taught me Shipping Insurance is an invaluable option when you are shipping something fragile, no matter how well you securely pack it for transport.

I continued doing what I had been doing, trading stocks, selling on Ebay, and modding the fitness forums, until about May of 2005.  A few months prior to that I had become the State Chairman in South Dakota for the American Powerlifting Federation and in May of that year I decided to create a website and resource for the South Dakota APF.  After about 8 months of maintaining the website, I implemented Google Adsense, specifically for it’s ability to generate income simply by placing their text links on my site.  I had what I considered a decent amount of traffic for my site taking into account not everyone is interested in powerlifting, especially in South Dakota, and was pleased with the little bit of revenue the ads were generating.

In the fall of 2006, I did a couple things that changed the way I viewed the potential for my website, APFSD.com.  First, I contacted a world record holder in the bench press and coordinated for him to come to my home town to put on a bench pressing seminar.  Through the power of my website, I was able to market the seminar at no extra cost and had more then enough people sign up to actually turn a profit on the whole seminar.  During this time I also promoted and hosted powerlifting meets and used APFSD.com for a central resource to download Meet Application forms and also the ability to pay online if so desired.  In January of 2007, I began work on something that still turns a profit for me to this day, although I have put absolutely zero hours of work back into it after I originally completed it.  I wrote an Ebook documenting on how to build a Monolift (a device similar to a powerlifting or squat rack, only far more complicated and far more useful).  Completed Monolifts sell for around $3000, far more then most people have available to spend on them, and with their weight, shipping increases the price a couple hundred dollars more.  As I had already built my own Monolift and was using it in our state powerlifting meets, all I had to do was take all the dimensions and document the building process with pictures and create a blueprint on how to build your own.  I originally marketed the plans for $79.99 and sold a few at that price, but after I dropped the price to $49.99, where it remains today, I began selling the ebook on a fairly regular basis.  While I’ve sold less then a hundred copies of the ebook, to places all over the world, the 8 hours it took me to create it has paid off in dividends since that time.

Due to timing issues of things going on in my personal life, I failed to renew the domain name for APFSD.com and someone else picked it up to park ads on it.  Fortunately, I had already started another site, titled MetalFitness.com which has taken different forms over the past two years.  Originally it was it’s own stand alone fitness forum, similar to the one I was a moderator at.  Due to conflicts of interest, the admin at the site I modded requested I shut it down for a small monetary amount.  Looking back, this was probably the dumbest thing I’ve done online, as my forum was growing rapidly and I was seeing a small income from the Adsense Ads I had just implemented.  I was very short sighted though, and shut it down.

However, in the spring of 2008 I turned MetalFitness.com into a blog to post informational topics on weightlifting, bodybuilding, powerlifting, strongman, and the nutritional aspects necessary to accomodate those sports.  At first I didn’t have time to update it regularly and I have been busy as of late with this blog, so it isn’t getting the attention it needs.  However, I still get a small stream of traffic there and still sell ebooks I’ve created, including How to Increase Your Bench Press in 30 Days.

Also, in December of 2007 I created what was actually my first blog, which I with my fiancee, still update on a semi-regular basis titled JoshAndChandra.com, a blog designed to help Exotic Dancers make more money in their profession.  As I’ve worked as a bouncer and bartender both in a Gentlemen’s Club for 8 years, Chandra and I have witnessed first hand what it takes for ladies to excel at what they do.  This led us to write an ebook to Help Dancers Make More Money in the Gentlemen’s Club, which is by far our best selling ebook to date.  This was also the first blog I used affiliate marketing on and learned what works and what doesn’t.

All of this, in about 8 and half years, is what I term my education in making money online.  It was slow and sometimes grueling process, but well worth it.  I would do EVERYTHING differently if I knew then what I do now, but hindsight is always 20/20.  However, my passion for making money online is what led me to start this blog, to help share what I’ve learned, and to help you do what I’ve accomplished in far less time then it took me.