$1k Blog

I am sure many of you have seen countless sales letters promising to sell you a magic way that lets you earn full-time income from home without ever going to work or even investing as much effort into your daily job. The purpose of this post is to dispel the popular myth that working from home and earning money on the Internet means that you will not have to work nearly as hard as you would on a regular job.

Pure and simply, this is nonsense. Having been working online for over a week now, I can tell you a little bit about what my schedule looks like.

I wake up a bit later than usual, some time between 9am and 11am, and normally like to lie around in bed if the weather outside is a bit sunny. In this respect, all the stories you hear about working from home are true - you have much more flexibility, since you no longer have to head to office every morning.

However, after when you get out of bed, that’s when the real work begins. Expect to invest as much into your online job as you would into the regular one. Spending 8-10 hours a day writing articles is a perfectly regular occurrence to me now, sometimes staying up until 2-3am to finish off the articles. Just a few hours ago, I had to tell my girlfriend that I no longer have as much time to help her with her university stuff as I did before, simply because of how time-consuming article writing is. While you gain a lot of flexibility by not having to be in the office every day, it also means that you no longer have a natural limit on the number of hours you will work a day (for example, you won’t have a reason to stop working at 8pm because none of the key personnel you need are at work any longer).

Any online job - article writing, copywriting or Internet marketing - is equally arduous and requires tremendous amount of investments in terms of both time and effort. It is true that passive income opportunities do exist online, and many have successfully pursued them - however, to reach the point where you can simply sit back and do nothing even as you watch your bank account grow every day from residual income, you will have to work harder than you can imagine.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise - the Internet is not a silver bullet for aspiring millionaires who wish to have it all without investing any effort. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, I will say that, for the year or so of working online, the only main advantage will be greater flexibility in working hours. Don’t expect to have sufficient residual income right off the bat - that’s just not going to happen.