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16th March 2007
Well, as you saw, Wednesday came and went without any updates from me on the status of my project and my effort to earn $1,000 online within a month. My apologies for not updating you - sadly, my ISP decided to upgrade everyone’s connection free of charge. This sounds great, if you don’t consider the fact that it meant constant service interruptions for two days. I was literally getting disconnected every 10-15 minutes, which is why I wasn’t able to post anything, or, more importantly, do the research I needed to submit my work to the client on time. As you can imagine, the final submission was despicably late (in fact, I only e-mailed it a few minutes ago).
Sadly, my effort to earn $1,000 a month was a failure - assuming that the client finds my work of acceptable quality, I will receive the remaining $300 for the job I did sometime closer to the end of the week. This payment would push me over $1,000, meaning that I will have earned $1,000+ in approximately 5 weeks.
In retrospect, this could have been done a lot faster - unfortunately, a lot of offline issues came up that required my immediate attention and took up far more time than I had originally anticipated. $1,000 a month was definitely doable and is something I will try to achieve next month.
In the meantime, over the coming days, you can expect to see a post-mortem of my project highlighting the lessons I learned as well as my successes and failures. I hope you will find it as informative and beneficial as I did.
March 17th, 2007 at 5:31 pm
Congrats George! Even if you did not do it “on the dot” as time frame is concerned, I would say it’s still a tremendous start. You know as well as I do by reading the Warrior Forum - there are people who post there after months of being in IM and barely making a few bucks (not even hundreds).
Yet you almost managed 1k in 1 month - and that is just the beginning.
Now move the blog towards 1k/month constant income and continue documenting THAT journey. It will be even more exciting than your first 1k. Then document the journey to 1k/month on autopilot
- how you automate your business and take it to the next level - making many 1k/month businesses.
I see great potential here - and I will come back as often as needed to remind you
March 17th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Thanks for the vote of confidence, Adrian! Indeed, I am not at all content with $1,000 a month (be it on auto-pilot or not). In the long run, I am hoping to turn the Internet into my primary source of income (since as you know, Swiss aren’t big on handing out jobs to non-EU nationals, not to mention that I quite like working from home).
I am not yet sure if my next month’s effort will focus on creating auto-pilot means of income, or if instead I will try to reach $2,000. At the moment, I am quite hard-pressed for money (have to cover university fees of $2,000 a month), so, from the financial point of view, reaching $2,000 of manual income as opposed to $1,000 auto income (which will take more than a month) might be a little bit more appropriate. Nothing is decided, though!
Speaking of which, the next one-month challenge for me should start some time closer to the end of next week - I am giving myself a break, mainly to wait until my lovely girlfriend leaves to her home country for a one-month vacation so I can concentrate on working online full-time.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
The point with 1k autopilot is to end up having something that brings you constantly 1k/month with minimum effort on your side. Once that is accomplished then you can move on to make even more money.
A recent example of what happens if you don’t “autopilot” eventually - there was a thread (now deleted) by Steven on the Warrior Forum in which he wondered how people make more money than him. He has a steady income indeed (5-6k/month I think) from IM but he can’t take the next step. He spends 14 hours a day to make that income and he is not willing to automate or delegate anything from what he already does.
He reached saturation point. There is only that much one person can do.
Moreover, bringing in automation - gives you space to breath. Just think you have a business depending on you for it to work and you get sick for a month. You’ll not be making anything anymore.
THAT I would say is the purpose of automation. True - it’s not easy. I think it may be easier to make 5,000 / month by yourself one off than to build up something that brings you 1k/month on autopilot.
And no, you don’t have to do it next month
But think about it.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Adrian, I absolutely agree with you on the importance of automatic income - indeed, automation the main long-term objective of my online career. With that said, unfortunately, what I need right now the most is immediate injections of cash to help finance my university studies (failure to do so would result in repatriation to Belarus, as my graduate degree is the only thing giving me an official reason to stay in Switzerland). With the way things are going, I need a minimum of $1,000/month to cover just the tuition fees (and I do need some spending money, too).
So, the reason behind my emphasis on manual rather than automated income at the moment is that if I fail to get the money I need for tuition fees, I might very well find myself automating my income from Belarus, which isn’t exactly my dream destination. However, as soon as I can secure something like $1,500 - $2,000 a month manual, I imagine I will be able to focus on automating parts of it.
How does that sound?
March 20th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
That sounds good and it’s well understood
Money talks and it would be better indeed working on it from Switzerland rather than Belarus 
- not that Belarus is that bad - I saw the website of the American guy who’s living there eating potatoes and cabbage off the land and he seems pretty happy 
Not sure if leaving off the land in Belarus is your goal though
March 20th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Actually, when it comes to Belarus, I beg to differ with Adam’s opinion (I presume that’s the site you went to - I read it as well). From my perspective - and that’s the perspective of someone who was born and raised in Belarus, spending the first 15 years of my life there - Belarus is a grim disaster, be it economically, socially and politically. The country is a dictatorship in all but name, election fraud is a regular occurence, human rights and civil liberties are systematically violated. Economically, the country is a mess - sure, Minsk might look like a modern city, but that’s only if you don’t leave the main street - the second you do, you get to see the real Minsk, which is dirty, polluted and highly dangerous. People on the streets all seem grey, depressed and hopeless - in fact, if there’s one word that charactersises Belarus at the moment, it’s hopelessness, the feeling of which seems to pervade every aspect of daily life there.
So yes, living off cabbages and potatos in Belarus is definitely not my goal (no offence to Adam intended, of course).