It was an evening around the end of September 2007 when I finally realised that I should take action in order to make some cash online. All I’ve done before was searching the net for some nice and easy ways to get rich quick. Everyday I had the hope of finding the holy grail of making money online. Unfortunately I soon had to accept that there’s no such thing as easy money on the net (at least not that often). It was clear, I had to take action!

My first idea was to create a blog since I had seen many popular and also successful ones bringing in much money day by day. I never created a blog before and I must admit that I was such a noob in these days. Anyway, I somehow managed to set up a free blog at Google’s Blogger.com, a great service by the way, I highly recommend them! The Making Money Experiment was born and also the idea to bring to proof if it’s really possible to make money online at all.

I set myself a personal goal, namely to make $100 within the next 6 months to come. I first had my doubts if I would really be able to accomplish this, but later on I thought “Where ther’s a will there’s a way” and so I went on, and that was the best thing I’ve ever done in my money making career.

The first officially posts on TMME were written and published even before October 1st and dealt about writing articles for the Triond publishing platform and how to make money on myLot. In September I made a little over $5 and I was full of pride, not knowing that much more is possible. The first weeks were also the days when I joined many PTC sites and the Yuwie social networking site. I tested nearly every single money maker on the net these days (well ok, most of them…).

My blog slowly became more poular, my traffic rose and so did my earnings. In October I already made $18 (hey and don’t laugh about it…). I also decided to integrate Google Adsense in my blog to make the big cash. Unfortunately Google banned me from their network, probably because of using Linkreferral to “artificially” drive traffic to my blog. Well, for me it was a chance to test even more online money makers so I could even thank Google for that ban.

Later on, in December 2007, the Forex market got my big attention. Also not closely related to making money online, I was quite fascinated from exchanging different currencies to make money. Unfortunately till today I never had enough time and money to test it out, but I probably will somewhere in the future.

Month after month my earnings barely increased, in March 2008 I still made only $30 per month. But one good thing was that I did finally reach my goal to make $100 within 6 months and to be honest, I was really proud. Right before, sometime in February, I already bought the domain MakingMoneyExperiment.com since I had so much money, hehe… Some days later I moved my blog to a self-hosted Wordpress install.

By the end of April 2008 I found the wonderful NeoBux, one of the greatest and innovative PTC’s I’ve ever seen in my career. Till today, NeoBux is my biggest money maker and I brings in some good cash to spend on future projects in order to make even more! April was also the time I started to dive into some more serious money making stuff like niche and affiliate marketing. I created my first niche website and already made my first affiliate sale with Clickbank. My blog received its first Pagerank of 2, damn was I proud.

The following months I spent most my time in getting more referrals for NeoBux and working on my niche websites. I also found a nice way to make money from searching the internet. In June 2008 I made over $200 and I still find it funny when I compare this with my first days with TMME, a major increase in my opinion but still way more possible.

Just lately, since August 2008, I can say that I make real good money from my money making attempts. NeoBux, as I already said, is one of the major money makers I’m involved with. But I do even more to generate some cash. I sell links on TMME, do writing jobs for other people, work on more niche affiliate sites and I’m still searching for more online money makers since I can’t get enough (ok, I do it because I will eventually quit my day job and make a living from my online business).

The short recap above only reflects a slim percentage on what I’ve done and written about here on TMME. It’s way too much to tell about here in detail. But I can say that I’ve learned several lessons during my journey, good ones and bad ones.

With help of my blog I got many new friends, including my buddy Tiberius Burciu who has never regret to help me out in testing times. I also got dozens of loyal readers who follow my blog and participate in heavily commenting on my posts. Thank you so much for your support!

I’ve achieved several things over the last 12 months. I started with nothing but some spare time to manage a simple blog and my will to work toward my goals. Now, 365 days later, I can finally say that with some hard work nearly everything is possible to achieve. I’m now making nearly $700 a month, something I’d never had accomplished from sitting in front of my PC searching for ways to get rich quick…

That’s it, my recap on the first year of The Making Money Experiment. May many more years follow so I can provide you with even more information on making money online! And another thing, if you want, start your own online money making career too, it’s well worth it. Just put your heart and soul in it, take massive action and you will see the benefits!

See you soon,
Querblogger