Since I was just 12 years old I have worked in many jobs. These have been; multiple paper rounds, sales assistants, data entry clerk, cinema popcorn seller, ticket office, desktop publisher, web developer, affiliate marketing, and business owner.

As a writer who has been writing online since 2005, I’ve run across – and tried – plenty of varied ways to make money online. I’ve seen the scams and been blessed by discovering legitimate ways to make money online. Here are 30 unique ways to earn some cash via the Internet: 1. Amazon: Publish your own Kindle books.
Apr 19, 2021 There are legitimate ways to make money online. The problem is that the real ways to make money aren’t “get rich quick” schemes. Most of them require a lot of work and sometimes a lot of dedication before seeing a return on your time. But if you really want to make money online, work from home or turn an idea into a business, you can do it.

During this time I have rarely been employed full time only really when I first finished school at 16 for 2 years. Ever since I have worked as a freelancer or in companies, I have either set-up myself or with business partners.

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Looking back over this 20-year period is astonishing and something I would never have predicted when I was a teenager, or even when at University. I briefly discuss some of this journey on my about me page.

At times it’s been hard work, with plenty of uncertainty. Other times seemed like I was earning “easy” money from what appeared to be overnight success.

I wouldn’t have changed this for anything though. The prospect of working for a boss full time has literally scared the shit out of me. Having financial security to avoid being a worker bee has been my motivation since leaving University.

Not having a boss has meant I have enjoyed long periods of travel and the holy grail of “making money whilst I sleep” – how much has this statement been flocked to death by gurus eh?

More recently, I have had 18 months off living in Malaysia with my family without financial worries. In fact, the only worry has been that I actually want to be doing something again.

So, what and how have I made money online working for myself over the last 18 years?

Contents

3 Behavioural Profiling Company

Web Development Contractor

After leaving University and experiencing some backpacking I was keen to follow a nomadic working life. At the time I was thinking of being able to live the “laptop lifestyle” is what I wanted to do.

I began learning how to build websites and understand how to program in Active Server Pages (ASP) and ASP.net to communicate with databases such as MSSQL.

Whilst building up my knowledge from working on small sites from local companies I got my biggest break from my friend ( Brooky ) who introduced me to a company in London who was looking for a company to develop a fairly large content managed website (content management system – CMS).

I got the contract, which meant I would earn almost a year’s income for 3 months’ work, although it wasn’t easy as I needed to hire and manage another developer to work alongside me. The job was made even more challenging by the project manager I liaised with kept on changing his mind, causing delays and additional work.

The site successfully launched and made me the “go-to” web guy for lots of their projects going forward. I worked with the then CEO on and off for nearly 8 years! Was I simply too cheap or just a nice, easy to work with guy? I would say bit of both 😉

CMS Software Company

Brooky introduced me to a guy called Matt, a very gifted programmer who had developed a Content Management System (CMS) that wasn’t quite commercially available yet.

His software was around 80% completed but had no customers yet, so I suggested we formed a company and used an upcoming project of five websites as our first client. We could then complete the software and have a portfolio of sites to show other prospective customers.

Whilst the software was at the time very impressive, it was not easy to roll out to new sites and required a reasonable amount of programming. At the time WordPress had only first started was not as sophisticated as it is today. However, it was gaining popularity of free CMS software like Mambo that made it difficult to convince some small businesses to pay for our solution.

Sales weren’t our strong point and so we struggled to get enough paying customers to sustain the business as it was, so we pivoted and looked at developing other software as a service (SaaS) offerings.

Matt played a lot of softball matches and in some netball leagues, who struggled with managing their teams and fixtures. So, we met with one of the league organizers and started developing an online league, team, and venue management software for Netball in London.

It was a hard slog to earn enough money to support both of us whilst developing this software from the ground up. Eventually, though we got a few paying leagues that got us some money, it wasn’t enough for both of us.

At this point, whilst I was confident in the software, I wanted to have time out and go back to be a solo freelancer, with the freedom and flexibility of working and playing hard when I wanted too.

So, Matt and I went our separate ways and he still owns and runs this company today. I am very happy for him, he worked hard to get the software doing a decent turnover and supports hundreds of teams and leagues around the world.

Although at times working in this business was tough, Matt and I had an amicable business separation, with both of us happy with the outcome.

Behavioural Profiling Company

I was enjoying working by myself again and spent time in Germany with my girlfriend at the time, then back to the UK went it all went Pete Tong (rhyming slang for wrong)!

When I moved back to London, I started doing web development for an old client and met a father and son team who had developed a unique behavioral profiling model. They were trying to get this online and migrate from a consultancy only based business to a SaaS model.

My old client had invested in their company and was financing this development and I began working with them for 4-5 months until the parent company began to struggle. I was close to not getting some of the money owed but thankfully was fully paid in the end.

The end result was the Profiling company split away and started out again on their own. They needed a tech guy to develop their online part of the business and approached me to be an equity partner.

The deal was for me to work on a retainer basis and sweat equity to be 10% shareholder of the business.

Whilst it started out great, within a year the company was struggling and the promise of raising venture capital never happened. It got so bad that they desperately needed funds and after re-mortgaging and health issues, the company was in bad shape.

I could see that there was a good chance of failure and so had not fully invested my time into the business and had spread my risk in doing other work too.

They Screwed Me!

The end result was being screwed over by the father and son.

Behind my back, they brokered a deal with another company to buy the assets of the company and employ the son for 2 years on a salaried package. To top it off, the new owner tried to use bully boy tactics to get me to work for a fixed price to do further development.

After I turned down his less than attractive financial offer, he attempted to get me to work for free on aspects of the software he believed wasn’t working as he wished. That was never going to happen.

The dire financial circumstances of the father meant that at the end I only received 55% of what I was supposed to receive from the final low asset sale. He used the money to fund his living expenses.

To say that I was incredibly disappointed with the outcome is an understatement. This was two-fold in that the business did have potential, but especially disappointed from the actions of the father and son. Throughout my time working in the business (2-3 years) they were constantly reassuring me that “we’re in this together” and “you will be paid”, all the promises were empty-handed and ended up being meaningless.

A conservative estimate of around £120k+ of development work, I probably received less than £20k in total. I had been burned, big time.

The biggest learning outcome f

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