Making money online: A true story

It first occurred to me one day I came to a great need of money, while I was unable to find a real job. I was serving my military service for my country, and my girlfriend was making plans of her own. She wanted us to go for ski holidays as soon as I would be done. I was absolutely broke at the time, only had a few € my parents helped me sustain myself with while being in the army, and due to that, I also could not find a real job.

My first thought was “how am I going to be able to make some money without being able to leave my service?” that question lead only to the use of internet. I am saying this because you also may have a reason, or be in a similar situation for which you can’t get a steady job.

I remembered back in the day I was part of a fansubbing group (fansubs are translated and subtitled anime – Japanese animation – by people who do it for free) and we would provide those episodes through our website via Bittorent. Naturally, this is an item that has a big deal of audience so the traffic on our website was off the charts.

The website was being hosted by a friend for free, but eventually due to traffic we had to move on. The problem was that none of us wanted to put money from our own pocket since we were already providing our audience with our efforts and countless hours on working to release our next episodes. We also didn’t want to turn down to the usual paypal donations that usually occur for websites that run for free. It was then our own webmaster tipped us about using google’s adsense to have our website sort of self-sustained. We had no clue of what was coming.

Immediately then, I went to google’s adsense page, followed the procedure carefully, I must say google has done a great job explaining, and their marketing and advertising ideas are splendid. I was done only in a short few minutes, and after our website was approved, I got our java code installed, the adds worked great and google’s customizable format makes them blend in your content as if it were your own.

As any “make money online promise”, I didn’t expect much out of this, but I did expect it to give us a good 20-30 $ a month to keep our site going. To my surprise, 2 days later I was looking through the administrative pages google provides and I was surprised by the figures. 2 days and we had a 3 digit number due in. By the end of the first month, we reached a good 1.200.00 $. An amount far beyond what any of us had anticipated.

The later months to follow, things changed. Traffic on the website remained steady and increasing, the content was not changing tho, just a couple of links to new episodes were added every few days. Income slowly decreased to a steady 200 $ a month and remained at that.

I am now no longer in the group, I was back then, I don’t know what they are doing nowadays about that, but I do plan on using any possible means to get a bit of extra money on the side. Might not be much, but it is money google gives you the chance to have a share from!