I used to look for ways to make money online. Blogs, websites selling stuff, designing websites, writing books, multi-level marketing...I've seen it all. Everyone wants to get rich quick. But that's hard to do (I hear luck is a big part of making that happen). The secret to a lot of online riches is residual income. That's money that keeps coming in after you've already done the work. Building a website and getting advertising revenue is one simplified method. Writing a song and getting royalties every time it is played on the radio or used in a commercial is a better example.
But I always had trouble making money online and effortlessly. Truth is, it's impossible to do effortlessly. My epiphany came when someone (I don't remember where, but if you're reading this...THANKS!) said to stop trying to make $1,000 a month or whatever amount you are trying to get to. Their advice was to just figure out a way to make a dollar. Then try to make a dollar a day and when you are able to make a dollar a day, just work on increasing it by multiplying whatever it is that you are doing. I tried that with a few blogs and websites selling stuff, but it was always inconsistent. I might make a dollar a day for one month and then the next month make $3.40. That was about 10 cents a day! Not enough to live on, much less plan for retirement.
All this time I was getting frustrated. I was working hard. I was trying new ideas left and right. I've probably created a little less than 100 websites trying to make money (this does not include websites I was paid money to make for clients). I wrote my own code and learned ASP.net to keep startup costs down. I probably blew through 6 or 7 years of my life trying to do this, sometimes on the side while holding a high-level position somewhere making money for someone else in record numbers (true story). I could increase revenue by millions of dollars working for someone else, but I couldn't make a dollar a day for myself unless I was working a J-O-B. I hated that.
So I gave up.
Then, a couple years later, I finally figured it out. I found a way to EFFORTLESSLY make a dollar a day. See, I had read about this new company called Motif Investing that allowed you to buy groups of stocks for one commission. I opened an account and invested a little less than a thousand dollars buying a few Motifs. Nothing really took off like a rocket or anything, but I would notice how every day I would log in (I can't help myself) and see how some stocks in my Motifs were up and some were down. Then the next day other stocks would be up, and some different ones would be down. I don't think I ever saw a day where ALL of the stocks closed the day up.
But I realized that, over time, there were all my dollars-a-day sitting in my investment account. That even though the entire lot of stocks in the Motif never went up all at once, the value of my account was going up. I was a champion of Motif after that. See, I rarely had so many stocks at one time because I never had that much money to invest at one time. There is no way I could buy shares of 20 different big-name companies in any meaningful amount in any short time frame. The commissions would kill me. I'd have to pay about $200 in commissions to buy just one share of each of 20 stocks. And some of these stocks were a few hundred dollars a piece. But Motif allowed me to buy partial shares. So my money was split up into 20 pieces, I was able to buy a share in all of the companies I wanted, and my commission was only $9.99 for each time I bought an entire Motif. That was awesome to me.
When I found Robinhood, that was even better, because there were no commissions. While I could not buy partial shares, I didn't have to worry about spending $10 every time I wanted to buy some stock and only had to worry about how many shares I could buy. This was also awesome to me.
Over the next few years, I was able to obliterate my dollar-a-day curse and turn it into dollars a day, every day. Yes, some stocks were down every day, but over time everything is up because I am buying good companies when they are being offered at a good price. I have honed my skills enough to where it doesn't take much effort for me to find my next investment. I finally found the effortless part I was looking for. The good part for those of you reading this who don't have the time to research stocks, don't know how, or don't even want to...you have options. In our free Retire Earlier Primer, we tell you the only stock ticker you need to buy over the course of your "working" years and never sell it until you near retirement. That's about as simple as you can get! Or if you want to get a little more action (and possible higher returns) you can sign up for our $1 per year stock alert service and make the exact same trades as we are making. That takes the guesswork out of stock research for you.
In conclusion, STOP looking for get rich schemes on the internet. You just learned everything you need to know about building residual income, effortlessly, for life! The stock market has been the best gig in town for over a century and you, too, can harness it's power to grow your investments and retire earlier and wealthier. What are you waiting for?
How many dollars a day are you making in the stock market right now? Have you had any successes/failures making money online? Let us know in the comments below!