Making A Living Online –

My entire life I have worked hard and done more than my share. In 1995, as I've mentioned before, I started my own ISP business. I have never worked so hard – and I've promised myself that I wouldn't do that again! It wasn't the hard work so much as the commitment of my time.

In 2001 I moved away from the office – I used to live within 10 minutes of the office and datacenter. My time was always being eaten up by the business. I moved to more than 30 minutes from the office and started to pull back – my son was now in charge… well he had the responsibility at least.

I slowly pulled away from the day to day business and started looking at some things that would give me some freedom. You see working for yourself doesn't always mean that you have freedom to do a lot of fun things!

I did take a lot of vacations during the early 2000's – mostly to Florida where I bought a timeshare. BTW – don't ever do this! If you have cash to pay for one of these things like I did then put the money into a condo or some other property. My opinion at this point of course.

In 2004 I dove head first into something that has always been an interest of mine – Real Estate! Yep – I figured out how to flip properties with a single back-to-back closing. I was encouraged to write an e-book and all I will say is that the rest is history!

I've written a number of e-books for the Real Estate niche – and between 2004 and 2007 I made a really good living on these books and marketing to this niche. I also went through a divorce at the same time and my energy was not focused at all from time to time. I did enjoy the automatic income and the easy life. 

You see, there are a lot of ways to make money online. The main point and something you need to really realize – you must set a course and never look back. My books, training, and other online services made me a good chunk of change – actually, I was enjoying online sales in excess of $100k per year just from the sales of my books. In 2008 that dropped to about $30k per year because of the economy and the Real Estate market. Most 'wannabes' just couldn't see how this could work.

Well I can tell you that I've flipped a number of properties for myself and I've overseen a bunch more. On average I would pocket about $19k per transaction. Not too bad considering I just did all of the leg work and thinking…

That's all gone now – I've pretty much pulled out of the Real Estate market niche. I still work on simple projects and maintain several web sites. Actually you can see the part of my collection of my books that still applies to the market today at http://ShortSaleBooks.com – the sales keep coming in, but I can't pay the bills with sales from this one niche.

Over the last couple of years I've worked to get my life back together and to get a better focus on what I was doing – I still earn a good living online, but I'm working to diversify. You see while Real Estate and the RE niche provided a good income for a number of years, it wasn't my real passion. And because the RE niche was a really hot niche at the time – a lot of 'buyers' – it made me a lot of money… I ignored my first rule – diversification.

So what is my real passion? The technology that runs the Internet of course!

I've been involved in technology my entire life – I love to see web sites come to life and I love to see them rise to the top of the search engines. This is where I live…

Now I'm finding a lot of little niches where I can apply what I know – it's working. And I'm going to share some of this with you here on this site so stay tuned.

Here's something interesting – did you know that the tattoo niche is hot but not many marketers are participating… hmmm… I see an opportunity. Let me do some research!

No I don't have any tattoos and I don't know anything about tattoos… although I have dated several women with tattoos…

To your continued success…

Michael Hobach