“The Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” — Mark Twain, in response to reading his own obituary.
I have gone through some significant transitions, not the least of which was a move to another state. I am now a resident of Oklahoma. For the first time in my life, I will have a driver’s license that doesn’t say “Texas” on it.
During that upheaval, I was hit with a massive distributed denial-of-service attack (actually, a distributed brute-force-login attempt, but the effect was the same), and I didn’t really have time to deal with it, so I just shut down the WordPress login completely. In my haste, I managed to lock myself out in the process. I discovered last week that I could not even get into my hosting account, and I was afraid that the site had been hacked. I ended up having to go to my webhosting service to get that fixed.
The site wasn’t actually hacked — I had just made some interesting mistakes in the process of locking it down. Fortunately, I was able to recover everything today (the site was still running ok, and even getting significant traffic).
I’m settling in at my new residence, and just now getting back to business as usual. Since my main sources of income don’t include this blog (yet — I have other sites that do make money), I had let it slide for a while. That’s about to change. I’m working on a course that will teach how to start up a website that actually makes money, without having to spend any money. Yes, it’s possible, but not trivially easy. It requires a significant amount of time and effort, and the results are limited.
As for not spending any money at all, I guess that’s not 100% true. First of all, you probably already have a computer and an internet connection, both of which cost some money. And my course will cost some money, too, although not as much as your computer or even your monthly internet access fee. I am even considering making the first few lessons free, but that decision hasn’t been set in stone just yet. My current outline is looking kind of long, with about 60 lessons total, covering pretty much everything I’ve learned in my journey to making money online.
I will also cover some very low-cost techniques that will greatly accelerate your progress once you have actually started to get some income.
Bear in mind that not everyone really wants to quit his/her day-job and be completely independent. I’m in that camp myself. Although my side-hustles currently do quite well (a couple of them took a hit because of the move to Oklahoma), I’m quite happy to be writing real-time software for a big company, and I will probably continue to hold down a “real” job for at least a couple more years (or until my side-hustles make at least twice my programming income). I like my job! It’s just that I like some other things, too.
There are a few things that I have to work out before I start selling the course, in addition to writing the course (and making the videos). Those things include getting a better mailing list service (I’m currently using MailChimp, which has a free version, but I’m finding that to be inadequate for email marketing), and working out the delivery mechanism for the course. Oh, and finding a much better place to host video than YouTube. YouTube is free, but free services come with limitations and strings which I am starting to consider to be unacceptable.
I estimate that I will be ready to deliver the first parts of the course in about a month. You will be able to tell when it’s ready by the appearance of a newsletter signup dialog on the site.
