I am the O. C. Thrifter!

I'm tired. I'm tired of spending hours looking online for ways to make money. Do you ever feel that way? Are you searching for something that makes sense and that you feel confident will actually bring you some extra income? Then this blog is for you.

Let me share a little about my background so you will understand why I felt compelled to start this blog. I am a 'fifty something' female living in Orange County, California, one of the most expensive areas in the United States. I am not native to this country as I am an import from New Zealand. At time of writing I have been here for 13 and a half years and have lived in the same OC city with my American partner.

I have always dreamed of owning my own business and knew early on in my working life that there was very little future in helping my boss get rich while I was barely getting by. Being self-employed was my aim, but for many years I had no idea how I was going to achieve it. I have an administrative background so I knew that no matter what I took on as a business I would at least be able to keep records and be organized.

Back in 2010 I suddenly lost my job as Operations Manager at a small auto dealership. I had no backup plan and because I had no warning regarding the loss of my position I fumbled around for several months. Every day I would spend endless hours online looking for a way to make a living from home. I tried some cockamamie ways of making money, all with miserable outcomes.

Eventually the idea of writing for a living came to me. I have always enjoyed writing and feel that I do a pretty good job of it, so it seemed like the ideal solution. After realizing how difficult it was to establish myself as a good writer on the most notable freelance writing sites, I came across a blog written by Pot Pie Girl. She was offering a free eBook that outlined how to make money as an affiliate for Amazon.com and creating mini website pages on a site named Squidoo.

Finally I found something that actually got me excited. By now I had discovered that while I like writing I don't particularly enjoy writing for other people. As a consequence of this realization the writing career idea was abandoned. Squidoo provided me with a platform to write on my own terms (for the most part) and make money doing it. Over the next year I learned about SEO, tags, labeling images, html and writing for buyers.

Initially I wrote informative articles about New Zealand and hoarding / organization. I even wrote an amusing piece about my impressions as a Kiwi living in Orange County. I enjoyed having my ideas out there on the World Wide Web for everyone to read, but sadly those articles did not get much traffic. The people who did read my articles tended to be other writers on Squidoo. It wasn't until I saw other Squidoo writers making money from affiliate sales that the light bulb switched on. I immediately started writing like a crazy woman and had over 50 articles up in a very short time. Within 3 weeks of my making my first sales-oriented webpage I made an Amazon affiliate commission. I was hooked!

Over the next 2 years I continued to create more sales pages, selling everything from jewelry to snow blowers. In the first year I made a total of $1600.00 in income. While it wasn't a huge amount of money it was enough for me to realize that money really could be made online, and not only that, but that I personally could do it. I had read so many reports of people making great incomes but I needed to know that I could do it too.

In December of 2012 I made $3200.00 in affiliate commissions and believed that if I just scaled things up a bit more I could ramp my earnings up to $3000.00 every month! That would equate to about 80% of the income I was bringing in when working at the auto dealership. Unfortunately, in the New Year of 2013 Squidoo underwent some massive changes due to Google no longer looking favorably on them, and my income dropped to just a few hundred each month. It was not much longer and Squidoo's demise became imminent. Its sale to HubPages was announced and those that wanted to transfer their articles were advised to prepare. Those that didn't want to transfer articles were invited to take them elsewhere.

I didn't get the option to do either, as just a month before the big announcement Squidoo locked and deleted my account, citing my articles as being spammy and overly promotional. In fairness, given the changes Google had made to their algorithm, Squidoo was quite correct in their assessment. I had backed up all of the web pages before the account got cancelled so at least I had managed to save the content, so I could use the articles elsewhere if I chose.

When it became apparent that Squidoo was struggling to stay viable I started several websites based upon the most successful articles I had. This was another learning curve, learning Wordpress and how to make a website that would attract Google traffic. It was both exciting and terrifying at the same time! Creating websites that make money is time consuming and I didn't have time to indulge this newly found skill, so I turned to selling items on eBay and writing articles on demand on iwriter.com.

I have been successfully selling on eBay now for about 18 months, and I have to say that for the most part I love it! Unlike affiliate marketing (which I still do a little bit of) the money is in my account very soon after a buyer purchases one of my items. I consistently make around $500.00 a month, and while some people would be glad to have that extra income, my partner has recently developed a serious health problem and has been unable to work the hours he used to.

Once again I have turned to the Internet in search of ideas for additional income streams that would allow me to make enough to cover the income my partner is no longer able to produce. For the past month I have spent considerable time in between listing and shipping eBay items, researching, looking, reading, analyzing so many money making ideas.

And so here I am today starting this blog.

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#makingmoneyonline #Squidoo #freelancewriting #eBay