My New Approach to Making Money

Since I’m not making big bucks yet as an author and quirky media personality, I’ve decided to diversify my income-generating strategies.

My new approach to making money involves working on two separate fronts: “paid remote work” and “building a career as an author (and quirky media personality).”

I’ve already had some success on the first front. For the past two weeks, I’ve been working as a Search Engine Evaluator. This involves looking at a search query, viewing a set of results, and assessing the quality of those results. The exact details vary from task to task, but the ultimate goal of my work as a Search Engine Evaluator is to improve search engine results.

So far, Search Engine Evaluator has been a fascinating job. Actually doing the work sometimes get dull and repetitive, but the basic concept is fascinating. I have to discern the user’s intent, decide how well the results satisfy that intent, and evaluate the quality of the pages listed in the results. It’s already giving me new insight into how search engines work that may be helpful when considering updates to my own website and online presence. It’s also weird enough to keep me entertained. Just when it starts getting monotonous, I get a query and/or result that is strange and thought-provoking enough to keep the work interesting.

If you’re interested in becoming a paid Search Engine Evaluator too, let me know. I’ll be writing more about this soon. In the meantime, I can answer any questions you have. I like it enough so far to recommend it to other people, and I get a referral bonus if I refer you to the program.

On the author front, I’m working on several different but related income-generating strategies.

The first, of course, is writing. I’m continuing to write a novel chapter each month and working toward my long-standing goal of writing at least one chapter, short story, poem, and essay each month.

But as the past eight or so years have shown, simply writing and self-publishing doesn’t actually earn much money! Being a successful self-published author requires considerable marketing and distribution work — and I simply haven’t been doing that work. This fall, I’m taking my first real steps into that work with the help of StoryOrigin and many other resources.

My other main author-related income-generated strategy is affiliate links. I don’t want to go the full affiliate marketer route and create whole websites dedicated to selling random stuff to strangers via affiliate links. But I do want to use such links on my website to sell books, solar-powered website hosting, and anything else directly related to my writing career and interests. This will probably never be my main source of income, but every bit of supplemental income helps. With a bit more effort, I expect to make at least some significant amount of income this way each month.

My long-term goal is to make so much money as an author that I can drop all unrelated remote work entirely. In the meantime, my work as a Search Engine Evaluator provides reliable part-time income while I work on building my author-related income streams. It’s not much, but it’s more per hour than I earned working retail, which is helpful. And it gives me the freedom to work from home on my own schedule and still have some time each week to spend with my family, volunteer, and build my career as an author.

Stay tuned for more updates on all of the above, especially my work as an author! I’ll have big news on that front soon. To stay up to date on my latest releases, promotions, and superhero adventures, please subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In the meantime, I hope that you’re finding meaningful and gainful work too! We live in a strange and in many ways dystopian society where most of us have to work for other people in order to survive. And the work that actually pays the bills is often needlessly difficult and alienating. But if we work together, we can develop individual and collective strategies to survive, to thrive, and to transform our communities and society for the better.