Hello and welcome to the first article in a continuing series about trying to earn money online.

First a little background. My name is Benjamin Close, I have a good day job working as a Research Associate in the Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia and a secondary job working as an System Admin forSecureEhosting with hobbies working on FreeBSDand Freedesktop. I earn a middle income 5 figure salary, am married to my beautiful wife Carly. We have no kids at present though we think of our pets (2 Golden retrievers, 2 cats and 2 fish) as our kids, and are in the process of building our dream home on a 16 acre block of land at Gould Creek, South Australia.

So why try and make money online? Well there’s an old saying:

“A wealthy man is one who doesn’t have to work for their living”

Or in other words, one is only truely wealthy when they don’t have to go to work to pay the bills, put food on the table, etc. Many call this retirement. Though the truth is we would all love to be in the position to not have to work. At present we have a mortgage, bills etc. We are content/happy people. Though there is always the worry (especially with the current global recession happening) that things could be much more unfriendly.

Whilst we both have income protection, it’s limited to injury not loss of a job. Losing our current jobs would be very hard to deal with. With the aim to have children in the not too distant future, this is something that we are going to have to deal with regardless.

Hence the reason for trying to make money online is two fold:

  1. To supplicant the current income stream
  2. To eventually replace the current income stream

I don’t expect this path to be smooth sailing, certainly nothing like the get rich schemes. Though I do believe with some hard work it is very possible. So feel free to read this category of my blog and track my progress if you want as I’ll be writing about everything I learn along the way. I don’t intend to be an expert at this (my previous tinkerings with Google Adsense has earnt me $100 in about 2 years – more on this later) and there will lots learnt along the way...LINK