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I will be turning 50 in a couple of weeks, and I am still a wage slave. Yes I do enjoy my job, but I will be looking at
retirement in a few years, and would like to secure an income for my future. Today we cant count on our superannuation
like our parents did. Every time I get a statement from my industry superannuation the money I have contributed each
year is eaten up by the investment losses experienced because of the global downturn. This is all on a supposedly safe
investment plan for those of us who will be retiring in the not so distant future.

So retirement is my motivation, but it wasnt always so. I spent the last 28 years looking for ways to remain at home with
my children and earn an income. That is why I decided to write this site.

I left school on my 16th birthday and went into nursing. I have always wanted to be a nurse, so this was the only option in
my mind. I trained in the "old school" by getting my hands dirty and learning from the ground up. Later I studied my
degree, but this wasnt available when I started all those years ago.

When I married my thoughts turned to children, and I realised that we would need 2 incomes to pay the mortgage (in
those days about 16% interest). Nursing and shiftwork didnt seem to fit well with children, so I began seeking other
sources.

I signed up with Avon, Amway, Herbalife and worked to get those businesses off the ground while I still worked, and
before children appeared. Needless to say the glowing reports given in the recruitment lectures never seemed to work in
real life, so I ended up spending more on starter kits than I ever earned. I am not saying these businesses dont work for
some people - they must do or they would be out of business now, just that they didnt work for me.

Next I tried party plan. I did Tupperware, frozen food, lingerie, chocolate making, etc. I did make money from all of the
party plans I tried, and I did enjoy doing the parties, but when children came along the difficulties of running parties when
your hostesses wanted them, and looking after children while your husband worked shift work put an end to those.
I learned remedial massage, and did that in peoples homes for a while, but the referrals were slow, and advertising
brought responses that were for another type of massage (it probably would have paid well, but its not my cup of tea).

I learned about computers in the old days of DOS, and earned a descent living from fixing up other peoples mistakes, and
installing new systems for a computer shop. However, when windows hit the market I started to fall behind. The updates
came faster than i could master them, so eventually that line fell by the wayside.

I tried caring for other people's children in my own home. My ears and nerves only stood it for about a year before I gave
that up.

During all of the quiet times for income, I fell back on nursing, working the antisocial weekend night shift so my husband
could care for the children while I was at work.

I tried starting my own business a few times. The first one was running my own party plan company for chocolate - 30
kilos of chocolate melted in my boot on the way home from the wholesaler, and put me off that idea. So I tried
aromatherapy party plan instead. Again it was moderately successful, until the supplier let me down. By the time I had
negotiated with a new supplier, interest was waning. I tried teaching aromatherapy, but people were only interested for a
short while, then drifted off to their next hobby.

Next came my greatest failure - I should have known at the start it wouldnt work - but of course I jumped in chequebook
and all - my folly was WORM FARMING. I replied to an advertisement offering to set people up as worm farmers, and buy
back the stock (worms produced) on a contract. How hard could that be? Make some soil beds, get rid of all my compost
to hungry worms and collect the offspring to sell back through my guaranteed contact? Well let me tell you - spending
tens of thousands of dollars setting up (no worries there we have contracts which will return our investment in months),
then growing, harvesting and delivering worms is actually quite easy! Getting paid on your contracts is impossible. 3
months worth of deliveries, constituting about 6 months hard labour, resulted in a letter from a liquidation firm informing us
that our contracts were worth nothing now the company who signed those contracts was bankrupt. The loss of so much
invested money, time and effort meant we had to sell our house to pay for the materials we had used to set up and
maintain the farm.

So we moved south, rented a house and started again. Working as wage slaves while trying to care for our family.
Fortunately the children were old enough now to go to after school care, so between us we managed to struggle through.
We have never recovered financially from the worm farming adventure, but at least we have a roof over our heads
(rented), food on the table, and jobs.

Of course it didnt stop there! Ever the optimist I continued to look for other ways to supplement our income, and maybe
fund our retirement, so together with a friend I conjured up a new business - manufacturing and selling screaming pillows
for mums in labour. Well we thought it was a good idea at the time.
Then I rediscovered the internet and the unlimited ways to make money (read that as unlimited ways to spend money for
little or no return).

Then one day I came across a website that was a revelation - I will tell you about the website a bit later - for now let me
say that it told me about a way to make an income from providing information to others on the internet. It seemed too
good to be true - all I had to do was write a website with lots of useful content, drive traffic to the site, and hey presto all
these visitors would click on my google adense ads and I would earn money.

Let me tell you its NOT too good to be true. It is a genuine way to earn an income. However, its not as easy as it sounds.
First you have to be able to write quality content and lots of it - tick that one, I am a prolific writer. Then you have to use
your writing skills to make a content filled website on a topic that people want to read, and hopefully click on some of your
paying links - this is a hard step. You need to find the right topic, assess the market, write all that content and hope that
those who come to your site will click those links.

As a side note, my first content rich website was death and dying your way. Probably not a topic destined to make me a
lot of money, but it was something I was interested in writing about, and I am still proud of the content, even though the
original site is now defunct.

Next you have to list your content filled website with search engines - ok a bit harder but if the content is there it happens.
Then you create an adsense account and start putting in context ads on your content pages - again its not easy, but its
not hard either as long as you have the content. Last but not least you have to drive traffic to your website - now this is the
hard part if you dont have the right information - and that is where I come in.

I have spent over a year trying to find this information and testing out marketing methods. At first it frustrated me - it all
seemed too hard, and I admit I gave up for a long time, but then one day I logged on to my google account and found that
my long abandoned website (one about death and dying) had earned me the grand total of $3.89. Ok its not a lot I admit,
but I have done nothing with this website for over a year, and it is now not even hosted.

So there you have it - my life in a nutshell.

This website for me is a way to share what I have spent a long time and many dollars learning. It is the cornerstone and
begining of my personal information revolution. I hope that the information contained in my other pages will herald your
own little information revolution, and bring you some well-deserved income.