I started trying to make money online in 2004. Colum, my business partner and co-worker, and I decided to launch a business called HalOtis. The premise was to compete in the NASA Centennial Challenges to build a lunar rover. We went through several design iterations, and did a mockup of the design before we realized that we just didn’t have the necessary tools and money to get any further with it. However, this initial initiative was what launched halotis.com. Colum and I decided to try our hand at making money to fund the space technology project by starting a blog.

The Brig.org was launched in 2005. It was a site where the two of us as well as a bunch of friends could write posts about the latest technology and space news. Apart from a few posts that managed to briefly make it to the front page of digg.com the site was a dud. Interest slowly waned as a result of near zero growth and the sheer amount of work required to keep a blog current. In the year that the site was live it made a grand total of $40 from Google Adsense. When the domain expired last year we decided not to renew.

By 2006 things were not looking too good for HalOtis. Colum was back at school full time, and I was working full-time in a different city on the opposite coast.

My employment was a contract position which required me to register a business; finally a legitimate reason to really register HalOtis as a business. That contract position ended and the HalOtis business was not getting used for a while. I didn’t want to let it die like that so I decided to re-launch halotis.com over Christmas of 2006.

I had come to enjoy working with Wordpress and decided to copy over all of the content from the defunct thebrig.org site to get it jump started. The new site would be devoted to any ventures that HalOtis decided to do in the future. The premise was to explore different was to make money passively so that Colum and I could support our full-time work on space technology.

Over the course of 2007, I read many books about ways to make money. Most of them were more inspirational than anything I could easily take to the bank.

Things changed after picking up a copy of Tim Ferriss’ 4 hour workweek. The book opened my eyes to a new way of doing business. It changed my perspective about things like outsourcing, and introduced me to the idea of fulfillment services and various other business services I had no idea even existed. Lastly Tim gave me an idea to quickly and easily test a business online (This later proved to be inadequate).

The first market test for a business idea was launching the site QuantitativeStockSecrets.com with no product. The idea was to see how many people would click on the buy link to purchase product at which point they’d be greeted with a message saying that the product was still in development.

After that failed miserably to show any potential of making money I decided to discipline myself to test a new business idea every 5 weeks. I’d funnel $100/week from my income into the businesses with a focus on trying to learn new things

In July I heard about this program being put off by Ed Dale and Dan Raine called the 30 Day Challenge. The idea behind it was to make your first $10 online. They’d teach the basics of how to do research to find a niche worth investigating, then drive traffic, convert it to sales and make money.

I’d heard of Dan Raine before. He had taken a bet that he could turn $150 into $15000 in one month. The story fascinated me. The fact that he only missed the $15000 goal by a couple hundred dollars blew my mind.

In August of 2007 I did the 30 Day Challenge. By the end of the month I hadn’t made any money, but my perspective about how to make passive income online was dramatically different.

At the end of September I decided to re-launch QuantitativeStockSecrets.com this time with everything that I’d learned from the 30 Day Challenge. A couple of days later and the site landed its first sale, then a few more came in.

That’s where HalOtis is today; working on making passive income through various other niche business ideas.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.