Then one day a few months ago, I stumbled upon a quadriplegic gamer doing a donation drive. He was doing a live webcast of himself playing games, and during this cast he would play commercials. By combining the money from the commercials and direct donations, he hoped to get himself an expensive, specially-made chair cushion to help him play video games more comfortably. This guy was overcoming challenges much greater than mine to make money off of playing games. I could do that, I thought. Why wasn’t I doing that?

I began researching. Live streaming and making videos are big business, and while expensive equipment helps, it isn’t a necessity. I started streaming with a $4 mic and a webcam out of the old computer parts bin. I cleaned up my youtube channel, removing everything that could possibly get me a copyright violation strike. I set a schedule and vowed to get a better webcam and mic. Using money I had made online, I ordered a CAD U1 USB Dynamic Recording Microphone and Logitech HD Webcam C310. Then I unveiled s0nicfreak.tv.

With very little content and just a week’s time, s0nicfreak.tv has become my highest earning site. It’s earning me more than sites that I have been building up for years. And all I’m doing is what I love to do – playing video games. I plan to focus a lot more on playing games, and turn what I love into more of a career than just a hobby – as I did (and will continue to do) with writing and using the internet. So stay tuned – there’s a lot of great stuff coming. I’m off to work out the kinks in using this new mic and webcam.

I know that. And I know what I’ve been doing wrong. One of the things I’ve been doing wrong I just remedied. I watched as sites all around me changed to nice magazine-esque themes with “sliders” and pictures and etc. while I did nothing. I stuck to the “simple and clean” mantra I was taught in the past, when I was learning to be a professional blogger. I ignored something else I had learned, and that is “evolve or die.” People like magazine-esque themes with “sliders” and pictures and etc.. Heck, I like them. So, I have changed the theme here at workathomenerd.com. I think it looks better, and I know it works better. The old theme didn’t work exactly right, and I knew that yet did nothing about it – another thing I was doing wrong.

Another thing is the way I have been writing. It would appear that I haven’t been writing very much at all. I have no new book even though over a year has passed since I completed my last released book. My blogs look like ghost towns. But I have been writing – just in the wrong ways. If you’re here reading this, your mind is probably open to learning something new and/or hearing out someone else’s opinion. That’s the right kind of people to write to. But rather than writing to such people and reading blogs of people that want to do the same, I’ve been posting on reddit. I’ve gone into conversations with good intentions – state my opinion and get a better grasp of the reasoning behind the opinions of others – but eventually realized the other person had no interest in this. I wrongly assumed that most people know there is no right and wrong when it comes to opinions, that people know they are not able to change my opinions and morals just as I am able to change theirs. In short, I’ve been wasting my time and writing skills and came away with nothing of value to show for it.

I hope to right that wrong as well. So stay tuned to all of my sites.

If you have a site, take part in the SOPA blackout tomorrow (January 18th). There’s even an easy WordPress plugin to make it simple!

If you want to make money blogging, here’s some tips.

1. Don’t put up some crap in the user’s way that they have to close to read what you blogged. All it does is make users so frustrated that they leave your blog entirely.

2. Use proper grammar and punctuation in blog posts. That first sentence is nearly indecipherable. Also, use the proper words. “Many people use their birth name,” not “there.” If your English is not good enough to do this, hire someone to edit your writing. If you aren’t making enough to pay someone to edit, your advice probably isn’t all that great.

3. Don’t spam reddit. It isn’t going to make you money. If anything, purchase a reddit ad. Especially if your ads pay per sale rather than per view, as most of your ads seem to do (if I’m wrong on that, please correct me). You may get a few people looking to see how stupid your link is, but reddit users are generally too smart to buy that crap.

4. Connect the things you’re trying to sell to the blog posts. You say you know the secrets, but you need to tell people that they can learn the secrets too by buying what you’re trying to sell. (Don’t say it just like that, of course.)

Swagbucks has been around for years, and has been verified to be legit by many of my online associates – but I was hesitant to use it. You only get a few cents for every task, so is it really worth it? But recently my already crappy computer started to go even further downhill and I realized that I need a new computer very soon, or I won’t be able to make any money online. So I started to do everything I could to earn money. Swagbucks was one of those things, and very quickly I won a $25 Amazon gift card in a Swagstakes (a giveaway where you pay Swagbucks as an entry fee). I took that as a sign that I should stick with it.

As a die-hard Google fan, I was hesitant to set Swagbucks as my main search engine. However, I realized that Swagbucks search is powered by Google, and decided I might as well give it a shot. For the first few days I was required to enter a captcha every time I won swagbucks – to prove I wasn’t using a bot or something – but after that the captchas went away, and now I rarely notice I’m using Swagbucks anymore.

My favorite part about this is that I can combine it with other jobs. If I have a job on Amazon Mturk (or anywhere else) that requires searching the web, I use Swagbucks to do it, so that I’m not only getting the job done, I’m earning Swagbucks as well.

I have been using Swagbucks for about 2 weeks and I have already gotten $35 worth of Amazon gift cards from them with very little effort. They will match everything a referral earns up to 1,000 Swagbucks, so I expect (/hope) that I will start to average even higher payments soon. Even if I don’t, any money for minimal effort is great, right? Click here or on the image below to check out Swagbucks.

I have been making a few bucks through Amazon, through the affiliate program, selling books I wrote, and the “Mechanical Turk” thing. The affiliate program is pretty good, and has a high turn over rate if you manage to make relevant referrals around the net. I managed to make $70 one week when there was a Kindle sale and I told interested people.

My books are selling well, and I really need to get some more written (I have hundreds of books in my head, and just need to get them out). Whenever a website asks, I’m listing my occupation as “writer” now. With the blogging, freelance article writing, and the ebook writing I do, I think that’s what I can call myself.

The Mechanical Turk thing, however, sucks. Even if you do the work exactly as they say they want it, the person offering the work chooses to pay you or not. So you could do an hour of work expecting to be paid $12, which is pretty good for an hour of work, but only get $2, which is pretty crappy. You could even get $0. And you have no way to know if they actually use the work you did despite not paying. Also, the majority of jobs on there pay only pennies and aren’t worth the time it takes to read the job description. I think Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was a good idea with horrible execution.

Amazon has also been helping me save money. They already have great prices on many things that I buy regularly, and their new Subscribe and Save option allows me to save even more. So I’m getting things like toiletpaper, coffee, etc. etc. with great savings, and without having to worry about going to the store or even remembering to order online!

Also, Amazon prime is saving me tons of money on shipping with the things that aren’t Subscribe And Save. And it’s giving me tons of free streaming tv shows and movies, which is great since a few months ago we dropped cable and got a Roku. We now have a lot more to watch at a fraction of the price.

There’s also the App Store for Android, which offers a different paid app for free every day, and the Cloud Drive, which offers 5GB of space for free, and allows you to store any MP3s bought from Amazon without counting toward that 5GB (the Cloud Drive saves me money because it means that I no longer have to buy SD cards for my phone!).

Yeah, I’m in love with Amazon now.

When I did sit down and try to get to work, there were problems and I realized my server needed a reboot. So I backed up everything and rebooted, only to find that somehow things had all been rolled back to a months old backup. Supposedly I somehow did a rollback before I did the backup – which meant the backup was of the old backup – but I have no idea how that happened. I stupidly did not have a backup anywhere else (always make offsite backups!), and thought I may be screwed… but fortunately HostHead had an offsite backup and they fixed things. This took 24 hours, though, and by the time it was done my sudden urge to update my sites was gone.

So basically this is a post to say I don’t really feel like posting. I’m hoping that seeing a post about the things I need to do will push me into doing them. I need to post on all my sites. I need to put the final touches on the ebook I wrote way back in November for NaNoWriMo and put it on the Kindle and Nook. Get to it, me!

The first is Akismet, a plugin that usually automatically comes with WordPress. When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service, which will determine if it is spam or not. The Akismet web service is constantly being trained by everyone telling it about spam it has missed or non-spam that it gave a false positive, so it works extremely well.

All you have to do is activate Akismet (it’s probably already in your plugins, and if not, you can download it here) and then get an API key, which is free if you’re making under $500 a year (if you make more than that, it’s just $5 a month). You can use the same API key for multiple blogs, so you’ll only need one.

So now that you’ve blocked spammers from commenting, it’s time to block them from your site completely so that they aren’t using extra sever power. The Block Top Spammers plugin generates a list of the IPs from things Askimet (and you) marks as spam. Then all you have to do is edit your .htaccess and add “deny from [spam ip]” (so if the spammer’s ip is 192.168.1.1 you would put: deny from 192.168.1.1), and voala, those spammers are gone.

These two simple plugins will save you time, bandwidth, and server load. I feel stupid for never using them before!

They also have a program where they pay you for receiving snail mail, but from what I hear, aside from the initial validation postcard, they don’t really send anything out. That really doesn’t matter though, since there are so many online ways to earn. It is completely free to join, so the only thing you have to lose is a little time.

Click here to join or click here to join and become my friend.