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Living Off Cloud: Making My Online Income Dream Come True

Welcome To LivingOffCloud.com! My name is Nadya, and I am the person behind the blog.

Living Off Cloud: My Online Income Dream

My dream is to earn an online income big enough to replace my regular income. What does online income mean? It means earning money from online ventures:  niche websites, eCommerce, online investment, etc. It is any way that allows to make money online. Basically, I want to live off the Internet, or Cloud, hence the name.

At the moment of writing this post (September 2015), I am only at the beginning of the journey, so the name is a bit premature. But at the same time it inspires me and it reminds of my final goal – to live a free life and to be a creator of my own wealth.

What This Blog Is About

In this blog, I will share my journey of building online businesses and earning money online.

Despite the believe that the Internet removes borders, there are still quite a few obstacles when it comes to the money side of online business. My online business will be mostly oriented towards the USA market… but I am not a US resident. I live in a nice northern country called Canada. This brings on all sorts of banking fees, which can be hefty and can eat up a certain portion of the revenue. And I try to do my best to minimize them. After all, all the businesses in the world try to reduce the expenses as much as possible, and my business is not an exception.

In this blog, I will capture all the difficult moments I am (already! hehe) facing during my journey to the online freedom. This information will be useful not only for Canadians who dream of making money online but also for everybody else who is looking for ways to make a spare buck coming in a form of (semi) passive income.

Making Money Online: My Goals

My main goal is pretty clear: Earn at least the minimal amount of money required for my lifestyle. Which is min $2500 / month (I mean US dollars). The earnings should come from my online activities: niche websites, online investments, and others. The deadline for starting earning at least $2500 a month is 18 months. If I achieve this goal, I plan to grow this to a life style business… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

How do I plan to achieve it? I want to start with niche websites. My short term goal is to achieve the following by the end of the year 2015: build two niche websites from scratch and spend about $20,000 on buying one or two established online businesses.

The websites built from scratch will require some time to start bringing in money (about 6 months or so). Meanwhile, the established businesses will be bringing in money from the day 1. I plan to invest their revenue into growing the built websites. I also hope to be able to grow the purchased websites in order to further increase their revenue. I do not know yet how exactly I will do it because it will depend on the exact businesses I acquire.

Here are my milestones and the projected online income for the next 18 months.

• End of 2015: Build 2 niche websites and spend at most $20,000 to buy 1 or 2 established websites; the established websites should bring a cumulative revenue of about $900 / month;
• April 2016: Start getting revenue from the built websites about $100 / month;
• August 2016: Grow the established websites to increase the revenue by 10%; grow the build websites by 300%; this gives the total of about $1600 / month;
• November 2016: Grow the built websites to the revenue of about $500 each;
• February 2017: Grow the established websites to bring in about $1200 and the built websites to bring in about $700 each; this gives the total revenue of about $2600 / month.

Everything that comes in 2016-2017  is just a projection. It will probably change after I start owing the actual websites. But…

It's much easier to get there if you know where it is you're going to and what's the path Click To Tweet

In this projection, I used an approach from the book “Goals!” by Brian Tracy. In his book, Brian suggests using “back-from-the-future” planning. Imagine what income you want to earn, let’s say, in 5 years. Then go back from the future by 1-year step at a time. What will it be in 4 years? 3 years? 2 years? In one year? This exercise helps to divide a big 5-year task into smaller achievable pieces and to build a road map which is easy to follow.

This is exactly what I have done here.

18 Month Deadline

Why are 18 months? Well, this period seems to be reasonably long to build more or less stable online income from niche websites. At least based on the knowledge I currently possess. Also, it is nicely aligned with some of my personal goals which I am not yet ready to share publicly 😉 But I do plan to write about them once the time comes.

Update: The graph was updated, because the old version showed incorrect numbers (it showed that by January 2016, I’d make $1000 instead of $900)