This is not true - Make Money Online OR how you get fooled

I have been trying to make money online for two years, and let me share where it brought me. I am writing this article because currently, I notice that many bloggers are trying to make their content popular, and they attract people by telling them how to earn money online. A lot of what they say is not true, and I am here to share my experience and tell you how difficult it is to start earning money online. Because I don’t want someone to quit a stable job just because they think it is very easy to earn online. But before we start, let me tell you briefly about myself.

I am a former institutional trader and treasurer. I worked for more than 12 years for different second-tier banks and brokerage companies. I specialize in equity valuations, portfolio management, and trading. I decided to quit my job a few years ago to start my own business. I create web-based and iOS applications that help investors undertake equity valuation, find great investment ideas, and construct an efficient investment portfolio. My business started as an educational project for stock traders, and now I manage different apps and course that help investors on their investment journey. I am trying to expand my business and increase brand awareness. That is why I lead a lot of financial blogs, have courses, and boost my online presence in general. I am sharing my story to prove that I am trying to make money online, and I will show you where my efforts brought me. And you will understand why I am so skeptical about someone’s article that advertises online money-making. So, let’s start with my story.

I am sharing my personal experience and will show you how difficult it is to start making money online. I will only be discussing the topics where I had my personal experience.

1. Online Courses. I had five different Russian language courses on Udemy devoted to equity valuation, portfolio management, and trading. The price of one course was around $50, but the Udemy has a discount policy and was selling my courses for $10 during discount weeks. When the course is sold through Udemy, they retain 80%, which means I was only getting around $2 for my 5-hour course. I had many students, but in 6 months, I managed to make about $200 on those five courses. If you divide 200 by 6, you get $33 per month. This is not enough. I was also paying to advertise those courses and was spending more to promote them, as I spent around $450. But I removed those courses, and I am not offering courses in the Russian language anymore. Because Russian people copied my courses, recorded my lectures from the screen, and started selling them on their websites, this is not honest and not ethical. That is why I removed Russian courses. I now have one Udemy course in English devoted to equity valuation, bond valuation, FX, portfolio management, and trading all-in-one. This is an 11-hour course, and I am currently selling it for $50. I have been offering this course for a year and a half, and I made $155, because Udemy sells it with a discount. If you divide 155 by 18 months, you get 8.6 dollars a month which is nothing. I did not spend my money on advertising this course and the traffic comes organically. So, 8,6 dollars is my monthly Udemy income.
2. Writing articles. I have many Storytelling accounts where I post different stock valuation, trading, investments, and portfolio management articles. I post 2-3 posts every week, participating in different groups. I will not be naming those groups or storytelling sites not to advertise them. But the problem is that first, my posts don’t generate much traffic, approximately 100-200 readers per month if I sum up all my storytelling sites and blogs. And the second problem is that I cannot monetize my articles. Because monetization is available only to some countries, I don’t live in those countries, so I don’t have access to monetization. I only can share my posts and grow my audience. But even this is a problem because not everybody is willing to subscribe to your groups. Many people just read, consume the information and leave. So, I generate 0 on social presence and on writing articles.
3. YouTube channel. I had a Russian channel with 600 subscribers and an English channel with 180 subscribers. I posted every day for a year and actively advertised my channel, and only 600 people subscribed. But I closed the Russian channel because Russian people tend to write many irrelevant comments and hate. The English channel was also very active; I posted once a week and spent 200 dollars each month advertising my channel. I only got 180 subscribers for six months. And then I closed the channel because it took all my time and effort. And I was not generating money from both of my YouTube channels. Because according to the YouTube monetization policy, I should have more than 1000 subscribers and 4 000 hours of video watch time. Based on my calculations, I would need a couple of years to get those subscribers, but the watch time is not calculated when people come from the ads. So this 4000 hours of watch time should be from your organic traffic. With my pace, I can achieve this in 3-to 4 years. This is too long, so I and I gave it up. I now only have one English YouTube channel devoted to my app, Diversset. I am not promoting it; I have two videos and only four subscribers. So, I generate 0 on YouTube.
4. Other Social platforms. I have Instagram, Twitter, Tok-tok. I post short 1-minute videos 3-4 times a week, but I get 3-4K people who watch my videos and posts, and 1-2 people subscribe monthly. As you can tell, I am not making any money from that. I only have those social platforms to show people my apps and increase their financial literacy. And I am not advertising my social media. My income here is 0 dollars.

    

5. Applications.
   In 8 months, I created two applications, one for iOS, a stock target price calculator, an investment ideas generator, and a web-based application, Diversset, a stock screener and portfolio builder. The first app (iOS) is free, but it has in-app purchase. So if an investor wants to get investment ideas, he can pay 5 dollars a monthly subscription. I have 150 app users, but no one has used this feature. So, I am not generating any money here. I run ads inside my app, but the traffic is so low that the ads are not showing in my app because the ads provider is stopping your ads when you have low traffic. But I was making some money on ads for the three months. And I made 12 dollars. If you divide 12 by 3, you get 4 dollars a month. This is my income. The second app, Diversset, is completely free. I also run ads. But I only made 1.5 dollars for the month. I just launched the app (a month ago), so I can only tell what my income was for the previous month. And something tells me that in the current month the profit would be almost the same. So for my apps, I am making 4.5 dollars a month on average.

This was my personal experience maybe yours would be different. I am not trying to destroy your dream; I am just showing you the true nature of making money online. If you want to start this journey you should clearly understand that this is a long-term game and you should keep doing it for many years to start earning good money. Or you can start spending money to advertise your social presence aggressively. Maybe you will get faster results. I am more focused on organic traffic, and I understand that this can take a long time. This is the reason why I keep developing and promoting my applications and writing an articles to increase my brands awareness. But I gave up many ideas on this long journey. Thank you for reading my post.