I spent this morning drawing up a monthly budget to help me handle my finances better as well as visually show me what disposable income I have (incomes – expenses) so that I know what money I have to invest and so forth.
After drawing up a simple spreadsheet on Google Docs, I noticed how my expenses column had far more rows than the income column, which is usually the norm. For the average person, there will only be 1 row in the income column and that would be their salary – This makes a person heavily dependant on their job. Now, this isn’t exactly an amazing discovery that I made, but it’s interesting to really note what dependancies we have when it comes to surviving in this expensive world that we live in.
This got me thinking about revenue streams outside salary hours relative to the number of free hours we have. An average job runs from morning until around 17h00 or 18h00 in the evening, allowing a person to have say 6 hours in the evening (assuming we sleep for 8 hours a night) to tackle any important matters, shopping, social life, cooking and any other required activities. Let’s say that this leaves us with the ability to do perhaps 2 hours of extra work every evening, totalling an extra 40 hours of work per month. Give yourself an hourly value and calculate what that results in. If you valued yourself at R100.00/hour, that’s an extra R4,000.00 a month income – Not much is it? Would it be worth spending those 2 hours working for R4000.00 or could you value those 2 hours more valuable in another sense?
This leads me to thinking of something, which brings good monthly income, regardless of free time, such as online marketing. The world never sleeps and when we’re asleep in South Africa, everyone is awake in America, and these Americans could be potential customers/clients. Running a website allows your “shop” to be open 24/hours a day, instead of the 2 hours. This is 22 extra hours a day, which at your R100.00/hour value, would be an extra R2,200.00/day, which is R44,000.00 a month!
Running an online entity could therefore be the difference between R4,000.00 and R44,000.00 if my math serves correctly – That’s a massive difference, just by simply running something online. Now, naturally, it’s not that easy to make R100.00/hour online, something like Adsense will take years and years to get to that value, but if you had to turn a service of yours into a resellable commodity, it would be possible to acheive this.
Anyway, this is simply what was going through my mind earlier and felt I would share it as a thought piece.
I’d be interested to hear your views..
Interesting concept, the only thing is that is that this is only in theory – and you would also have to assume that the additional income (say online entity or whatever it may be) will actually bring in its exact worth.
ie. This is the best case scenario, and relies on many factors that you may not be able to influence.
I have actually also been thinking along these lines, but more along the odd job, ‘real world’ things to boost my budget. Yes, it’s not as easy as sticking a few ads on my blog, but it’s more reliable in the long run and has more instant gratification.
Absolutely, determining how to value each hour is difficult and can only really be done based on stats and previous earnings.
Doing odd jobs here and there may take up time, but it makes such a huge difference when the end of the month arrives!
I’ll say if you are in the IT world you can make much easier extra money after hours, but then also if you do it the whole day then you don’t want to do it in the evenings also.
About a online shop, it is easy money with little work, BUT to get clicks to your shop and then people to buy from you is not so easy. I had a online shop running for a year and a half with only 2 sales, with up to over 100 hits most of the days, ok you guys will say that is not much, but I was ranked in google for many keywords number one. I then started to sell on bid or buy (this is not a ad for them) for double the price and in 2 weeks had my first sale, and now getting steady sales in a month.
My experience is that people in South Africa don’t trust the online shops, that is why I try to find a way to get my web store verify so that people can trust me and buy. Any of you guys have ideas how to get buyers to your shop, without spending all your money on ads.
Agreed Jacques, sometimes it’s tiring working at a computer all day and then coming home and doing the same thing again. I guess the secret is to do one thing at work and then another at home, so that you’re changing things at least.
100 visits a day isn’t bad at all mate, don’t sell yourself short ever! I agree with you about South African people not trusting online shops, the market is still young here, it’s going to take time to convert them unfortunately.
It’s funny how life is, I would like to sit and work 24 hours on my PC, but I can’t, other people that can, don’t want to.
I read today on “My digital life” that the online trade actually benefit from the global markets fall. BoB also say there sales increase since the weakening of the rand. So I will say for a extra income start to sell on the side and teach yourself some SEO and work on that in the extra hours.
Thanks for the twitter on my online shop idea, Chris. Any person want to know how to do that I will help them for free.
Wanna get a waitering job for 1 day a week? I reckon it could be quite fun!
@jakes – Absolutely, I wrote an interesting article on TechLeader about online marketing benefiting from the economy decline.
No problem with the Twitter :)
@HoTsTePPa – No thanks mate, I worked as a waiter for several years, that time is over now :)
I think this can help many people with a extra income, and it is easy and with a very little outlay.
At http://www.bidabargain.com also a auction site, you can get a shopping cart for free, and they give you R1 000.00 to start off.
I can tell you a R1000.00 is a lot of money to get you started. What I also like their is that they want to build a online internet mall so if somebody come to a shop, they can also find your shop. It is by far not as busy as bid or buy, but give it time, I think with time they will expand very well with many more features than bid or buy.
That’s a pretty cool idea, thanks for sharing with Jacques! How’s business going?
Cant retire yet, but the exposure help. Beautiful camping site, and photo’s you post on the blog.
Absolutely, retiring is over rated anyway from what I’ve heard bud!
It was the perfect weekend away :)
Remember to take the following into consideration when calculating your true hourly “wage”:
* Travel time and costs to/from work.
* Cost of clothing/uniforms for work.
* Cost of nursery school/after school center if you have children.
* Daily lunches bought (take aways)
These are all expenses that must be deducted off your salary before diving it into the amount of hours you go to work, because say for instance you stayed at home, many of these expenses won’t be needed.
Thanks for the extra things to consider Charles, it’s really hard to remember each and every one, especially a few of the ones you’ve included here.
People normally don’t think about food during the working day, and the truth is that it’s actually a really big expense!
It’s incredible to come back and read articles like this :)