Hi my name is Jared from GoldPavedRoad.com
The purpose of this website is to monitor my progress in my goal of becoming financially independent through passive income online. I began my journey 8 years ago when I was 13 which is when I first began making websites. At first it was more of a hobby, making blogs for my friends and I to keep our friends updated on our every day lives, designing websites for local bands from my highschool and other small jobs. Before long I began to realize the potential of making money designing websites and I began shifting my focus towards monetizing my websites.
The next few years were pretty discouraging from me. I had a basic knowledge of HTML and search engines, but I was unable to efficiently promote any of my websites. I purchased a webhosting reseller account on eBay and tried to launch a small webhosting service. Before long I had a client list of about 20, however, the price I had to offer the hosting packages at were so small that I was barely covering my overhead each month.
After 6 months of running the webhosting services, I realized that the market was far too over saturated already and I decided to cut my losses. Feeling even more discouraged than ever I decided that advertising would be my next endeavor. I promptly signed up for a Google AdSense account and began placing my ad codes on any website that I was running at the time.
I was just finishing up with highschool and thinking about what my next step would be. I had quit my job working at a grocery store and I didn’t want to have to work for anyone else. During the short time I attended a local community college, my father and I devised an online distribution company business model. We sunk a considerable amount of money into designing and advertising our distribution website in hopes that it could be my escape from a “normal” job.
We were hopeful at first as we already had a small list of leads for our products and we had made a few small sales that covered our initial startup costs. One day we received a pretty large order and were very excited thinking that our business was about to take off. After we sent in the order to our distributors and received the merchandise, we came to the realization that the order had been fraudulent and the credit card the customer supplied us with was not valid. We were now stuck with the goods that they had ordered and nobody to sell them to. Again, we decided that it was time to cut our losses. We returned the goods to our distributor and were refunded minus the restocking fee.
Because we decided to put an end to our distribution site, I was forced to get a full-time job at a restaurant where I worked for the next 3 years. After 3 years of serving, I was sure that I needed to get back into the online business again somehow. I enrolled at a technical college where I was taking some basic computer classes in preparation for my career.
My father had been running a blog online about financial investment, stock markets and the personal financial world for a while so I decided a good way to get back into making money online would be to redesign his website and help him monetize it.
Since March of 2009 I have been helping him with his website and have since started many more of my own in hopes to find a good niche that we can monetize. So far we have only seen some very minor profits, and recently took quite a blow when Google decided to suspend our AdSense account, which had $400.00 in it at the time, for no reason.
I remain hopeful that one of these days I will find what works for me and be able to cash in on it. This website will serve as a journal to document my progress and share my knowledge and resources with the world as I become financially independent.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy your stay!
-Jared
Gold Paved Road