Everyone knows the tradition, frame your first dollar. A lot of times you see them hanging in local restaurants etc. In the online world there is no such thing since we get paid via check or direct deposit, but it is funny to think about making that first little bit of money online. I’ve only really started making a living online a few years ago, before that it was little by little. So let’s take a stroll down memory lane and see the different ways I made money online before making money online was so popular.

I think the first bit of money I made online was with AllAdvantage. If you don’t know what AllAdvantage was it was a program that you installed on your computer and it would display ads on the bottom of your screen while your surfed the internet. It was a lot like AGLOCO, but you actually got paid. Since I was on the computer most of the time when I was in highschool it was easy money to me. I remember getting my first check for $25, I was really surprised that I got paid for just surfing the web. AllAdvantage did not last long, only from 1999 – 2001.

After AllAdvantage I started selling computers on Ebay, back then computers were expensive and not that many people knew how to build them, or knew about Newegg. I was able to buy parts cheap on Newegg and build a system and put it on Ebay for $200-$300 more than what I paid and was able to turn a profit. It was not the easiest thing to do, but it gave me extra cash. Now you can buy computers so cheap it is not even worth trying to build custom PC’s. I also sold custom computers to people around the neighborhood.

ThinkComputers actually did make some money before I really took it seriously. KDS actually bought an ad on the site for $1000 for one month! That is actually a lot, even by today’s standards. Back then we were one of a handful of sites doing hardware reviews. Like I said I never took ThinkComputers seriously up until a few years ago. So what did I do with the $1000? I gave $500 to the guy that was helping me do reviews and I took the other $500 and bought a new digital camera, which actually really helped out ThinkComputers a lot.

My last year of high school and my first few years of college I did not have a whole lot of time on my hands between working a regular job and going to school. So it was not like I could spend a lot of time online trying to make money. I did however find a survey program that would pay $5 per survey, which isn’t a lot, but if you do a few a week it is easy extra cash. One thing that was really cool about this survey program is that they would actually send you products and then you would take the survey on them. A lot of it was food too, so I would get like “no name” chips and pop and get to try them out etc.

While in college John Chow told me about Google Adsense and that lead me to learning about making money online the easier way. So now I spend most of my time working on ThinkComputers and this blog.