How I Made Money Online
I recently stumbled across an article that was made by @acesontop. The title of the article is: "When and How Did You Earn Your First Money?", and you might have seen either that one or other ones due to that article. An interesting read and a fun idea to share our stories. However, as I honestly can't even remember how old I was, or what I did when I earned the first money in my life, I decided to do something slightly different with this. I will talk about when I made money online for the first time.
I can't tell you exactly the date I made my first bucks online, but I can tell you that it's well-more than a decade ago. A rough guesstimation would be approximately 15 years ago. I can't remember the exact amount I made either, but that doesn't really matter for this story..
You might have heard that I have been working as a freelancer in the past. You might have heard that I was working full time with brand building due to the success I had as a freelancer on sites like Fiverr and SEOClerks. I have talked about that multiple times in the past.
However, I bet that you haven't heard how I made money online for the first time and I am sure that you could never guess regardless of how many times you tried..
I could easily make this into a very, very long story, but I'll try to keep it short and simple:
- Counter Strike 1.6.
That is the short answer, but the money I earned wasn't in form of a salary or tournament prizes. For those of you who doesn't know what Counter Strike is, it is a series of multiplayer first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror while counter-terrorists try to prevent it. So, it's simply put a computer game.
That being said, I played CS on a "semi-professional" level and even though I somewhat travelled a couple of times to compete in tournaments, we (me and my team) never won any money.
I would say that we where above average though, a rather decent team that could've made it to the "big leagues" if we had continued to focus on it.. The scene wasn't anything like it is today though, so we had literally zero chances of becoming "stars".
Something cool happened though, which is the whole point of this article. I made money due to CS. You see, in CS there are two teams that compete. You play 5 versus 5. I was the in-game leader during all the years we played, which is basically the person who controls the other players. I told everyone what we were about to do and they did what I told them to. Even though it's "just a computer game", a form of trust and understanding forms when you play with the same people countless of hours per day, so they trusted me. They believed in me as a leader and in us as a team.
We worked hard and we had different setups for various situations. We had strategies and different "takes", which basically is a system for how to play and when to do it and I decided when. This went on for several years. We were rather successful and we actually beat a mix-team where the top players in the world played together.
Due to that success though, and because other teams realized how strong we were as a team and how good we managed to play in various situations, an IGL (in-game leader) from another team sent me a message. He was interested in buying some of our tactics, and he contacted me as a I was both the in-game leader and the "spokesperson" for our team. I had never had a thought of selling our strategies, but this person and I made a deal. I gave him some of our "tips and secrets" and he paid me for it.
That was the first time I made money online, and that was basically what paved the entire way for my upcoming freelancing days afterwards.. My passion for the computer game I played together with my friends for several hours per day suddenly became worth something in terms of money..
I sold my creations online to a complete stranger who happened to like the things I did. That was monetized content in the purest form..