Hello there! I am Skye Fox.

This is my first post ever. I sat for a while and thought about what I should do my first post about.... I understand that the idea behind Steemit is kind of like "If you have good, valuable, original content, people should engage and therefore you make money from your valuable information." ... although I have noticed many people getting up votes with just a few hot girl pics and not so much valuable info.... Lol, I decided to go the valuable information route instead!

So I thought that I would share with you how I freed my self from the chains of employment and became self employed in early 2015! I hope that someone finds value in this, and I really honestly hope it helps someone else make that FIRST DOLLAR that sets off an online money making addiction, leading to a free, self driven lifestyle. To me this information is invaluable, because it is a big part of how I make a living.

A few things about myself first. I am 27, living in the midwest USA. I have one 9 year old child that I have full time with the other parent absent for the last 4 years due to opiate addiction and bad priorities. I went to a 2 year college locally. I was not really able to attend a University because of having a child, I had an obligation to stay relatively close to the other parent since the child was 50/50. I received my associate's degree in computer science and I went out into the job market world.

At 20 years old, I was feeling like I really didn't know what I wanted to do for work. I knew what I had a degree in, but I really didn't want to be the "IT Person" that fixed all the computers for everyone else. Not to mention, after going into the job market I found that no one wanted to pay me more than 12-13$ an hour, even with my degree, because I didn't have any experience! Factory work pays at least 25% more than that even around here, so that was kind of a slap in the face to me. Basically for the next 5 years I tried out a few jobs and I just kept quitting for one reason....

I DIDN'T FEEL LIKE I WAS SERVING A PURPOSE ON THIS PLANET!!

No seriously.... it just got to a point where I would kind of look around and be like ... "what am I doing here? What is the point of all this?"

This feeling came to me after 1 full year of working 50+ hour weeks staring down a microscope soldering circuit boards for a company that had contracts with the US military. My wages weren't high enough to ever become "rich" myself... Sure, I could maybe save a little bit of money into a 401k and live a life of mediocre means, but at what cost? My eyes were already getting worse from the microscope and our health insurance was horrible and we were forced to take it since it was deemed "affordable" according to whoever made the rules for Obamacare....

This dissent lead to me coming home every night and trying to find a way on the internet to get me out of the situation of having to make someone else rich while I make a steady, rather low, income. This task was made nearly impossible since I was working at 4:30 am and not getting much sleep. I had a family at home that needed my attention so it wasn't right to sit on the computer chasing something that seemed unreachable at the time. And then the fact that the great majority of "make money online" stuff is usually just click bait trying to get you to sign up for something so THEY MAKE MONEY ONLINE and not you...

Sooooooooo!

I am going to tell you what helped me make my first 100$ online, and what eventually lead to me quitting my job and becoming 100% self employed, with passive income! At the time that I quit my job, I had only made 300$ in one month on the internet. I had been researching online for over 18 months at this point trying to just figure out a way! $300 isn't very much, but I knew that if I could make $300 online while working 50+ hour weeks I could probably make a lot more if I had 40 hours a week to sit there chasing my dream of being self employed.

The platform that freed me from my job might shock you.... the platform is actually Pinterest! And right now it is a gold mine for internet traffic and making money online. This guide isn't solely just for Pinterest. The concepts that are learned here, can be applied to nearly any social media or blogging platform. These concepts might even work at Steemit.com if applied properly :p

Step 1: Find yourself a niche

My suggestion to find a good niche is to think about something that you are passionate about or something that you could at least enjoy working with daily. Once you have an idea then you go to google and Youtube and you read and watch many guides on "how to find a low competition niche" or "how to find the perfect niche." I suggest you go about it this way because things in internet marketing are constantly changing and there is not one comprehensive guide on exactly how to do things perfectly. People have different information and viewpoints along with different results. Pay most attention to the things you hear repeated often.

I'll give you a small example. "Food" isn't a specific niche, but "spicy beef recipes" is a lot more direct or even "low cost easy spicy beef recipes". You have to think specifically rather than broadly, the more specific, the more laser targeted your audience will be. This helps you target down a specific audience which really helps your chances of engagement.

Step 2: Make a Pinterest profile.

Make a Pinterest profile. I suggest you start your account as a Business Account. This will give you Pinterest Analytics which is very important for analyzing your traffic and finding what out is most successful. Fill out your profile as completely as you can. Profile descriptions are not all that important unless your are building the profile around a very specific product or idea.

Step 3: Do a small amount of activity, then wait 24 hours

Get your profile started by making a few boards to pin to. Use the search function and find some content to pin to your new boards. Pin content that is getting a lot of engagement but also make sure you click through the pin to see the actual website. You will want to do a quick review of the website/article to make sure it's not just sort of spam or virus. If the content seems like it could be VALUABLE to the audience that you are targeting, then pin it to the appropriate board. I would suggest starting at least 3-4 boards and a few pins on each of them to get started. What you are going to be doing is basically putting together boards full of valuable information around your niche and then pinning your own valuable information among these boards. This way you build an audience, you build trust, you build value, and you get traffic to your website and you might even have a loyal customer/fan for life. After you build up your profile initially, let it sit for 24-48 hours. This gets you ready for the next phase, which is following! Following is very important but if you make a profile and start to follow people in the masses right away, you just might find yourself banned.

Step 4: Following And Continuing To Build Your Boards

Now that your account has sat for at least 24-48 hours you are ready to start following. Pinterest has a following limit of roughly 300 people an hour. I never push anything near this and I actually stay in the 300-750/DAY range. I believe this looks much more natural and less like a bot. If Pinterest thinks you are a bot, they will ban you. I've seen it.

Following is so important because something like 1 out of 9 people that you follow, will refollow you back because they receive a notification that you follow them. This will build up your followers. To find like minded people, which results in much higher engagement, we will search for pins that are related to the niche we selected.

Example: If you selected the niche "food", which you wouldn't do because it is so broad, you would type "food" in the pinterest search, and along the top you click the "people" button. This will give you a list of profiles with people that have that word somewhere in that profile. This way you already know they are interested in "food" and now you follow them and get a decent number of follow backs. You are building a targeted audience.

Step 5: Steadily build your account

This is basically what you will do for 1-2 weeks. Pin good content to your boards, add new boards, continue following 300-750 a day. If you do these steps you will undoubtedly start to get followers and repins. Again, the idea here is that you are putting content in front of like minded individuals. You are targeting a specific audience and you are using information they gave you to increase your chances of getting them to engage with your profile and pins. After the initial 2 weeks of building up your account, you can start unfollowing people to get your follower/following ratio closer to 1:1, this will take time. Be careful not to unfollow more than 150 in an hour. Many people use bots to do mass following and unfollowing, you don't want to look like a bot. Pinterest will give you a warning if you pass their limits for following/unfollowing.

Step 6: Promote your blog By Adding Pins

Ok so now that you have built up your initial profile and built up your initial followers, you will now start to add your own high quality content to your boards. For this you need images. Images are hard to get online without them having copyright. To find copyright free images I use CC Search and I change to filter to only photos without copyright. Another great option it to take your own photos. If you would like to use CC search, just Google it. Find the photo you would like to use and save it for later.

Choose your blogging platform. I currently use Google Blogger because it is free and easy, but many people like to use the Wordpress.com option as well. Either platform works, just watch a few youtube videos and find out with one you prefer to use. Or maybe you want to promote your STEEMIT blog post... what an idea! Whichever blogging platform you decide to use, make sure that you connect your blog with your Pinterest profile.

Now you will need to make content to promote. You will have to write your content, or you could choose to pay someone on Fiverr for articles. Personally, I just write my own articles and reviews. Many things don't even need much content. For example, if you were a healthy food blogger and you were doing a "homemade fat free yogurt recipe" you could have an image of the yogurt, below the image you would have a few paragraphs about your experience with the yogurt recipe and what you thought about it, and then below that you can share the recipe ingredients that you used. Now you have your first post, that offers valuable information which in this case is a healthy yogurt recipe. Be creative with your content. Remember, if it fits what your audience is looking for then they will probably enjoy it.

Now you will need to edit your photos. We're going to add text to them and make them look like other high quality pins that you have observed being successful. Try different kinds of texts on your pins and different layouts/fonts and see what works best in your market. To edit my photos and add text I use a website named Canva. It's free and great. Canva already has a pinterest image option so you should need to do much for resizing it, but if you do then use MS Paint and use the resize button across the top to resize your image to your desired size. Of course any image editing software that you prefer will work.

Now you have your first pin completed and you need to upload it and start getting traffic to your website! To upload your first pin, go to your board that is related to whatever content you just created. To continue with the example we will say that I am pinning this to the "healthy food" board. Click "add a pin" then "from the web" and paste your URL to your blog post that you created. When you enter the URL then Pinterest will automatically search for the photos and allow you to select to upload which photo from the post you want to pin. Your other option, which you are going to use more often, is the "upload from device" option. We use this option because we use Canva to edit our images and add text and what not, so we often upload our own image from our computer and then add our blog post URL as the destination. You can change the destination once you upload the image from your computer, make sure you change it to your blog post URL otherwise you won't get traffic.

Now you have your first high quality content post that is part of a board that has many related pins that offer great value. Are you starting to understand how this works? Basically you are finding an audience and putting content in front of them that they are highly likely to be interest in, resulting in high engagement which in turn results in a larger audience.... it's like snowballing and it's wonderful..

Now you just rinse and repeat and you be very patient! I mean very patient! I have seen pins take off in 24 hours, and I have seen them take off after 40 weeks. It all depends on the community and how they react to your post at that time. But I have seen a pin take off after 40 weeks and then generate passive income for 12 months straight resulting in over $800 in revenue. No, someone doesn't live off of $800 but this is not the only pin that I ever added either. It's consistently adding 1-3 of your own pins per day + repinning 10-30 other peoples pins that will help you build and earn money.

How does this help you earn money online?

With internet marketing traffic is a huge factor. You can have a ton of traffic but if you the audience doesn't care about whatever is on your website, then they will surely close the window or back out of it very quickly. Pinterest is a great way to get free traffic, as far as earning money online, there are many ways and I will quickly explain a few although I am sure if you read this far you might have an idea of how you want to make your money already.

The 2 ways I make most of my money is through affiliate marketing (selling other people's products for commission) and ads from Adsense.

Affiliate marketing is very broad since nearly every company wants someone to go out and sell their products. And many of these companies are willing to pay good commission if you bring in sales. A few sites that offer affiliate programs are Amazon, Ebay, Clickbank, and Comission Junction. Again, I suggest you watch some Youtube videos and figure out which one works best for you. There are thousands of programs out there and these are just a few that I am most familiar with. Some pay higher commissions and some have higher conversions. Test and find what works best for you.

The other great option for making money is by placing Adsense ads on your website. Adsense can be kind of tough to get accepted to. Adsense wants you to prove to them that you are getting visits to your website before they are willing to let you make money from their ads on your site. If you get at least 10 pins on loaded Pinterest that are getting engagement then you really shouldn't have a problem getting accepted. When Google sees that Pinterest is pointing to your blog post they essentially gain trust for your blog. If for some reason you get denied from Google Adsense, then continue to build up your Pinterest profile and add content and get repins and you shouldn't have a problem being accepted the 2nd time you apply. Adsense pays you for every person that clicks an ad on your website. They can pay you any where from pennies to dollars for 1 click! It just depends what niche you are in and what advertisers are paying for those ads. Adsense is a great way to make passive income without needing sales! Get website traffic and you will get ad clicks!

My Conclusion And Shortlist For You

-Find Niche
-Build board around niche with good content
-Repin other peoples high quality content (Pin rough 5:1 ratio of Theirs:Yours Content)
-Follow people that repin pins related to niche
-Add your own niche related high quality content to boards
-Watch your interested audience engage in your high quality content and repin it!
-Rinse and repeat with different niches and ideas and continue to grow your existing boards!

A bonus tip: If you can understand now how this concept works, you can apply it to many other social media sites. Facebook you find like minded people in groups, on Twitter they you hashtags, on Tumblr it's tags.... Build a following, put good stuff in front of them, win.

Internet marketing and make money online is so vast that the possibilities are really endless. I just wanted to share this and I hope that this information helps someones "light bulb turn on." I hope this kick starts someones journey in the make money online entrepreneurial world. I'm not rich by any standards, but I make money 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with "paid vacations". The best part, and the biggest reason for me reaching for this lifestyle is the fact that I have family that I just felt I didn't get to spend enough time with. Life passes by so fast, years were just going by so fast with the majority of my day spent making someone else tons of money. Now I get to choose when I work and what I work on and it has opened my eyes to the possibilities. Now I see that IF YOU WANT SOMETHING YOU CAN HAVE IT. I remember just 2 years ago I thought "I could never make passive income through the internet, I am stuck working for the rest of my life." But I hated getting up at 3:30 a.m., I hated working 6 days a week and having no family life.... so I made it change and so can you. Consistency is key in life. JUST DO IT!!

Thank you for reading if you got this far and I hope it helps you!