I am English and I live on the edge of the great city of London. I am an “eastender” and have lived in London all my life. You can see some pictures of my hometown, Enfield, here. I am married and have three grown-up children . I have a grandson who lives in New Zealand, and we have never met, so I am hoping to travel to the other side of the world before too much longer.

Until early 2004, I had a well-paid but unfulfilling job in a law firm. My greatest regret in life is that I remained in that job for far too long, but during my years as a single parent, earning enough to support my children took priority over any other considerations. When the children had grown up, I was stuck in a boring but safe rut.

When that job ended abruptly, did I feel sad after all those years? No – quite the contrary – I felt as if I had just escaped from prison after serving a long sentence! I realised that a job does not just affect what you do weekdays from 9-5, it impacts on your whole life. I am not sure that I would ever have had the courage to quit my boring job and carve out a new career. I had been liberated and felt that fate had given me a chance to regain control of my own life. A chance like this is not to be wasted, and I was determined to find a way make money as my own boss.

I spent many hours searching the internet for home based business opportunities and there was certainly no shortage of attractive-sounding propositions. I was overloaded with information, but I decided that I definitely wanted to work from home on the internet. Considering that my expertise was limited to basic emailing, deciding to have a home based business was a major decision, but I wanted a complete change of direction.

My personal experiences (which you can read about here) made me feel that it was time for me to “give something back”, and I wanted to do something worthwhile. I firmly believe that “what goes around, comes around”. What I wanted to do was settled in my mind. Finding out how to do it was my next task.

After hours of Google searching, and reading articles, I actually found the solution by complete accident when I opened an advertising email. (I did try earning money online through Paid To Read Emails but I did not manage to earn anything.) It was an offer for all the things I had been searching for, and more. A stroke of pure luck.

The email was promoting something called a Plug-in Profit Site. I had never before heard of such a thing but, when I saw the website and read the details, I knew immediately that this was the way forward for me. I signed up there and then and started on an exciting learning curve.

I had learned quite a bit about working online but was still not making much profit when I encountered Erich Winnecke who admitted me to his 3 Phase Profit Programme where I learned how to build and promote my Work At Home Directory.

During the time I was studying online promotion etc, I tried out various ways of earning money online. I already mentioned the Get Paid To Read Email disaster, which for me turned out to be Didn't Get Paid! I don't think any of the companies I joined are still in existence, in fact, I think most of them disappeared within six months.

I also tried online paid surveys with much better results. My first attempt almost put me off the idea: I tried signing up with individual companies and this took forever as I had to keep doing searches and would hit a dead link or find out halfway through the sign-up process that the company did not accept UK residents. I begrudged paying the fee to join a Survey Database but eventually gave in and joined Survey Scout which would have been the sensible thing to do in the first place, but I have to learn the hard way! One big thing to remember with the Paid Surveys industry is that you can't earn a living if you just sign up for 10 or 20 survey companies, you need to sign up for at least 100. That sounds a lot but it is not too bad if you do the signing up over 4 or 5 days. You need to join that many because you won't fit the profile for every single survey each company has. I still do my online paid surveys because I enjoy it as well as appreciating the extra income.

The most recent thing I did online was to join MPAM which is often referred to as "Marketing University". This programme will teach you how to make a living online, you are given all the tools and resources (including free website hosting) as well as training. This probably sounds like a strange choice of new programme for someone who has been working online for getting on for two years. One of the reasons I investigated MPAM was because their motto "Prosperity With Integrity" intrigued me and I also thought it might be a good programme to recommend to Internet marketing beginners. When I discovered it would teach me how to build my own genuine niche website, I decided it was just the place for me.

I am especially happy to be working at home at this time because it enables me to look after my baby grandaughter a couple of days a week while my daughter pursues her career. I can't bear the thought of that baby being left in the care of strangers, however well qualified they might seem. Although I don't get much work done when I am babysitting I look forward to those days. It is like spending time with a very small and amusing friend: she is just over one year old and has not quite got the hang of walking and talking but I love spending time with my little buddy who crawls along after me giggling or shouting "nang!" She has a vocabulary of two identifiable words: the other one is "no". She clearly understands the meaning of "no", "nang" seems to mean everything else.

Wow, just checking things and looked at this page, it doesn't feel like six months flashed by since my last update but as my granddaughter is now 18 months old and walking, it must be so. Well, the update is that I'm still here and things continue to get better and better.

Just updating the website. My granddaughter is now a walking, talking, running, jumping two and a half year old. I'm still here, still making money online and still learning something new every day.

To read my full story from the beginning click here.

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