selfemployed webmasters, what if your mom says go get a "real" job?

[JerseyGirl]

Great story, good things happen all the time through hard work and I think you telling that story only reinforces it for others out there going after the same thing.

Congrats!

[jcorkern]

I agree, They just can not grasp that we do work and that it has to be treated as a business for it to work!

Only if their thoughts were true!

I sure would like watching t.v. all day and eating all day.

I sometimes work so long that when I take a break at midnight, I realise i am hungry!

[JerseyGirl]

That is classic, you forget to eat, but ya know what, I totally know where you are coming from.

For me, it becomes addictive. Working from home, I am constantly drawn to my PC. If I get up in the middle of the night to grab something from the kitchen, I automatically check my inbox.

I never invested the same hours working in an office and also never accomplished more. There is something about the determination, it is like you just know it is entirely up to you to be successful.

[surfallday]

Originally Posted by Julia

Well I'm not self-employed, but I still have a tricky time talking to my family about what exactly it is I 'do' - I've tried explaining to them many, many times what 'affiliate marketing' is (including using diagrams, showing them websites, etc), and over a year later, I think they still have no clue!

It's terrible isn't it! Gotta love the blank stares you get when you tell people you're an affiliate marketer and search engine optimizer Now I just them the old, "I work on the internet".

But to the first question....if your mom says to get a real job I wouldn't. Even my mom told me I was wasting my time when I got out of college working on affiliate marketing. Now I'm 25 and could retire while my friends are beating their brains in at work. Stick it out, work hard, and be creative. I always found negative words to me were the best motivation I could get because you want to prove them wrong.

[Lisa76]

I get the blank stares all the time, especially now that I'm doing this full time. People have a hard time grasping you can make a living from a website even when you're not physically working on the website. I was talking to a cousin over the Holiday and he still swears I'm involved in some kind of scam. LOL

But when my parents found out exactly how much I was making, they stopped staring and questioning. LOL Suddenly all my friends want websites. But I am continuously reminding people that it's more than just putting up a website. They seem to glance over the stories of me spending 10+ hours per day on the PC and all the content I write. They forget it took me years to get to a point where I earned enough to comfortably quit my 9 to 5. They ignore the stories of all the sites I started that failed. People only want to focus on the money and glamour.

I've never worked harder in my life but I am loving it and really don't consider it work. Although I'd much rather be spending 10+ hours/day doing what I love than sitting in a cubicle bored to death and dreaming of working on my sites when I got home. Anyone else do that?