I Tried a Lot of Ways to Make Money. This Is the Short Version of my story.
For almost a decade, I’ve been experimenting with different ways to make money outside my job.
Not in theory. In practice.
I’ve built blogs. I’ve grown a YouTube channel. I’ve published books. I’ve tried freelancing. I’ve tried day trading. I’ve tried the small “easy money” ideas people keep recommending online. And over time, I’ve also settled into long-term investing.
Some of these worked a little. Most didn’t. A few taught me lessons that were more valuable than the money they ever made.
This post is not a detailed breakdown of each experiment. Each of those deserves its own story. This is the summary—what I tried, what actually happened, and what I learned from each.
The goal is simple: if you’re testing ideas, chasing side hustles, or trying to build something on the side, this might help you avoid a few expensive detours.
1. Blogging (What Actually Made It Work — And Why Most of My Blogs Failed)
I started blogging around 2016. In the last almost ten years, I’ve built 10+ blogs.
I didn’t just try one topic. I tried almost every niche you can think of: personal finance, business, food, home, fashion, beauty, crafts, gardening, travel (built multiple blogs in some of these niches).
Most of these blogs failed. In fact, only two worked. And both of them were in personal finance. At their peak, they made me around $500 per month each.
That’s not a success story you see on Twitter. But it’s the honest result of a decade of trying. The biggest lesson wasn’t about SEO, traffic, or hacks. It was about alignment.
Personal finance worked for me because:
- I’m genuinely interested in it
- I’ve been experimenting with money, side hustles, and investing for years
- I have stories, mistakes, and real experience to write about
- I’m educated in finance (MBA), so I’m not starting from zero
- I actually enjoy writing about it
In other niches, I didn’t have that.
I love traveling, for example—but I don’t travel enough to run a serious travel blog. I tried anyway. It didn’t work. The same story repeated in other niches. I was writing because I thought the niche would make money, not because I had something real to say in it.
That’s the part nobody tells you clearly enough:
Blogging doesn’t work because a niche is “profitable.” It works when your interest, experience, exposure, and knowledge come together in one place.
For someone else, that could be food. Or home. Or parenting. Or fashion. In fact, some of the biggest blogging businesses are in home and food. Finance is a small niche. Those are massive ones. Different people, different fits.
Another honest truth:
I tried blogging “just for money” in many niches. Every single one of those failed.
The only ones that worked were the ones where I already had depth.
Even then, let’s be very clear:
After almost ten years, I still only scaled those sites to about $500/month. No million dollars, no overnight success, no miracle breakout.
That’s also why I’m very honest about what blogging is to me today.
I already have a job. I already have a savings and investing plan aimed at long-term goals. Blogging, for me, is both a long-term asset and a creative outlet. I do it because I enjoy the process—thinking, writing, building something over time. If it makes money, great. If it grows slowly, that’s fine too.
So if I had to compress ten years of blogging into a few lines, it would be this:
- Blogging can work. I’ve seen it work.
- It doesn’t work just because a niche is “hot.”
- It works when your interest, experience, and knowledge line up.
- And even then, it’s slow, uncertain, and very far from easy money.
That’s the honest version. No hype. No screenshots. Just what actually happened.
2. YouTube (Fast Growth, But For Extroverts)
YouTube gave me the fastest results I’ve ever seen online.
Almost ten years ago, I saw people making money by re-uploading popular content. A friend of mine had done exactly that and made serious money (almost $20,000) before copyright caught up with him. At that time, platforms were still evolving, and a lot of things that wouldn’t work today worked back then.
So I tried it too.
I picked a very popular TV show, created a channel, and started uploading. A lot. In about two months, I had uploaded hundreds of videos. For the first few months, growth was slow. Then it suddenly took off. By around the seventh month, the channel crossed 100,000 subscribers.
On the surface, it looked like a huge success.
In reality, it was built on something I didn’t own.
As soon as the channel hit that level, I got copyright strikes. I had to delete everything. The channel stopped performing, and that experiment was effectively over.
Technically, I still had a channel with a large subscriber base. But I couldn’t build on it. I don’t enjoy being on camera or building a public persona around my face. Even today, I prefer writing and staying anonymous—which is why this blog exists in this form.
That experience taught me a very sharp lesson:
Fast growth means nothing if you don’t own the content, the direction, or the brand.
Yes, YouTube creates millionaires. But it rewards people who build something original and personal over time. What I had was speed without ownership—and that’s not a business. It’s a temporary loophole.
So YouTube, for me, was the clearest example of this pattern:
You can take shortcuts & grow very fast online. But if it doesn’t fit who you are—and you don’t own what you’re building—it won’t last.
3. Kindle / KDP (A Lot of Work, Very Little Leverage)
Around the same time I was getting serious about blogging, I was also deep into researching side hustles and online businesses.
I read everything I could find. Big list posts. “Best ways to make money online.” “Top side hustles.” “Online business ideas.” If you were searching in 2016, you couldn’t miss them.
Two things stood out everywhere: blogging and self-publishing.
Back then, both felt like a gold rush. Fewer people were doing them, competition was lower, and a lot of people were openly sharing income stories. With blogging, SEO was simpler. With Kindle, the store wasn’t as crowded as it is today.
Self-publishing also appealed to me for another reason: it was writing-based. Just like blogging. I didn’t realize it clearly at the time, but I was consistently drawn to things that involved thinking, structuring ideas, and communicating them in written form.
So I tried Kindle Direct Publishing seriously.
Over time, I published 10+ books across multiple genres—fiction, non-fiction, different topics, different approaches. I experimented a lot.
The result?
I made a few hundred dollars in total.
Not zero. But nowhere near worth the time and effort it took.
That’s when the real problem became obvious: the effort-to-reward ratio was terrible.
Each book takes a lot of work—writing, editing, formatting, covers, descriptions, keywords. And unless you hit scale or build a strong system, each book is basically a small, fragile bet.
For me, KDP taught a very clear lesson:
Just because something works at scale doesn’t mean it’s a good use of time at small scale.
Today, self-publishing is even harder. The market is crowded. Competition is intense. The rules have changed, just like they did with blogging. A few people do extremely well. Most people disappear into the noise.
I don’t regret trying it. It taught me how online platforms really work. But it also made one thing very clear to me:
I don’t want businesses where a lot of work produces very little leverage.
4. “Easy Money” Gigs (They Pay. They Just Waste Your Time.)
If you search for “side hustle ideas” or “ways to make money online,” even today, most lists look the same.
Surveys. Microtasks. Small gigs. Reward apps. Click this, fill that, watch something, get paid.
Technically, these do pay.
You might spend 30 minutes or an hour filling a survey and make $1. Maybe a bit more if you’re lucky. In the beginning, it even feels encouraging—your account shows some balance, and you think, “If I do this every day, this adds up.”
Then reality kicks in.
You sign up for a few platforms. The first day, you might get some tasks. Then nothing for days. Sometimes weeks. And most platforms won’t let you withdraw until you hit a minimum amount—$10, $50, sometimes more. So you sit there slowly collecting a few cents at a time, waiting months just to reach the payout limit.
I tried this myself, long before I had any serious blogs.
The result was simple: a lot of time for very little money.
Later, from the other side—as a blogger—I actually promoted some of these platforms. They’re easy to promote because they’re free to join, and many of them pay decent affiliate commissions. I made some money that way. So yes, these platforms clearly work as businesses.
But as a user, the math is terrible.
That’s the real difference people don’t talk about.
- They work as affiliate products.
- They work as businesses for the platforms.
- They barely work as income for the person doing the tasks.
My honest take is this:
If you’re curious, try it for a few hours. You’ll understand very quickly that it’s a terrible idea. There’s no harm in learning it the hard way.
Just don’t build your plans around it. Don’t download ten apps and think you’ll “optimize” your way into real money.
You’re not building income. You’re renting your time for pocket change.
And once you see that clearly, it’s hard to unsee it.
5. Freelancing (Good Work, Wrong Fit for Me)
When you go deeper into the world of online income, you eventually run into a simple idea:
There’s active income and there’s passive income.
Active income means you get paid for your time or your service. A job is the most common example. Freelancing works the same way. You write, design, edit, code, or consult—and you get paid for that specific work.
Passive income is different. You build something once, and if it works, it keeps paying you over time. Blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, and books fall into this category. You do the work upfront, and the result can keep earning.
Like most beginners, I was drawn more to the passive side. The idea of building something once and letting it compound over time is very attractive.
But after trying and failing at multiple passive-income ideas, it’s natural to look at the other side: services and freelancing.
The logic is simple. Instead of gambling on whether something will work, you get paid for what you do. Not zero. Not “maybe.” You do the work, you get paid.
I tried this through platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, mainly offering writing-related services.
The honest result? It didn’t work for me. I didn’t get any real traction or consistent work.
Looking back, the reason is also honest: I wasn’t fully invested in making it work. My mind was still stuck on building passive income. I treated freelancing more like an experiment than a serious business. And freelancing only works if you treat it seriously.
That doesn’t mean freelancing is bad.
Plenty of people make a full-time living from it. Some do very well. It’s a real, respectable way to earn money. You’re trading skill and time for income, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, for many people, it’s far more reliable than chasing uncertain online businesses.
It just wasn’t the right fit for me at that stage.
I wanted leverage. I wanted to build assets. I wasn’t motivated enough to compete, pitch, and grind in a service marketplace. So my results matched my effort.
The simple takeaway for me was this:
Freelancing is a solid way to earn money. But it’s an active-income game. If you don’t want to play that game seriously, it won’t work.
And that’s exactly what happened in my case.
6. Day Trading (A Lot of Time, A Lot of Noise, Almost No Edge)
My introduction to trading didn’t come from books or finance blogs. It came from a movie.
There’s a popular Hindi movie, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, where one of the characters is a trader. That was the first time I seriously noticed the idea. I started looking up what trading actually is—and the concept hooked me.
The pitch is very seductive:
Sit in front of a computer. Use your brain. Turn small money into big money.
For someone like me—who’s never been physically strong but always thought of the brain as the main asset—that sounded perfect. Making money by thinking, not lifting things, felt like the ideal game.
I started in my engineering days.
At first, I didn’t even have real money to trade with. I used demo accounts and paper trading apps. And like many beginners, I did well there. It always feels easier when the money isn’t real.
Later, I started using small amounts of real money. Whatever prize money I won in college competitions, I’d try trading with that. I’d usually lose it. Then repeat the cycle.
When I got a job, I had more money to try with. I moved from stocks to futures and options. Some days I made money. Some days I lost money. The best days, I made around $300–$400. The worst days, I lost around $300.
Over time, if I add it all up, I was basically break-even.
I didn’t blow up my account. I also didn’t build anything meaningful. The largest amount I ever traded with was around $5,000. And honestly, most of my “wins” were just luck. One big news event, one lucky options trade, and I’d feel smart. The losing days were just the other side of the same coin.
The bigger realization came later.
Trading demands time, focus, and emotional energy—every single day. In college, you can still pretend you have that time. Once you have a full-time job and real responsibilities, it becomes almost impossible to do this properly.
There’s also the brutal statistic nobody likes to accept:
Most people lose money in trading. Not 60%. Not 70%. Closer to 95–98%.
Yes, a tiny group of people make serious money. But those are usually professionals who do this full-time, with systems, teams, and years of experience.
For normal people, trading is mostly this:
- A lot of screen time
- A lot of emotional swings
- A lot of effort
- And very little reliable return
I don’t regret trying it. I learned how markets actually behave. I learned how easy it is to confuse luck with skill. And I learned how expensive “tuition fees” in the market can be.
If someone had told me all this when I was starting, I probably wouldn’t have listened. I would have thought, “I’ll be the exception.” Most people do.
So my only practical advice is simple:
If you try trading, use small money. Money you’re okay losing. Don’t treat it like a career plan or a wealth strategy.
For me, trading ended with one clear conclusion:
It took a lot of time, a lot of energy, and gave me almost nothing in return.
And that’s what pushed me toward the next step: investing.
7. Investing (The Boring Thing That Actually Works)
Trading is what finally pushed me toward investing.
Not because I read one more blog post saying “investors win, traders lose.” I had already read that a hundred times. It didn’t stick.
What made it stick was trying to trade and seeing, over years, that I wasn’t getting anywhere.
There’s also something else people don’t talk about enough: trading is a bit addictive. Once you start, your brain keeps wanting the next trade, the next setup, the next chance to “do better.” Even when you know the odds, it takes time to step away from it.
But once I did, and once I started reading more seriously about investing, something clicked.
Investing is almost boring compared to trading. And that’s exactly why it works.
You don’t need to predict tomorrow. You don’t need to stare at screens. You don’t need to be right every day. You just need time and consistency.
The real eye-opener for me was understanding compounding.
For example, if you invest $1,000 every month for 30 years and earn around 11% annually (which broad markets have historically done over long periods), you end up with roughly $2.4 million.
You would have invested about $360,000 in total. The rest is compounding doing the heavy lifting.
Yes, you have to adjust for inflation. But even after that, you’re still looking at something close to the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s money. And from a corpus like that, even a conservative 3–4% withdrawal can give you a meaningful yearly income without killing the portfolio.
That’s when I realized something simple but powerful:
You don’t need genius. You need time, discipline, and a system.
Today, that’s exactly how I operate.
At the beginning of every month, my investments go out automatically. Mutual funds. Index exposure. A diversified mix across markets and assets. Whatever is left after that is what I spend.
Roughly 50–70% of my income goes toward investing, depending on life situations. Right now, I’m keeping some money aside for specific goals, so it’s closer to the lower end. Once that’s done, it’ll go back up.
My goal is simple: financial independence around 40.
Not because I want to stop doing anything. But because I don’t want to be forced to work for money after that. I want to work because I choose to. On things I enjoy. At my own pace.
Will life go exactly according to plan? Probably not. Things change. Health changes. The world changes. But having a solid investing system gives me something trading never did: peace of mind.
If I had to summarize the whole journey in one line, it would be this:
Trading taught me how hard it is to beat the market.
Investing taught me I don’t need to.
What Actually Mattered
Out of everything I tried, only two things really worked for me: blogging and investing.
Even with blogging, let me be very honest. I’m not making money from this blog right now. In the past, I built two blogs that reached around $500 per month. That’s not huge. It’s not life-changing. But it proved something to me: this model can work.
But with both my blogs, I had to pause it somewhere (due to life events). Once I stopped, the blogs slowly died. So yes—blogging is often called “passive income,” but in reality, it still needs active attention.
What I’m doing now is different. This blog is not built around keywords or growth hacks. It’s an experiment in radical transparency. I’m going to share what I publish, what happens, income reports, what works, what doesn’t. If this kind of blog makes money, that’s a real result. If it doesn’t, that’s also a real result. Either way, it answers a very honest question: does this kind of personal story-based blogging still work today? or is it all about keywords still?
About the other ideas:
- YouTube works if you’re willing to build something original and put yourself out there. I wasn’t.
- Self-publishing (KDP) is a difficult nut to crack. I wouldn’t recommend much unless you have some brilliant information to convey (I learned a lot, but wasted a lot of time doing this).
- “Easy money” gigs pay, but the time-to-money trade is terrible (horrible).
- Freelancing is a real way to earn, but it’s active income. You have to commit to it seriously. I didn’t.
- Day trading doesn’t work for most people. I’m not an exception. If you try it, atleast start small so that you’ll lose small.
And then there’s investing.
If there’s one thing I’d tell anyone to start today, it’s investing. Keep it boring. Keep it simple. Use index funds. Diversify slowly—large caps, mid caps, small caps, maybe some gold, some international exposure. Or don’t even complicate it—just start with a broad index fund and stay consistent.
Investing is not exciting. That’s why it works.
Personally, a big part of my income goes into investments every month, automatically. Whatever is left is what I spend. My goal is financial independence around 40. Not to stop doing things—but to stop being forced to work for money.
Will it go exactly as planned? Probably not. Life doesn’t work that way.
From being in $22,000 of debt a couple years back, today I’ve closed off my debts & built my portfolio to +2.5% of where I want to be. That means I still have another 97.5% to go. I’m 29. The plan is to cover that in the next 10–11 years. That requires career growth, discipline, and some luck. It might happen. It might not. But at least there is a plan.
The bigger point is this:
Don’t just work for money. Work toward independence.
Everything else—blogging, YouTube, freelancing, businesses—try what fits your personality. If you like writing, try blogging. If you like video, try YouTube. If you like providing services, try freelancing. There are many ways to try to make money. Most won’t work. A few might.
These seven are the ones I tried.
This is just my story. Let me know yours in the comment section!