Back in 1999, after a year of being sick and not being able to work as much, I was researching the possiblity of starting an apprenticeship program for a friend of mine to go through to become a massage therapist. Apprenticeship programs are allowed here in WA but have to be approved by the board and meet their school requirements. I started collecting information from my old massage school notebooks and when it started to become to much paperwork and jumping through hoops to get the program approved, I put it all into this website-www.thebodyworker.com. In the beginning it was just a hobby.
I had no previous computer experience. My friends kids taught me to surf the internet. I remember shaking in fear the first time I registered my domain name and figured out how to upload a page. (Yikes – if I can do it anyone can).
Something to do while I was recuperating from working too many hours for too many years and also putting too much energy into putting on training classes for the Zentherapy Institute.
I had come down with a unexplained vertigo and dizzyness that would put me in bed for a week at at time every few months or so. It was the beginning of my road to figuring out where I wanted to go with my massage practice and how else can I make money, writing about something I love and have poured my heart and soul into.
Somewhere in that year I purchased the manual “Make Your Site Sell” from Sitebuild it that is now available for free. It put so many ideas in my head and the content came spilling out into 2 new websites -www.massagetherapycareers.com and www.massagepracticebuilder.com.  I wrote a few ebooks – The Insurance Billing Manual” which is also available online for free today and was selling books through Amazon’s associate program which was helping by bringing in additional income.
Through the past 7 years I wrote when I had time and struggled with dizziness and minor unexplained health issues that just wore me down.
Back in 2004, I came upon this phenomenon called “Google Adsense” and started putting ads on my websites. I had been reading about them for awhile and was very skeptical because I didn’t think that you could make any money by people clicking on ads. I never clicked on ads. I was afraid at first that they would send a virus to my computer or something or people would get my email address for more spam. I put the ads on the top 25 pages and the first month I made about $100. I quickly started adding the ads to my pages and now I can’t stop! I have plans for making about a dozen more sites on different topics that I love researching and writing about.
You can tell I am not really a writer by trade. I think I barely passed any english class I ever took. I have been thinking about hiring an editor and when I was researching it I had a sample of my writing edited. Boy did she pull my writing apart- but it also made it sound more organized and presentable. I never hired her , but will for my next e-book that I hope to get out early 2007.
So I am still practice massage, but I am starting to find that it is much easier to make money online from writing about the topics that I love. What is making it all possible is everything I learned about making a website and running a business – which most of it comes from Sitebuildit! Everyday they are coming out with new things and they don’t raise their rates. I am proof of the results that SBI gets!
So I still struggle with dizziness occaisionally, but it is part of my healing path. A part of the call to pay attention to the things within me. Recently I have only been working 2 days doing massage and I realized that I feel better – physically and emotionally. I have been blogging more and planning more and creating more new ideas. I can’t wait to get to the computer and start writing or researching something.
Also, One of the reasons why I started writing has to do with the fact that this whole 17 years of being in the massage profession, I keep coming back to the fact that no one ever really told me what it would be like. The massage schools made it all seem easy and fun. Massaging and living a life that was more meaningful. They neglegted to tell me anything about how to make money doing so. I live quite a simple life because of it which is both a blessing and it’s own curse. Not wanting much because I never thought I could get much is now changing as I approach 50….the whole thing is that no one ever told me anything about much. If they did I must not have believed them.
For this reason I write- to tell you where I have been and what I have learned, in hopes that someone will be able to do it differently than I did…
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